By: Jeremy Blye

Last week, I was given the opportunity to work with Lurie’s Children’s Hospital for their Game On event, and I was joined by some of the community as well. John Ucha and Joshua Zullo made the time to help support the another community that is near and dear to us. While at Lurie’s Children’s Hospital, we had a lot of fun interacting with the patients and crew on the set, and we were able to volunteer for a great cause. Let’s take a look into what we were doing and what we were supporting.

 

 

If you do not know, Lurie’s Children’s Hospital hosts monthly events through their Extra Life Program that allows the patients within the building to interact with one another and any staff/volunteers that may be on site. In this Extra Life Game On event, Lurie’s set up a whole production set with gaming consoles. It was an internal “Twitch Stream” where patients could dial in and speak with all of the people on set. I say it is an internal stream since it was only streamed to people within Lurie’s due to HIPA restrictions. They also had a whole OBS production team behind the camera and games while we played. During this stream, patients had the ability to call in to win free gear, and on top of that they were able to talk to us.

 

 

 

Now that you have an idea of what went on during this event, I thought I would go over how the event went. First of all, this was one of the best volunteer events I have ever been to. It was a lot of fun getting to interact with people within the community, an awesome production cast, and patients around Lurie’s. Considering that we are basically at finals for this quarter, this event was a great way to get some time to just relax, have fun, and entertain those around me. On top of trying to entertain those watching the show, we had our fun messing around with the cast members.

 

I think the best part of this event was when the host got involved with our conversations. John, Josh, and I were joking around that the host opened up a bunch more when he realized we weren’t just annoying kids. When we started discussing older video games on set, the host realized we were not only annoying kids, we were knowledgeable gamers. Although we were poking fun at one another, I had a great time getting to be a part of this event. I am so glad to see people like this put on such amazing events. I am super excited to be able to get back into Lurie’s to help out with future events, and I hope they do the same for us!