Extra Life: Raising Money For Children's Health

Every year in November, I and thousands of people raise money for our local children's hospitals through an event called Extra Life Game Day. It's a specific day where everyone participating in that year's Extra Life charity campaign is urged to play games for a full day in an effort to collect more donations.

Extra Life began in 2008, where 1,200 gamers raised $120,000 USD. In every year since, those numbers have grown, with 2024's total raised being $12.3 Million USD with tens of thousands of gamers participating.

My local children's hospital is the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario or, as it's more commonly known, CHEO. I have been raising money for CHEO through Extra Life since 2017, and from then to this year (2025), I have personally raised $4,628.50 CAD ($3,300.56 USD). In 2017, I had joined a friend's Extra Life team to see what it was like, and I immediately loved it. What's not to love? You get to play videogames all day with your friends, while also raising money to help sick kids. Sign me up!

For my second year of participation, I got my friends in my game development group, SkyPyre Studios, to also take part, and thus began the annual SkyPyre Extra Life team. This year, we raised over $1,300 CAD, and since 2018, over $13,000 CAD ($9,270.23 USD)!

If you want to participate, all you have to do is sign up on the Extra Life website and spread the word! Donations are accepted all year long, with Game Day being in November. So, until the end of this year, you could be raising money and / or donating! And on January 1st, it all starts again!

Learn more about Extra Life

Many individual participants choose to livestream throughout the year to collect donations, while many teams livestream on Game Day in a big climactic donation spree. My team has been livestreaming our Game Day every year. As Game Day usually lands on daylight savings day, instead of livestreaming for 24 hours, we gain an hour! So, it becomes 25 hours! It's a lot of fun, but when you reach the wee hours of the night, it gets pretty brutal to stay up that long, while also trying to play a videogame with some skill.

In the last couple years, not in small part to us starting our thirties, we have elected to livestream for 12 hours, rather than the 24. So, now we livestream from noon to midnight on Game Day, and it's been for the better. Our team members' energy lasts the entire livestream, we don't usually come out of this event sick, and it's entirely during times when people are awake, so we usually have livestream viewers and a steady trickle of donations, which in turn, keeps our energy up and motivation high.

Apart from playing games for a full day, and hoping people donate, we also have milestones and incentives. These can be anything, and vary from person to person and year to year.

Mathieu's face with half a beard

For my team, we often have a milestone for reaching halfway to our goal. For example, this year's halfway milestone was that I would shave half of my face right down the middle, and would have to keep it that way for the remainder of the livestream. Well, within the first few hours, we hit that milestone, so I had half a beard for most of the day.

We also have incentives. We've had a number of them over the years, but we've landed on one main mechanic that we've been using called The Wheel of Chaos! Whenever a member of the team receives a donation, that person must spin the wheel. Whatever it lands on must happen. The wheel changes slightly every year, but we usually have things like getting whipped cream to the face, or playing the current videogame blindfolded for a set amount of time, and many more. The chaos comes from the randomness of the wheel, because as most of the wheel is some sort of punishment, some are worse than others, and even still, we have some neutral items or even rewards. These include drinking some water and making sure to stay hydrated, or having a snack.

So, these milestones and incentives combine together to create short-term and long-term goals for viewers to donate frequently. For example, some people may want to donate once with a larger amount, which would trigger the wheel once. But some people may want to spread their budget out into many smaller amounts to spin the wheel many times throughout the day. This can lead to entertaining scenarios in the games we play as well as keeping us on our toes, never knowing when the next spin of the wheel will come and who the target may be.

I would highly recommend taking part in this amazing event. You can participate as an individual, a team, a money raiser, and a donator. Every person who takes part and every little bit that's donated helps.

I want to thank all past donators and stream viewers, we wouldn't have raised this much over the years without you. You're all wonderful, generous, and amazing. Here's to another successful Extra Life, and I can't wait to do it all again next year!