Games 4 Kids: Bringing joy to kids spending time in hospital through video games

As the fireworks rang out on New Year’s Eve, we drew the curtain closed on our Games 4 Kids 2024 charity efforts. All up, we raised more than $2,000!

Games 4 Kids is a charity created by AVCon to raise funds to buy consoles and games for the Women’s and Children’s Hospital. 

The spark for AVCon doing its own charitable efforts came years ago when current AVCon president Matthew ‘Mowen’ Owen was running a different event in Canberra. 

After spending time visiting the local hospital after his own daughter was born, he used his current organisation to work with local businesses and buy some toys and games to donate to the same hospital and brighten young patient’s Christmas.

When Mowen took on the role as President of AVCon in 2023, he raised the idea with the rest of the committee to try a similar thing here in Adelaide.

This was then paired with an idea to run a Christmas Market; a place where local artists and small businesses could set up stalls for the weekend just before Christmas. 

People could attend the market to organise their Christmas shopping, finding unique and exciting gifts for family and friends. 

Rundle Mall Plaza were kind enough to let our organisation use the empty space on their second floor to run a community market, which they agreed to give us at no charge (which they did again in 2024). 

This meant the only cost to running the market was the hire of furniture and some marketing. 

Our team then met with the Women’s and Children’s Hospital (WCH) Foundation about our intent to raise money and buy gaming materials, which led to them granting us an authority to collect.

We were enthusiastic to see what we could do!

Putting it all together, we got a winning combination; an exciting event to run out of Rundle Mall Plaza, a place for local artists to sell and promote their products, AVCon being able to help support and grow the local scene, and all the money made from the market would go to our charity (as well as public donations through our charity portal). 

Everyone in the community was able to benefit and work together towards multiple goals.

When Games 4 Kids was created, we didn’t have an official designer on the AVCon team. So the original logo you saw in 2023 was bought from a designer on Fiverr (we’re now incredibly grateful to have a designer on our team to help bring our big ideas to life).

In 2023 we intended to purchase PS5s for the hospital, as they were the most likely to see the longest amount of support and use. 

We ended up buying a PS5/Spiderman 2 deal during Black Friday sales, which resulted in Mowen walking into a store and asking if we could buy 4 PS5 units on the spot.

“I didn’t think they would allow me to buy them all at once, but they did. Carrying them out a few people gave me funny looks and I had to explain I wasn’t a scalper!” he says.

This year at the request of the WCH Foundation, we donated Nintendo Switch consoles due to their portable nature. 

Again Black Friday sales provided the best value, though this time there were limits on how many we could buy, resulting in multiple AVCon staff members having to buy units!

Why have we created our own charity instead of promoting an existing one? Our president has the perfect response

“There are many existing charity efforts, and they all do amazing things. But I wanted to do something that suited the spirit of AVCon. Many of us spent our youths playing video games, I know I did. It was a large part of what makes us who we are. So while we are not contributing to life saving research or new medical facilities, being able to give good quality gaming hardware directly to the hospital definitely serves a worthwhile purpose. The consoles we donate don’t come with any strings attached or any other directives; they are simply for the purpose of allowing kids to experience fun electronic gaming at some of their lowest moments.” 

Feedback from the WCH Foundation has been very positive and our donations have been used across multiple wards. One place of note is an area for children waiting to go into surgery that is not accessible to family or friends. This is a place where our games will help keep their spirits up and their minds occupied. 

Some of our Playstations have even gone into basic treatments like visualisation exercises in the youth mental health ward.

With such success in 2023 and 2024, we will be back in 2025 to do everything we can. So enjoy the new year and keep an eye out for the AVCon Christmas Market and Games 4 Kids efforts when Christmas rolls around again!