An act of charity, and how online gaming can support a social cause

As of now you, whoever you may be, have probably heard of the game World of Warcraft (WoW). It’s a massive multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), where hundreds and thousands of people play in the same world to accomplish various tasks. This game in particular – due to it’s huge popularity, talking 11 Million subscribers – has been in the focus of the press many a time. For bad and for good.

I think it’s just very easy to label a computer game an “addiction”, whereas other hobbies persued with the same effort, are usually called “dedication”. It’s just something our parent’s generation has to get used to. The computer, the internet, can be a good place to hang out. And through playing with other people there’s social skills to learn, and after all I think it’s in no way better to be with the boyscouts than playing WoW. It’s just different. However, that’s just for the introduction.

There’s been a kid, Ezra, 10 years old, who had a brain tumor. And he had one wish: To spend some time with the development team of World of Warcraft and to play the game. Blizzard, the company behind WoW, didn’t hesitate, arranged everything and had Ezra work with the game’s master developers for one day in their headquarters. Ezra got to design an in-game item, a new quest and even had his voiceover recorded for an in-game NPC (non player character, usually offering some general advice & jobs for players).

It’s happened in a game with 11 million players, and we were watching. Now, a couple weeks ago, Ezra lost his fight against the tumor. He died. The WoW community sent their consolations to Ezra’s parents, who were stunned by the huge reaction from people who neither knew their son, nor them. Recently there was an in-game event, arranged by WoW players, for a kid with some really bad luck. Almost 900 people created a new character and did a “Run for Ezra”.

They all created fresh (really vulnerable, that is) Tauren characters (Taurens belong to the Horde-faction of the game, which fights the Alliance-faction – players can decide which faction they want to support, and Horde was the one Ezra played). Then they started to make their way to the Alliance capital city, to attempt an assault (which, with characters that weak, inevitable would’ve been doomed). Unfortunately, the servers couldn’t handle 900 people in one place and so the event was cancelled.

Still, if you think about the story behind the whole thing, if you take into account that no one of these 900 people had ever met Ezra, I think it was amazing. Did it help? Certainly not. Does it matter if it helped? Certainly not.