The Benevolence Crusade

Over the months of April and May, I am going to be playing Battletech for the Sydney Children's Hospitals Foundation (SCHF).

If you want to support me, you can:

• Donate some money here
• Share this blog post around

You Got Your Giant Robots In My Feudalism

On a semi-regular basis, the part of my heart that cares about other people emerges from its cave, bleary eyed and barely functioning, looks at the state of the world and wonders how it can possibly help.

So here we are, using video games to solicit donations yet again.

This time rather than streaming a game live, I'm going to try something a little bit different and do a Let's Play, which is a common thing on the internet where someone plays a video game offline, records the footage and then does an entertaining writeup afterwards, ideally with audience participation.

The game I'll be playing is Battletech, which is a isometric, turn-based tactics game where large, well-armed robots piloted by normal sized humans, engage in battle with each other for an assortment of reasons.

I'm doing the setting a bit of a disservice with that summary, because it's actually incredibly interesting with a detailed in-universe timeline and has been around in some form or another for as long as I have been alive (i.e. ~40 years).

Anyway, it's a great game and a great fit for a Let's Play.

Especially when you make it a bit more personal.

Which I will be doing, because I'm also going to use this as an opportunity to generate a bit of social cohesion internally in my little slice of Atlassian, by using the names of real people I work with on a day-to-day basis as my pilots and theming the whole thing around relevant organisational constructs.

The idea being that people will live vicariously through their similarly named pilots, and I can have a bit of fun with the whole thing.

As a concrete example, I'll be creating a mercenary company in the game called The Shards of Tenancy, and they'll use the following crest, which is derived directly from both the primary colours of Atlassian and the internally focused logo for my area, which is Tenant and Sharding Platform.

As awesome as this idea is, it does complicate things somewhat in terms of talking to external people, because I can't share any of the writeups or footage outside of Atlassian.

Not because Atlassian won't let me (Open Company, No Bullshit), but because it just doesn't seem right from a privacy point of view.

So I won't.

But that doesn't stop me from shouting into the void that is the internet that I am doing the thing in the first place and using that noise to increase the chances of getting more money for the Sydney Children's Hospitals Foundation.

Speaking of which, if you made it all the way to the end of this then I appreciate you. As a reward I present this, with no further context.

Now go donate some money and help those sick kids.