On April 5, 2024, Gamers Outreach gathered hundreds of gamers at Eastern Michigan University with one goal: to raise money for children’s hospitals around the world. Their annual Gamers for Giving local area network (LAN) party has improved the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of children by providing access to video games throughout their hospital stay, with this year’s installment raising over $1.25 million for the cause. A charity started in Ann Arbor and grown in the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, Gamers Outreach has widened its reach to collaborate with some pretty big names in YouTube and Twitch (which is how I found them), companies such as HyperX and Xbox and even celebrities, like The Rock. As a (reluctantly) self-identified gamer, I’m always looking for ways my hobby can truly improve the world. So, I sat down with Gamers Outreach’s founder Zach Wigal to learn more about his organization’s origins, their current projects and even a bit about Star Wars Galaxy along the way.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Michigan Daily: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Zach Wigal: Sure. I guess I’ll start at the beginning. My name is Zach, the founder of an organization called Gamers Outreach. We’re focused on helping hospitals make entertainment more accessible inside their facilities. We’re trying to restore a sense of joy and normalcy in people’s lives while they’re receiving care. We were founded back in 2007; I was a high school student at Saline and had an interest in organizing video game competitions. A Halo tournament I tried putting together got shut down by a police officer because he believed video games were corrupting the lives of America’s youth — it’s a long story, you can read about it on our website if you’re curious. I decided I wanted to organize a new event for a charitable cause to try to demonstrate all the positive things that happen when gamers get together around what we’re excited about and kind of on accident discovered (that) Mott at the time was having difficulty providing kids and families with activities while they were receiving treatment. So we started building these gaming kiosks that we now call “GO Karts” as a way to help the hospital manage an Xbox or PlayStation so a device wouldn’t get lost or stolen. We built one gaming cart for the hospital, thanks to funds raised from our video game competition. The hospital really enjoyed it. They asked for another one. And then a neighboring hospital, Helen DeVos in Grand Rapids, asked for a gaming cart because they had sort of heard about it through the grapevine. We’ve discovered that not only was Mott trying to provide activities to patients, it turns out basically all hospitals have this challenge where, over the years, research and treatment have been the priority. And because of that, a person’s quality of life has often taken a backseat. There aren’t many groups that are seriously investing in activities or entertainment for people that are stuck in hospitals, so that’s what we do.
TMD: So, going into a bit more detail on the Gamers for Giving event, what about LAN events do you think makes them so gratifying and so electrifying?
ZW: I think LAN parties help connect people to the sense of community that exists when you’re part of gaming culture. LAN parties are really a cultural experience. It’s an opportunity to meet in person the people who are the most hardcore video game enthusiasts. You really do have to be — I mean, I say this as someone who runs LAN — you have to be pretty nerdy to come to a LAN party, right? You get to meet the people that are really into gaming. They’re really into hardware, and you’re just all sitting together doing what we all love for a couple days straight. And I think that sense of community is something that we don’t get to experience very often as video game enthusiasts. To be in this sort of environment, it doesn’t get recreated very often.
LAN parties used to be organized primarily to help avoid lag in internet connections. You know, back in the day, you even had these places called LAN Centers, or internet cafes; they’re not as prevalent anymore. People would go to these places to play Counter-Strike or other multiplayer games because they were just trying to avoid, you know, disconnections that would happen while you would play from home. People would go to LAN centers or they would organize these LAN parties. Nowadays, internet bandwidth from the typical person’s home is strong enough that you really don’t notice too many latency issues across these games. So really, for us, LAN parties these days are, as I mentioned, more of a communal experience. The reason to organize a LAN party is less because you’re trying to avoid Internet connection, and more because we just wanna get together in person and have a great time and show off all of our rigs that we spent time building.
TMD: What goes into planning such a big LAN event?
ZW: You have to bring together a handful of specialties to produce a LAN party. So foundationally, you have to worry about venue, power and internet. Those are the big three. You need a venue that’s big enough to organize the size (of the) LAN party that you’re looking to put together. You need tables, chairs (and) basic infrastructure things. Power — you need a lot of power for people’s PCs. So, if your venue doesn’t have that in-house, you might have to bring that from an outside vendor. And then internet connectivity is also important. In fact, that’s a huge part of the event these days. One of the reasons we enjoy hosting our event at Eastern Michigan University is because it just so happens (that) the George Gervin GameAbove Center, the arena that they have, is really well suited for hosting a LAN party. We can put down carpet pretty easily. They have a 20-gig pipe running into the venue. So when we’re pushing the traffic for our event (it is) maybe 3 gigs/second max, but we’ve got up to 20 gigs in total on the pipe. So, it’s a great venue for us to organize this sort of event we’re trying to do.
