PAX West 2024 Conversation with Edwin Nolasco, the Marketing Director with Gamers Outreach
One of our main missions and initiatives is bringing the power of play and technology to help children go through the hospital process.
Wonderful! I was speaking to someone here yesterday and basically it’s all done on these machines and you bring them to different facilities?
Yes, so one of our main initiatives is called the GO Kart program – or Gamers Outreach Kart – and it includes any console that the hospital needs, normally with two controllers, the monitor, the entire structure of the GO Kart is medically graded and we fundraise year-round to donate the GO Karts to children’s hospitals for them to have that accessibility to video games.
Have you had any challenges getting the GO Karts out there to the hospitals?
Our previous versions of the GO Kart, we did have challenges. Normally they would come in a crate but we have Johnny – the CEO for NZXT – who is on our advisory board, actually helped us redesign the new GO Kart we call 3.0. That comes in an actual 29-square-inch box and we’re now able to ship these GO Karts around the world a lot easier. It takes you longer to get it out of the box than it does to put it together.
More ergonomic!
Yes, more ergonomic, we’re actually calling it the IKEA model and it doesn’t have any – like our previous models’ lift mechanism was all mechanical, you had to press a button, but this one’s all pneumatic so you just have to press a pedal and it goes up or down however you need.
I think everybody knows, at this point, the therapeutic quality of games. Can you talk a little bit about why you’re providing this kind of service?
So there have been a lot of programs since, I believe, 2012 where a lot of hospitals are adding therapeutic play programs and video games do quite a bit for those programs, so they use video games for physical therapy, pain management, a distraction tool, and just overall to make sure that child, or even adult, can have that sense of normalcy, so it doesn’t feel so much like they’re in a hospital environment and instead just work on their motor skills or creativity by actually playing video games.
A lot of the time in a hospital when a kid is going through a big surgery or something, normally they’re just sitting there watching TV and not able to do much of anything, but what happens when you bring in something like a GO Kart and then they have that access to video games, when they have to rebuild their motor skills, it all starts with the hands. So by playing video games they’re rebuilding their motor skills and the way they’re thinking, because they’re doing problem solving and playing these video games.
Lots of hand-eye coordination, that engagement in critical thinking.
Correct. And then for physical therapy, they can raise the GO Kart and the kid can stand and play, and while they’re distracted just playing some games, they can actually stand anywhere from 3-5x longer because they’re not worried about pain management and they’re building the muscles they need to start to stand and walk again and have those skills back.
What kind of relationship do you have with the medical staff or researchers or specialists at these hospitals? What’s the R&D process like?
We actually work directly with the medical staff in order to provide the GO Karts, so we ask them questions like: “what consoles would you prefer” or “what games do you need on the GO Karts, what games would be better for your patients?” and then we’ll ask them if they need an adaptive controller, so we work directly with the hospital before we ship the GO Karts to make sure that we fit all of the hospital’s needs in order for them to get the most out of our Gamers Outreach Kart.
What’s been the community reception, in terms of the hospitals or the community around Gamers Outreach?
Yeah, so we actually do a lot of peer-to-peer fundraising, so we work with a lot of creators, we have three main pillar events, and one is called Gamers For Giving which is our big LAN event – we call it like Gamers Outreach E3 where we put out a lot of information, put out what we’ve done last year. We’re very transparent with our community so we put out our financial website so people can see that most of our money is going to our programs.
We also have VTuber Summer Slam. Now, you don’t need to be a VTuber to join it, but we work with a little bit over 1600 VTubers to fundraise during the summer, that’s a 7-day event.
And then we do Spooktacular Streamathon, which is the whole month of October. We work with a lot of creators, they cosplay, they put on costumes, they fundraise for Gamers Outreach. They’re able to put more GO Karts in hospitals.
And then what we also do is we communicate with the hospitals and sometimes have those people in the community actually go and visit the hospitals, see the GO Karts, and see how they’re actually impacting, you know, the lives of these kids first hand. So, we try to do everything together.
Do you ever hear from the kids themselves, or their parents?
