Speedrunning for Charity: How Donations Gather Around a Live Streamed Couch

Games Done Quick (GDQ) is both a week-long video game speedrunning marathon and a successful charity event, raising more than $1.5 million USD in each of its past five events. To understand GDQ's success as an online charity event, we conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with GDQ speedrunners, attendees, hosts, and online viewers, analyzed past donation data, and conducted 72 hours of in-person participant observations at a live GDQ event. We found that central to every GDQ event is "the couch" which reconstructs the environment of a living room. Viewers do not simply donate to support the charity or in response to the technical prowess and ingenuity of speedrunners, but to actively interact with and be part of the couch experience, the ideal social milieu of speedrunning. Building upon previously identified motivations of why viewers donate to online live streamers, our work contributes to understanding how collocated gatherings can reinforce and amplify the cultural and social aspects of online subcultures (even heterogeneous ones) to encourage charitable giving. This opens opportunities for design that evoke a visceral level of engagement with charity events similar to that observed at GDQ.