Gaming for a cause

St. Clair Esports Club hosts 24-hour livestream for charity

By Melinda De L’eveille & Andy Tworek

 

Gamers are often seen as lazy, introverted and disconnected from society.

While some in the general gaming community may fall under that umbrella, members of this fundraising community have painted a different picture of how the average gamer behaves.

What sets these individuals apart is their drive and passion for bettering the lives of those who are most vulnerable.

According to the Extra Life website, Extra Life is a fundraising program of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, which since its inception has raised more than $100 million USD to change the future by changing children’s health.

Funding raised through the program goes to children’s hospitals in the U.S. and Canada to provide support for a variety of healthcare services.

The Extra Life program was started in 2008 by Jeromy “Doc” Adams, in partnership with the now-defunct video game blog and podcast website Sarcastic Gamer. The program was created in response to the death of 15-year-old Victoria Enmon to Acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

Adams became close with Enmon during his time as a radio DJ, through the radio-a-thon program. Upon Enmon’s death, Adams wanted to honour her memory, so he set out on a quest to raise $10,000 for the hospital that treated her.

Originally, Adams intended for his fundraiser to be a one-time thing, but the online event exceeded expectations, raising more than $120,000 for Texas Children’s Hospital. After seeing the event’s success, Adams continued to run the Extra Life program.

In an interview with Forbes in 2015, Adams explained why he continued running the fundraiser.

“We started thinking,” said Adams. “Maybe Tori’s legacy can be more than this one event. Maybe we can keep going.”

Adam Schifani, Extra Life’s community manager since May 2022, originally got involved with fundraising for Extra Life in 2018 after his son benefited from the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals charity.

“My son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2018,” said Schifani. “My brother and some friends and I decided we wanted to give back, so we started fundraising for Extra Life.”

When asked about the organization’s long-term goals, Schifani pointed to the company’s slogan, “Change kids’ health to change the future.”

“As a parent of a kid who has a chronic health condition, the more we raise and support hospitals, the better kids’ lives will be.”

Schifani mentioned the Extra Life program has positively impacted the gaming community.

“It has shown the world that gamers can do a lot of good and that gaming can do a lot of good,” said Schifani. “There’s the stereotype that a lot of gamers are very introverted people, and Extra Life has had a lot of people build communities for themselves around their fundraising.”

Since its humble beginnings, the Extra Life organization has expanded over the years to become one of the world’s largest gaming-based fundraising programs.

This was made possible through Extra Life’s community of more than 100,000 people livestreaming and raising money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

“You get to see an inspiring amount of passion from people,” said Schifani. “People are getting involved in all kinds of ways, and they’re supporting their local children’s hospitals, they’re having fun, and they’re inspiring their friends and family members to get involved.”

The Extra Life program’s growing community happens to be one of the organization’s biggest strengths.

“As it grows and people get more invested, it’s absolutely fantastic to see that level of passion from everybody,” said Schifani. “It’s really important to us that Extra-Lifers feel a sense of belonging and purpose, and that they feel like they’re making a difference for kids in their area.”

The St. Clair Esports Club is among the more than 100,000 members part of the Extra Life program.

“I started Extra Life last year,” said Eric “KingLevchuck” Levchuk, cast member and former president of the St. Clair Esports Club. “It started because I’ve followed Roosterteeth and how they do Extra Life – and started taking on that philosophy of wanting to give back to the community.”

The St. Clair Esports Club held its second-ever 24-hour Extra Life livestream on Nov. 5, 2022, which featured 22 different segments composed of different games and punishments for the livestream’s cast to participate in.

“It’s just fun,” said Levchuk. “Being able to hang out with people and knowing that money is going to a good cause, doing stupid stuff – it just makes for a good time.”

Unfortunately, the club ran into some problems securing the event’s location.

“With a week remaining until the event actually started, the SRC came back and was like, no, never mind, you can’t do the event at the Nexus,” said Levchuk. “So, within a week before the event, we had to find a new venue.”

Matthias “ApostLe” Eitzen, vice president of the St. Clair Esports Club, was one of those involved on-screen during the stream.

Eitzen described his time working on the event as, “a very fun experience.” He added despite how taxing the event was, he was “Really proud of how so many people came together.”

“Within the final 72 hours, we had to scramble to find a new place to start running everything out of,” said Eitzen. “Fortunately we were able to partner up with M Chapter, a local board game cafe.”

The cafe is located in close proximity to St. Clair College’s South Campus.

“They were very gracious and with almost no notice they let us come in and set everything up,” added Eitzen. “Finding a place that can give us all those accommodations – it can be pretty tough.”

Eitzen said he appreciated the efforts of those involved throughout the event and was inspired by how united everyone was.

