Make-A-Wish’s April Stallings Illuminates the ‘Whys’ of Gaming: Joy, Well-being, and Connection

Gaming is really a lifeline for a lot of our kids. People don't really grasp what it means to them…This isn't just like a momentary…I want this cool thing. It really is about the why of it, which, for gaming, for a lot of kids, it's connection. It's distraction. It's mental health.— April Stallings

In mid-August, April Stallings, Charitable Gaming and Creators Community Manager at Make-A-Wish International, joined me and Player Driven ’s founder, Greg Posner, on the Player Driven podcast. The full podcast posted September 1. Stallings, who has been in her current role for a little over five years, was forthcoming about what the job entails and the emotional ups and downs that accompany it. This week and next, Player Driven Design Desk will summarize, update, and augment our exchange, which offers a window into not only how Make-A-Wish and Stallings approach the intersection of critically ill kids, caregivers with outsized hearts, and the video game industry, but a window into what fuels passion and love of gaming more broadly.

A couple housekeeping notes up front. First, there’s Make-A-Wish, which was founded in Phoenix, Arizona in 1980, and is focused on granting wishes domestically, and Make-A-Wish International, which was founded in 1993, and that’s based in Hilversum, Netherlands. The latter nonprofit fulfills wishes in dozens of additional countries around the globe. Stallings hails from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and works for Make-A-Wish International.

This pair of nonprofits have fulfilled over 650,000 wishes globally to date. It’s a remarkable accomplishment. According to Make-A-Wish’s website, the “world’s largest wish-granting mission” relies on “tens of thousands of volunteers, donors and supporters” to fulfil its mission of granting wishes for kids (almost all of whom are 3-18 years old) facing dire medical issues.

Stallings told Posner and me that her role initially came about due to “increasing interest and demand from our wish children for gaming-related wishes.”

Additionally, there was an awareness that “this industry could be a real game changer, no pun intended, for what we do, and what our mission is.”

At the top of our exchange, Posner noted that “Make-A-Wish sorts wishes into four kinds: To go, to meet, to be, or to have.”

“Travel is the biggest overall,” he continued—it’s the cornerstone of the “to go” category—but when “a kid asks ‘to have’ something, the number one thing they ask for anywhere in the world is gaming…”

Stallings nodded.

In terms of “our four categories of wishes,” she said, “I would say gaming kinda crosses into two of them. Actually, three of them.”

The first is the “‘to meet’ part, where I want to meet someone, I wanna meet my favorite celebrity. The ‘to be’ is where I want to be, like, an astronaut for the day,” the second category. “Then ‘to have,’ which is, you know, exactly what it sounds like: I want to have this thing that I think will make my life amazing.” Gaming is, “definitely, [in] the ‘to have’ part of it, is huge.”

Posner asked if anything in particular gets her “pumped” to get up and start work in the morning.

“Right now, it's when someone says ‘Yes’ to me for a Gamescom meeting!” grinned Stallings.

Gamescom is a major European videogame conference that was held in Cologne, Germany in late August.

“When I'm, like, you know, laying in bed at 6AM, and I'm looking through my messages,” she told us, “when I see that someone actually accepted my meeting request instead of running away from a charitable conversation, that gets me pumped.”

I hope you’re pumped for a great convo about charity and video games because you’re about to get a packed inbox of it!

One last housekeeping note: Next week’s Design Desk will focus on the non-gaming aspects of Stallings’ work. Here, the focus is videogame industry-related wishes, stories, programs, etc. We’ll especially break down two videogame-centric programs below: Stream for the Wishes and Cosy Up for Wishes.

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Make-A-Wish + Video Games = More Joy, Enhanced Quality of Life

Once a month, at least…at the [Make-A-Wish] International team, we sort of, like, share wishes that we help with around the world, right? And it's simultaneously, like, our feel-good moment, but, also, we have an ugly cry together a lot of the time too. There's something cathartic about that…The overwhelming positive impact that what we do…helps carry us through a lot of that stuff.—April Stallings

An early question put to April Stallings, Charitable Gaming and Creators Community Manager at Make-A-Wish International, involved the timeframe in which wish requests for videogame-related hardware, software, and so forth, started coming into Make-A-Wish.

Stallings didn’t know the exact year, but suspected it was when “the first, you know, Nintendo…the OG NES came out…whenever home gaming, home consoles really became a thing.”

NES came out in 1983. If accurate, that means gaming-related wishes became “a thing” in the first few years of the nonprofit’s existence.