Yeah, so on every GO Kart we have a donor card and normally the donor card will tell you who the GO Kart was donated by. So, we’ll get a lot of incredible testimonials about the families saying “hey, thank you Gamers Outreach for donating this Kart” and they’ll send a picture. Normally the Kart is donated by our partners, like we’ve worked with a lot of great companies like HyperX and Hermitcraft, and they’ll say “hey, make sure to tell them thank you for donating this Kart because it helped my kid so much in this one- or two-day hospital process and he’s not scared to come back anymore.” We get a lot of those stories in our contact box, yeah.
That’s very sweet! And what kind of games are typically on the Kart?
So, of course, we mainly concentrate on children’s hospitals, so we try to put E-for-Everyone games. The most popular games right now are gonna be Minecraft, but then you have some of the greats like Sonic, a lot of people request Mario Kart, and then sports games. Everybody loves a good sports game, so FIFA, even racing – those are the most popular games. We also tend to put a lot of other platform games as well, so a lot of kids love playing especially co-op with either the therapeutic play technician or their family members, so games like Overcooked and Moving Out, a lot of fun two-player games so they can enjoy playing together.
You seem to cover the whole spectrum of play, like Minecraft can be really relaxing, I would play and just get lost in it, but then you have the sports games where you have to anticipate movements and do a little strategy.
Normally when we send the GO Karts to the hospital they come preloaded with 10 to 20 games already so they have that variety of games for the kids to play.
Do the publishers donate the games themselves? Or is that more part of the fundraising?
Yes, so we do work with devs, and they’re more than welcome to help us if they have kid-friendly games to donate codes to us and in turn we put those in the Karts, and then when the Karts get donated to the hospital, you know, their game is able to be played. It’s estimated that one GO Kart is played around 2,900 times in a year.
That’s a lot, that’s so worthwhile.
We’ve done a lot of research on this – the average kid’s stay is 1 to 2 days, but the whole run-through of year-round, I mean, we’ve seen a little bit more under so we average it out, so it’s around 2,900 play sessions in one year for one Kart.
It’s nice to see those statistics behind it showing just how many kids are getting access to this and how meaningful it is.
And we have a little over 2,050 GO Karts and over 420 facilities over 10 countries around the world. So, when you add all that up, it comes close to like 5.7 million play sessions annually.
Play sessions that are helping kids, and sometimes adults!
We get a lot of companies, or just people in general, who like to donate to veteran’s hospitals, we have people who donate to inmate hospitals, we always like to respect donor intent, so if they want to put any of these into adult hospitals, we are more than happy to help them out no problem.
Being at PAX, or any game convention really, what does that do for you guys, with people getting to see it, getting to hear some testimonials – or even testimonials not about this specifically but like “oh I wish my kid had this” or “I wish I had this.”
A lot of creators that we work with have never seen a GO Kart before, so this gives them – and companies – a chance to see it first-hand what exactly is a GO Kart and what it looks like, they can touch it and feel it, and I believe it strengthens the connection with the creators and companies that we’re working with to help us continue to fundraise these GO Karts. It’s such an incredible opportunity, especially for brand awareness to be here at these events, so our community that has helped us out in the past with fundraising can actually see the GO Karts and jump on with a friend and play, to see how awesome these things are. Especially at a show, they can better understand how this is helping the kids in the hospitals.
And you can get those people who have been in the hospital, or have a loved one who’s been in the hospital, seeing these now.
We definitely get a lot of parents that wish they had this while going through treatment and even if they’re lucky and don’t have to go to the hospital with their kids, they completely understand the entire process of why video games help kids in the hospital. So, it kind of hits home for them, because back then it was like a little tool cart with a tube TV and everything connected, and this just makes it so much easier.
Do you have any final thoughts?
If anyone wants to work with Gamers Outreach, contact us, you can look us up on our website at gamersoutreach.org and we are on X, Instagram, and Facebook at Gamers Outreach, so you can reach out to us, we’re always happy to help and work with anyone that wants to help our cause and mission to help fundraise to continue to putting more GO Karts in hospitals around the world.
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