Used Games Help Sick Children

A new charity provides gamers with both a place to get cheap used games and to help children suffering from rare diseases.

The charity, called Donate Games, asks gamers to do exactly that, donate their old games to the charity. In return, gamers get a tax deductable receipt equal to, or greater than the trade-in value at a retail outlet. The charity will then sell those games to other gamers and the money raised will go to helping sick children.

Donate Games is the brainchild of Jim Carol, whose son Taylor was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and benefitted from Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity while receiving treatment in Seattle. As he watched videogames help Taylor get better, Carol was convinced of the power of games to do good. The idea for Donate Games came to Carol quite suddenly, as he explains in the press release officially announcing the launch of Donate Games:

“Suddenly, many things became clear. Taking our own experiences with our son Taylor and our new knowledge of game donations, we saw an opportunity for video games to do good once again, now in a completely different way.

‘Why isn’t there a charity that recycles used video games, reselling those games online to help the millions of sufferers of orphan diseases, fighting alone in these hospitals around the world?’

We couldn’t find a single reason why not, so we created that charity ourselves.”

Donate Games is focusing its efforts on children suffering from so-called ‘orphan diseases’, rare conditions, often genetic in nature, that affect only a tiny fraction of the population. It’s still early days for the charity, and they don’t yet have any games available for sale, but if the heavyweight partners are anything to go by, they’ll have the staying power to get their shelves stocked.

If you’re anything like me, you have a large stack of games that are doing nothing but gathering dust, and this seems like a pretty good use for something you’re only keeping for nostalgia’s sake.

Source: Game Politics