So those are the foundational elements — venue, power, internet. And then you start getting into, like, more aesthetic and experiential design topics beyond that. Are you hosting tournaments for your attendees? Is there a streaming component? Obviously, in the case of Gamers for Giving, there’s this charitable component to our event, so we’ll organize tournaments and competitions. We have people who volunteer to help organize those tournaments. Then we also have this kind of live production where we’ll invite gamers and our friends in the gaming industry who are streamers. We’ll ask them to broadcast, and they’ll help raise money for the initiatives of the nonprofit. Of course, we think about other items like attendee safety; we have a security team at Gamers for Giving, and thinking about food for people is important. So, you know, basic event planning stuff. It’s almost like you’re building a campsite for gamers for a weekend. So you really wanna be very thorough in thinking about what do people need to just exist and live? That’s important. And then what the things that people need or want to have to have a good time.
TMD: So, moving on to some of the other projects you guys do, could you tell me a bit more about the GO Karts and the impact that you’ve observed from them?
ZW: GO Karts are these portable video game kiosks that we construct, and each unit is equipped with a PlayStation or an Xbox, a monitor and then we also install an assortment of games on those devices. And then we ship them out to the hospitals and provide indefinite support. So as the hospitals have questions, our team comes forward, and we help make sure that the GO Karts are operating for years to come. They were really the result of noticing hospitals often don’t have the hardware to make video game content easily available to people in the first place. And then it’s also difficult for hospitals to actively share that equipment with patients if it’s not in some sort of mobile solution. The GO Karts were meant to be a way to go, “Hey. Everything’s set up already. Just plug this thing into the wall and it’s going to turn on and it’s going to play video games.” We estimate probably six to eight kids per day use a single cart on average. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. Just depends. I mean, sometimes a gaming cart goes into a playroom and 20 kids a day might use it. Other times, it might be shared, you know, room to room with kids for a period of time. So I would say if you take that number across all the gaming carts we’ve deployed at this stage, we estimate somewhere north of five million kids per year are benefiting from just the GO Kart program.
TMD: So, on the other hand, (you’re running) the Player 2 program. Instead of bringing hardware to hospitals, you guys are taking people and you’re having them go to hospitals. Have you noticed a difference in bringing gaming consoles versus bringing people?
ZW: Interesting question. You know, they really do different things. The purpose of Player 2 is to help provide a layer of support to hospital staff, helping them manage devices that exist. For example, years ago, we actually helped put an Xbox 360 in every room at Mott. When we donated those items, the hospital realized someone had to go room to room to hand out games to kids, update consoles, make sure people hadn’t left their account information behind, etc. And the hospital didn’t really have staffing to support that sort of activity. But there were a number of medical students who needed to volunteer at the hospital to do internship hours for academic purposes, which is advantageous to Mott given their affiliation with the university. So Player 2 really became a way to help supplement hospital staff who wanted to provide kids with gaming experiences but really had limited bandwidth in terms of managing all those devices. Sometimes we’re working with hospitals that have staff who are great at taking care of kids, but the staff maybe don’t necessarily know a lot about video games or play video games themselves. So something that might be really simple to us as gamers, like, “oh, of course, you just need to plug the HDMI cord into the slot.” Or, “of course, you need to download this new update for the Xbox.” That’s all stuff that someone who doesn’t play those devices has no idea about, so Player 2 is really a way to help hospitals make sure they’re able to support devices that are a benefit to patients.
TMD: You mentioned that when you first did the LAN party in high school, you guys got shut down because there was the whole cultural panic about video games causing violence. Have you noticed your work becoming easier now that video games are becoming more mainstream?
ZW : Certainly. I would say video games are far more mainstream now than they were when I was a high school student growing up. And I like to joke that even my mom has Angry Birds on her cell phone at this point. Right? That’s how much more prevalent gaming has become, which is crazy because at the time, in my mind, I thought video games were prevalent even then. But now, seeing the true scale and reach of the gaming industry, it’s clear and obvious that it’s really come a long way since my time as a high school student. And I would say, culturally, when video games were at that cusp of becoming more prevalent as they are now, there was just general concern around screen time and content, like what kids — I say kids generally, but, you know, all gamers — what people were doing in these games and what sort of influence, if any, they had on people’s day-to-day lives and the way they (moved) about in the world. So I do think there was a period of time when the video game industry was far less familiar to people. And for that reason, there was a lot of concern, whether founded or unfounded, around the game industry generally. I do think that exists far less these days.
