This might be the most bittersweet post I’ve ever written in my tenure with Take This. This week, we bring Take This’ AFK Room to PAX West again. We celebrate the 10th anniversary of the AFK Room in Seattle! It simultaneously marks 10 years that I’ve been with Take This, first as a volunteer and then – by the end of 2015 – as a staff member. It may also be the last time the AFK Room happens. Ever.
You may have noticed our plea for financial support earlier this year. As hard as we’ve worked to make up that gap, we still need significant help. Without your support, Take This and all of our impactful programs will cease to exist.
We want to highlight the impact your past support allowed Take This and our world-class, mental health experts to make in the game community over the last 10 years. Here is a partial list, as well as what might be lost in the future:
- Take This brought our AFK Program – the first mental health support space at major conventions – to 55 events, either directly or through local partnerships. Many of our AFK Rooms helped over 1,000 people per convention to find respite and mental health education during an otherwise overwhelming event. Many attendees tell us they cannot attend large events without knowing they have the AFK Room in which to rest and recharge.
- Take This’ staff appeared on hundreds of panels and other media appearances. We’ve spoken on a broad range of topics from how to find a therapist, burnout, the use of games as mental health interventions, the social benefits of online friendships, crunch culture in the game industry and content creation, online harassment, mental health representation, content warnings, management from a neurodiversity-affirming lens, and so many more! We brought our knowledge of up-to-date research to all these talks, including award-winning sessions at high-profile and high-impact events like GDC.
- We provided over 100 workshops to game studios to educate staff and managers on mental health topics and improve studio culture.
- We authored the first-of-its-kind white paper on the state of mental health in the game industry, bringing attention and research-supported information on topics like crunch culture and burnout.
- We created multitudes of high-quality, free, educational mental health resources on our website, including our most-circulated article on dealing with con crash, our detailed information on content creator burnout, and our voluminous mental health resources list.
- We collaborated with studios and creators on projects like Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2 and Dropout’s Mentopolis (and a bunch of other studios’ projects we can’t reveal, due to NDAs) to help improve mental health representation and help writers and developers avoid stigmatizing, outdated tropes.
- In a similar vein, we created the first-of-its-kind, Mental Health in Game Awards to honor games which overtly address mental health themes and do so with an effort to avoid stigmatizing portrayals and mental health tropes. Past winners include Stardew Valley, Celeste, Psychonauts 2, and Spiritfarer. The 2024 finalists are due to be announced soon.
- We conducted original research on ways in which toxicity can negatively impact both gaming communities and studios’ revenue. We developed resources to help gamers, developers, and policy makers cultivate healthier and more resilient gaming.
- We recently created another pioneering program: the Accelerate Program. It provides mentorship and mental health education opportunities to early-career game professionals. This program aims at boosting the knowledge and career skills of future leaders in games, allowing them to build a better, more sustainable game industry. Our hope is to open future cohorts focusing on specific specialties like content creators, researchers, and esports, among others!
That’s so much impact, and – again – it’s only a partial list! If we don’t raise $80,000 by the end of September, all of this will disappear.
The Accelerate Program and the 2024 Mental Health in Games Awards will finish their contractual obligations, and we have a few studio workshops scheduled in the fall, but otherwise by the end of 2024 Take This ceases to exist. Even after we raise the needed, immediate funds, we need to find substantive, ongoing support to make sure that all these invaluable and impactful efforts don’t simply evaporate.
A lot of what we do as an organization is uncompensated or underfunded, which is often the nature of nonprofit work. Every AFK Room costs us about $15,000 in labor, travel, and materials. Most conventions – as wonderful partners as they are – do not pay for us to be there. We’ve already had to inform PAX and our volunteers that we will be unable to provide an AFK Room at PAX Unplugged in 2024. Without funding, the AFK Room will never return in its current form to any convention.
We’ve been at this for so long because we believe in what we do: bringing mental health knowledge and resources to the game community! We know that you care about our mission too! It doesn’t matter if you’re a community member who can give $5 or you’re a corporate giver who is interested in sponsoring an AFK Room or a future Accelerate Program cohort, if ever you wanted to ensure that Take This remains around to help build a better, more sustainable future for the game industry and community, now is the time to give! It’s cliché but true: every dollar counts!
If you are able to directly support Take This’ mission, go to our donations page. If you are a potential corporate partner who wants to uplift and build a better game community by sponsoring our future efforts, please reach out at info@takethis.org.
Thank you for your support over the years! Now, let’s try to make sure there are more impactful years to come!
Raffael Boccamazzo, PsyD (“Doctor B.”)