On August 27th, 2024, Dr. Raffael Boccamazzo (or as he’s commonly known online, Dr. B), wrote an update on the website for Take This. Boiled down, the message read: ‘we’re excited to be going to PAX West to celebrate ten years of running AFK rooms at conventions. Here’s all of the wonderful things that this charity has managed to accomplish… and if we can’t get together $80,000 by the end of September it all stops and goes away’.
This is a frustrating and sad state of affairs. As someone who has seen some of the good work that Take This has done, I’m hoping that they can raise enough community support to keep functioning. If you’ve ever been to a Penny Arcade Expo event or wanted to see more positivity in the gaming community, then the survival of organizations like Take This is something you should be interested in.
What is Take This, And Why Do They Matter?
Take This is an organization which states its mission is to “decrease the stigma, and increase the support for, mental health in the game enthusiast community and inside the game industry”. It has been around since 2012, and while other charities or organizations have popped up since, they were the first advocates for mental health that focused on the gaming community. A chief inspiration for the project came from a dark place: the suicide of gaming freelancer journalist Matt Hughes.
According to 2022 statistics, the AFK room program at gaming conventions had helped thousands of gamers find support, whether large or small.
I first became aware of them by accident in 2016. They were hosting the AFK room at PAX East, and I saw it on the floor map; I had been sleeping awfully thanks to it being, well, a gaming convention, and so I popped in to charge my phone and sit down somewhere quiet. It was a really relaxing quiet zone, and as I settled in, a mental health volunteer from the organization came by to ask if I needed anything.
If I’m being honest, it had been a rough year; we ended up chatting for 10-15 minutes, the conversation branching out from me being just tired to how I had been tired of a lot of things for a while. The volunteer let me offload without complaint, asked if I needed help figuring out how to get into therapy or any other resources, and said I could stay as long as I liked. Never pushed or judged, just an open ear.
It was a great experience, and after that I stopped by their information booth later and in later years. I heard anecdotal stories of how they had helped stop some convention goers from having panic attacks or worse. I’ve always appreciated Take This for offering this service at gaming conventions since 2014 - I’m fortunate to have great support in my life, but for many, this resource might be someone’s first chance at finding mental health support. They even have articles that are meant for immediate help such as a flow chart and guide on how to find a therapist.
However, that isn’t all Take This does. A lot of their work is much more academic, such as publishing white papers that cover subjects such as online extremism found in gaming or how ‘crunch’ in video game studios is bad for long term health of a game dev studio. They’ve gathered original research in various areas adjacent to gaming and online communities, and have done work consulting with game studios in areas such as helping structure work/life balance for employees or how to include discussions about mental health in games. It's a mix of projects, some of which are more direct while others are more supportive in the background of the gaming community.
What Happened?
As a quick summary, it appears in articles that date back to February 2024 that Take This had been dealing with monetary issues. Funding for non-profits can typically come from grants or from companies in the industry they are a part of. We all know about the cascading layoffs of 2023 that have continued into 2024, as major publishing companies cut costs to show off high quarterly profits. In that process, groups in supporting roles such as Take This lost sources of funding. Take This has also has received grant money in part for them to complete academic research such as their white papers, but those are typically temporary injections of money or only can be spent in specific ways... the same way academic grants are usually done at universities worldwide.
I should be clear here - this article isn’t a deep dive into the organization or finding long term fixes. I’ve just seen first-hand some of the positive effects of what Take This has accomplished in the past, and feel like it's a shame that they could disappear. By operating at gaming conventions like PAX East, Take This has provided years of direct mental health support, helped people with suicidal ideation, social anxiety, or has just given gamers a quiet place to relax at a busy event.
I am hoping that the organization can restructure, find ways of saving money, and find stable monetary sources in the future. For the moment however, we just wanted to draw attention to the situation and do our part to try and help in a tough time.
Our Fundraising Campaign
As someone who made Sprites and Dice to try and build a community that focuses on the positivity in gaming, there’s a reason why I support Take This as an organization. As of a video update released on 9/4, Take This has raised $14,000 of its needed $80,000 goal, and is pushing hard to make up the rest before the end of the month.
Sprites and Dice usually hosts a charity campaign once a year here through Tiltify, and while we were debating which to pick, the news dropped about Takethis.org. With that in mind, we started a goal to help raise $1,500 towards their total. It’s a relatively small amount, but we’re hoping to promote the idea that if anyone has a few extra dollars lying around, they can put it towards a good cause.
To help with that, our Tiltify campaign has a bunch of small goals such as sending out game codes or steam gift cards when we hit certain milestones. We’ll be giving them out whenever we’re streaming for Finish The Damn Game Month during September, or playing Satisfactory non-stop when it hits 1.0.
We hope you’ll check out our charity campaign and maybe win some free stuff! Feel free to check out TakeThis.Org for yourself and donate directly if you can. I sincerely believe that Take This has the capacity to do great work for the gaming community, and it is work that can be priceless for someone who needs a supportive ear at just the right time.
Thanks for reading, and have fun gaming everyone.
