John Zeitler

Yesterday and today, Bungie has been running an event within the Halo 3 Multiplayer system that allows lazy or broke gamers to contribute to the Haiti disaster recovery effort. In short: for every 1000 gamers who play Halo 3 online while wearing a specific emblem, Bungie will donate $100 towards the fund, to a maximum of $77,000 (because 7 is a sort of code number for them). It’s an admirable effort, and one I participated in as but part of my contributions. We’ll see how it works out for them.

I’m not exactly a big fan of the kinds of “efforts” we’re seeing out of many companies. Those that say “Purchase this thing and we’ll donate 100% of our profits to Haiti” are probably the most suspect, because of the way that shady accounting can turn a $20 t-shirt into a dime donation. I’m not saying that all of the companies that run those kinds of promotions are that ludicrously corrupt, but it would be very nice to know just how much of the $20 is going to the T-shirt and how much is going to where it needs to go. I also dislike how companies can place arbitrary caps on their donations– if they’ve got an idea on how much they want to spend on being decent human beings, why make it a game? What possible good does it do to say “well, we were gonna donate this last six thousand dollars, but we didn’t get enough sales, so you’re just gonna have to make do with fourteen thousand (even though we’ll still say we’re donating twenty thousand in our press releases)”?

I realize, of course, that there’s a certain level of internal justification I have to make on this point, because around Christmastime, I wanted to buy one of the “Oscar Mike” shirts offered by Giant Bomb in a promotion for some charity or another. In this case, however, I was viewing the shirt as the primary purpose of the money, and the charitable contribution as a secondary effect. As with everything, it’s the intent that matters almost as much as the act itself. If I wanted to donate to the charity, I would have done so directly, and not just said “well, this shirt that I get counts”. (In the end, of course, I didn’t get the shirt, but not out of a moral compunction; it was sold out by the time my paycheck rolled around.)

In the end, I’m sure everyone will do what they feel is right when it comes to Haiti, or even when it comes to troubles that aren’t on the other side of a body of water. I can’t know what everyone is thinking when they do their part, nor do I want to. I’ll simply have faith that the right people are doing the right things, for all the right reasons.

(As a final note, and to add a small amount of levity to this topic, I had the damnedest time trying to figure out a title for this post. Originally I was going to be a lot more militant about it, and play up the Halo 3 angle by titling it “Pornstars For Virginity“, after the old joke that “Fighting for peace is like f%#$ing for virginity”, but then I got a little too into the description of the match I’d been playing, and all of a sudden none of it made sense. I hit preview and found that what was above the fold– that is, what could be seen without having to scroll– gave off the distinct impression of being nothing more than Halo 3 slash fiction. There were grenades and stickbombs involved. No, you can’t see it– I deleted it in horror.)