June 6, 2012, E3, Los Angeles—we met with Jeromy Adams and Miranda Barnard from the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and talked about the role of gaming in helping seriously ill children. Their group has started the Extra Life gaming network to generate contributions for local Children’s Hospitals.

Here is a chance to help others with all of your gaming hours. The intent of the program is to schedule gaming marathons as fundraisers for local Children’s Hospitals. The idea is to have people schedule time on a single day to play games. The players get sponsors for their time and the proceeds go to a designated Children’s Miracle Network Hospital.

Last year, 14,000 groups played games and generated $1.2M for the hospitals with their efforts. They would like to improve on these numbers this year, and are looking to get more players and donations through various outreach activities.

Any interested people can go to their website http://www.extra-life.org/ and sign up for the event scheduled for 10/20/2012. Players and sponsors can set up accounts, designate hospitals, and contribute on the site. Because the whole event is based on the honor system, players can actually play at any time and place and just report the results of their efforts. The organization would prefer that people sign up as groups, because they don’t want an individual to play games for 24 hours at a single stretch.

In addition to the individuals and groups playing games on the marathon day, they have support from corporate sponsors including Microsoft, Sony, and EA. The organization will welcome any additional help and suggestions for changes in the program.