Founded in the fall of 2001, the Get-Well Gamers Foundation provides children in hospitals all across the United States an opportunity to engage in an activity most of us take for granted, play video games.

The foundation started off as a brain-child between classmates and has now evolved into a thriving charity. The following is an interview with Get-Well Gamers Foundation president Ryan Sharpe.

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Thanks for taking to the time to participate in this interview Mr. Sharpe. To start things off, can you tell us how Get-Well Gamers Foundation was created?

The Foundation was created as a response to my own experiences as a child. Born with a weak immune system, I spent a lot of time in hospitals when I was young, and the presence of video games in some of my hospital wards versus the lack of them in others made the benefits of electronic entertainment for hospitalized children readily apparent to me. Fast forward to 2001, and I found myself with the means to go about providing games to hospitals, and I've been pursuing that goal ever since.

What type of relationship do you have with video games that lead you to establish the Get-Well Gamers Foundation?

I've been a gamer since I was four years old. I think video games are one of the best forms of entertainment ever developed, and I know firsthand how engaging they can be. More than movies or books, I think video games have the ability to take a child's mind off their ailments and allow them to escape from their hospital ward and into a world of their choosing.

What set backs did you experience in the beginning? At what rate did games and systems come in initially?

Anonymity is a charity's biggest enemy. Establishing that initial trust with the public is quite a monumental task, especially with all the scam artists people have heard about in the news and such. Really the only way to combat that is to just do what you say you'll do, and eventually your actions will speak for themselves. I'd like to think that after five years we've gotten to that point, but then again there are still those occasional doubting Thomases who question the sincerity of Goodwill or the Salvation Army, so I suppose it’s just an occupational hazard.

As to our donation intake, that's always been a bit of a roller-coaster. There can be droughts where we won't get anything at all for over a month, and other times we can get over a thousand dollars worth of donations in a single day. It all just comes down to luck- hoping the right people hear about you at the right time.

Now that the foundation is going strong, what are some of your long term goals for Get-Well Gamers? Perhaps a network hospital in every state? International Get-Well Gamers?

The Foundation's mission statement is "A game for any patient, anywhere, anytime they want one" so I suppose you could call that a long-term goal. More pragmatically, we're hoping to go international by the end of the year, and a Foundation hospital in every state is practically a necessity. Really, I'm sure I'll run out of years before the Foundation runs out of hospitals, so I suppose we'll just keep adding hospitals as long as we can.

What type of games and systems do you accept? Does Get-Well Gamers strictly accept console based video games and equipment, or is the foundation looking for PC games and equipment as well?


The Foundation will accept just about anything, but the caveat to that is that some of it won't actually make it to the hospitals. Really old things, like the original NES, Master System, and the like won't make it to the hospitals because most of them don't even have TVs compatible with the old R/F switches. Also, titles from newer systems that we feel would be inappropriate for children usually don't make it to hospitals either- GTAs and the like. However, these titles do still serve a purpose for the Foundation- we've sold, traded, and otherwise made these "unusable" games to work for the benefit of the Foundation's mission.

How does the distribution process of video games and consoles to the different hospitals and clinics in the network take place?

It used to be that we'd have to go looking for all the hospitals ourselves, but nowadays word has gotten out and it's about 50/50 of us calling them vs. the other way around. The basic process is, we get some information from them (# of beds, what systems they have, what kinds of games they'll take, etc.) figure out what we have that will best suit their needs, and ship it out with FedEx. We usually start off each new hospital with what we call a "boredom inoculation": A new system with all the controllers, memory cards, and other accessories, plus about 8-10 games. Afterwards, we'll periodically provide hospitals with "Booster shots", which can be anything from another stack of games to replacement cords or whatever else they need to keep the kids entertained.

How does a hospital or clinic join the Get-Well Gamers network?

Really, all it takes is a phone call. We're always interested in getting new hospitals, so if you contact us you're pretty much guaranteed a donation. It's really just that simple.

What can we, as caring gamers, do to help the Get-Well Gamers cause?

There's a bunch of stuff any gamer of any means could do to help the Foundation. First and foremost, we can always use new games and systems, or even the incidentals, stuff like AC adaptors, A/V cables, and so forth. On the less material side, the Foundation needs its mission and message spread all over the internet, and any gamer with an internet connection can help. Put a link in a forum signature, Mention the Foundation on your mailing lists. There are a million ways to point people towards the Foundation using the internet, and any one of them would be helpful to us. Finally, we can always use new hospitals. If you've ever been hospitalized, or a family member, or you just drive by one every day on the way to work, let us know about it and we'll set them up in our network.

Thanks a lot for your time Mr. Sharpe, on behalf of gamers around the world I would like to thank you for starting up such a wonderful foundation.

My pleasure. It's my hope that I can use the Foundation to allow gamers around the world to share in this wonderful endeavor.

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Get Well Gamers is a private organization funded by gamers like us. Let’s show the world how compassionate the GotFrag community is and make a difference.

For more information check out http://www.get-well-gamers.org.