“The fact that everyone was able to just come together for such a good cause against the odds, I think that was just a really inspiring thing to see.”

Zachary “Bailable” Schryer, President of the St. Clair Esports Club, was also involved with the stream.

Schryer shared his fondness of the event, stating that overall, despite the endurance required to keep the stream going, the experience was “very fun,” and the “vibes” he got from the event were that, “There was a lot of good energy throughout.”

“The 24-hour aspect of the event, running a stream for that long with a limited team, is very draining,” said Schryer. “And, if you can imagine, after being awake for, 14, 15, 16 and so on hours, it gets harder and harder to hold on.”

Additionally, Levchuk explained the members of the club were not very prepared to do 24 hours and by the time they reached 1 a.m. they were “pretty beat up.”

“That was the hardest part, just keeping that energy up throughout the whole night,” Levchuk elaborated.

According to Schryer, the St. Clair Esports Club’s main executive team is comprised of six people, “All have varying roles and had different levels of involvement with the event.”

“We had a couple of other people that were involved in different segments,” said Schryer. “One was one of our good buds Owen, who did the Valorant segment.”

This year, the club ran a variety of segments throughout its livestream featuring a revolving cast of people.

“For one of our larger scale segments, DLC dungeon, which is a Dungeons and Dragons segment, we had a couple more people that weren’t typically involved join in that,” said Levhcuk.

He added that the new “Who’s Nest is it Anyway?” segment was his favourite. The improv-based segment takes heavy influence from Roosterteeth’s own Extra Life segment titled “Who’s Spot is it Anyway?”

“It was something we haven’t tried before and something that again, we borrowed from Roosterteeth,” said Levchuk. “We’re not comedians, but we were still able to make it a really fun segment.”

Despite how new the cast was to improv, Levchuck indicated the segment went smoothly.

“We never practiced it – never done anything like it,” said Levchuk. “And it turned out really well.”

While segments like “Who’s Nest is it Anyway?” were a lot of work to pull off, Eitzen said that the hardest challenge he faced during the stream happened to be some of the punishments he received.

“For our $100 donation goal it was pretty simple,” said Eitzen. “I think it was just eating a spicy chip or something like that.”

The longer the stream went on, the group’s punishments got more and more severe.

“For our $1,000 donation goal, I had to eat a raw onion – and friends of mine, they know that I have a famous dislike of onions,” said Eitzen. “I took one bite and almost threw up on the spot.”

Schryer also talked about some of the punishments he experienced, such as taking a bite out of a jalapeno pepper during a segment.

“Another one of them was at $3,000,” added Schryer. “Me and Ethan, one of our other club executives, shaved our beards.”

When asked about the other punishments that took place throughout the stream, Levchuk mentioned one of this year’s new additions, The Wheel of Pain, as well as a couple of other punishments he and the executives endured.

“I think The Wheel of Pain goes down as one of my favourite new additions this year,” said Levchuk. “Having something like that, physically there and spinnable was really exciting.”

“I dyed my hair blue again this year which is always a fun time,” Levchuk continued. “And man that spicy chocolate…the spicy chocolate was not fun. That was probably the worst punishment I took this year.”

In the end, the 24-hour livestream was a large success, having raised a total of $4000, which according to Levchuk was “a huge jump” from what the group raised the previous year.

“My biggest takeaway was just seeing the drive that is still there from a lot of our community members, and from the people who helped run this event,” said Levchuck. “We came out of it going, okay, we’re definitely going to do this again next year.”

Roosterteeth’s Contributions to Extra Life

Roosterteeth is a media company located in Austin, Texas that was founded in 2003. Its relationship with the Extra Life program started in 2010 when the company did its first-ever 24-hour livestream, which raised a total of $15,000.

Roosterteeth has continued to contribute to the program. As of 2020, Roosterteeth had raised nearly $7 million USD for the organization.

On Nov. 12, 2022, the company held its eleventh consecutive event raising an additional $202,781 USD.

Jack Patillo, a long-time Roosterteeth employee, participates in the company’s Extra Life livestream every year and has been very vocal about the importance of the program and the fact that everyone can be a gamer and raise money through Extra Life.

“My parents are gamers, they play casino games on their phones. Everyone is a gamer and it’s so bad when you see negative connotations taken to gaming, and we’re showing who gamers truly are. We’re good people, we are the next generation, we are the current generation, we are the past generations, we are all of them,” said Patillo.

Extra Life has been a part of Roosterteeth for more than a decade now and many people discover the Extra Life organization through Roosterteeth’s livestreams, so while the company themselves have raised millions for the program, they are also responsible for inspiring many more to fundraise as well.