I do think the irony is (that) concerns around screen time is actually what caused some hesitation in the healthcare landscape to implement or integrate video games with healthcare facilities. My opinion is that if someone is stuck in bed and physically can’t leave their room, one of the few things they can do is play video games. In fact, one of the only ways for them to really engage with their friends or people in the outside world — and I say “outside world” as in outside the walls of the hospital — is to get on the internet and play video games. We had a child who was waiting on a heart transplant in Children’s (Hospital) Los Angeles and, thankfully, he got a surgery, and he’s fine now. But at the time, this kid was stuck in his room for nine months while he was waiting for a transplant. And his mom was telling us, you know, “if it hadn’t been for Minecraft, my son would have gone insane,” because he really didn’t have access to his friends. Everyone would meet up on Minecraft and so he had this kind of digital playground to interact with people, and that really helped him keep it together while he was waiting for his transplant over the course of almost a year. This kid was 13 years old. I mean, middle school is weird enough, let alone now you’re waiting on a heart transplant. We see that kind of story daily at Gamers Outreach and I think it just goes to show how impactful video games can be. Of course day to day outside the hospital, it’s healthy to go to the gym. It’s healthy to play sports. That’s what we do as humans — move around. In addition to those things, you can also play video games. So I think that’s where video games are, from our perspective in the hospital, an opportunity. They’re a tool to help kids socialize. They’re a form of entertainment. They allow kids to express creativity, and they really give kids — and adults too, I say kids because we work in pediatrics, but this is true for adults as well — a sense of agency when they otherwise don’t have it in these environments.
TMD: So what can you tell me about the future of Gamers Outreach? What do you guys hope to do in the future? Any new projects?
ZW: Our big goal is to really build a world where one day we all look back and ask ourselves, “Remember when hospitals didn’t have video games?” I think just recently we released our new GO Karts. We have an updated design that fits modern consoles, and we have a wish list of hospitals that have come forward and asked us to deliver those units. So, in the near term, we’re focused on fundraising. We just wrapped Gamers for Giving; it raised enough money to knock out half of the wish list requests that we received so far, which is great.
This summer, we have an event coming up called the “VTuber Summer Slam.” We’re going to be doing a streaming marathon online to help raise money for the next portion of the wish list. Beyond that, we’re hoping to make our programs more readily available internationally, so that’s a logistical project that we’ve been working on that is starting to come to fruition. I think beyond that, Savepoint and Player 2 are more fledgling programs; the GO Karts are a bit more streamlined at this point, Savepoint and Player 2 — with Savepoint especially, we really are hoping to expand that program a bit more. Right now it exists in one hospital, we have a handful of (vending) machines that need refurbishments that we received but we also need to actively fundraise to support those machines. So that’s kind of what we’re in the midst of doing right now.
Also, “Portal” — we’ll be announcing more later this summer, but we’re pretty excited. We’re basically trying to create a software platform that helps hospitals manage content across hundreds of rooms and automates a lot of the processes that have to be managed by hand when you install consoles. We’re pretty excited about it, we think it’s going to solve a big problem.
TMD: For anyone who would like to do work like this either with Gamers Outreach or on their own, what advice would you give them?
ZW: If people want to get involved with Gamers Outreach, they can check out our website, make a contribution, register to volunteer or just generally follow us on social media. Then I would say if people are interested in doing this sort of work and we don’t have a presence where they are, or they just don’t want to wait or have their own version of something they’d like to do, the best advice I can give is to try and contact your hospital directly and talk to them about what their needs are. Often donors will make assumptions about what would be helpful in a hospital and what they end up doing may or may not be actually helpful, so it can go a long way to just pick up the phone and call your local hospital, call the foundation, call their child life department, look for some good points of contact on their website and just ask, “Hey, I’m someone interested in getting involved, what are the needs of your hospital?” They’ll give you a list, and maybe if you have your own ideas you can suggest things as well as see if they resonate with the hospital.
TMD: I have one last question for you, and this is a fun one. What are your top three games, and are there any new releases you’re looking forward to?
ZW: Top three games, I would say: Final Fantasy X, Star Wars Galaxies and I have to say Halo 3. Those three games were probably the most impactful — I really have a top 10 list but if I had to list three those are the three that come to mind, for sure.
Games that I’m looking forward to — it’s funny, I just downloaded Manor Lords the other day and that’s pretty great. So far I’ve only played a few hours of it. Ashes of Creation looks really interesting to me, it’s a (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that’s coming out and it seems like there’s a lot of opportunity for players to impact the world. I used to play this game, Star Wars Galaxies, and it was like Minecraft met World of Warcraft met Star Wars Battlefront. Like, it was an older game but it really was ahead of its time and was quite innovative. Like, you had all these features in the game where you as the player really had like — there was also (?) online and there was a player economy. It was quite complicated, and it was all within the Star Wars universe so it had this lore that everyone was familiar with already. It was such a cool game and it ended up getting shut down for a list of reasons but it really left a big gap in the market. There’s really (an) opportunity, I think, for somebody to come in and build something like that, but it’s really difficult to do with how technically sophisticated video games have become. But Ashes of Creation looks really promising. I had Final Fantasy: Rebirth on my list too, but that obviously has come out now. I haven’t actually had the time to play it yet so that’s on the backlog list.
Follow Gamers Outreach @gamersoutreach on all platforms.
Daily Arts Writer Lin Yang can be reached at yanglinj@umich.edu.
The post Zach Wigal on helping hospitals through gaming appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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