Player Driven’s founder, Greg Posner, went back to the “to have” wishes category to ask if there were “common themes” in the requests she’d fielded.

The “to have” wish category, she replied, “can look different depending on where in the world we're talking about.”

“It could be, ‘I wish to have a gaming bedroom redecoration.’ You know, they get the full LED lights, the whole nine yards.”

“It could be ‘I wish to have a Nintendo Switch.’ That's probably our most popular console,” she continued. “Device-wise, kids in North America are wishing for different [things] than, say, Southeast Asia. Mobile gaming is much bigger in that part of the world.”

“Then we move on to things like ‘I wish to meet,’” elaborated Stallings. “Content creators are becoming, more and more, the celebrity of today's generation. Wanting to meet their favorite content creator, their favorite gaming content creator specifically, or even I wanna meet the developers of my favorite game. We get that one a lot.”

“We did one recently where we had a child who wanted to meet the team at Arrowhead because of Helldivers. He specifically wanted to meet the development team, which I thought was really fascinating.”

Arrowhead Game Studios developed (and Sony Interactive Ent. published) the original Helldivers in 2015 and followed that up with 2024’s Helldivers 2.

“That sort of trickles over in the ‘to be’ category,” Stallings added, “where there's a lot of kids who want to be a game developer, you know, whenever they grow up.”

“That's a really fun thing we can do, is get them connected to someone who can actually teach them what it's like to design their own character, design their own game, to be part of the game’s ecosystem.”

That's one of the cool things that wishes do, actually, is they get kids thinking about the future and what comes after their illness. I think that's a really powerful part of what we do.

Potent, indeed.

Make-A-Wish (U.S.) released a study that quantified some of the impacts that fulfilled wishes had had on kids and their families in 2022. The website states, for example, that “9 out of 10 wish alumni say their wish made them feel more confident and hopeful for the future.”

A press release with more context about this 2022 Wish Impact Study is here. Among other things, the project surveyed roughly 350 “wish alumni.” The impact of fulfilled wishes, apparently, goes way beyond boosting near-term optimism and confidence.

Over 9 out of 10 wish alumni, according to the study, also reported their wish journeys had “made them feel more joyful,” “brought their family closer together,” and “improved their overall quality of life.”

Two-thirds of wish alumni, moreover, said they’d increased compliance with medical treatments after learning they’d be receiving their wish.

Source: “The Impact of a Wish: The 2022 Wish Impact Survey Results,” courtesy of Make-A-Wish.

One of the verbatim quotes from a wish alumni who’s quoted in the same study implied the mental and physical health upsides have been long-lasting:

Before I received my wish, my quality of life was horrible, and I had no desire to keep going. When I learned I would be getting a wish, I had something that made me want to fight for my life. Now, instead of having 100 seizures a day, I have less than 10 a day.—Anonymous, wish alumni

Stallings turned back to Arrowhead and gave them an extra pat on the back.

The “folks at Arrowhead,” she said, “need a good shout out…They're under a constant deadline, you know, to deliver more content for Helldivers.”

“They pulled away a good part of their development team to spend a full day with this young man and his friends,” she explained. “He's an older child but, you know, he couldn't travel. They got all of his friends together in a room on a Zoom call with the development team. They spent hours with him, showing him what they do, answering questions...”

That is worthy of a second kudos serving.

I wondered if she could share any more wish stories like that.

“I think that's probably the coolest thing about what we do is,” Stallings began, as she weighed her options. “Some of the absolutely wild stuff that kids come up with...Not necessarily gaming related, but one of my favorites was a kid who wanted a mobile chicken coop so he could take his chickens around with him!”

I was tempted to use ChatGPT to conjure an image of that…but concluded that was insensitive.

“We've had a kiddo who wanted to go, you know, visit the Minecraft headquarters,” said Stallings. “He wanted to see the stage where they film the live reveals and things like that.”

“They hosted him for a whole day. He got to meet the devs. He got to go shopping in their store. The team in Stockholm really rolled out the red carpet.”

Kudos to you too, Mojang!

“There's a kiddo right now,” she recalled, who “wants to go visit the studio of a game that's 10 years old. The studio doesn't even exist anymore, you know, but this is his passion. This is his game. This is what he loves. So, now we're pulling together the old development team and trying to get the gang back together, right?”

Another one popped to mind.

“We had a kiddo who’s a big fan of Brawl Stars, the mobile game. Part of his condition means that, eventually, he's going to lose the majority of his eyesight. This is probably two or three years ago where we reached out to the team at Brawl Stars,” Stallings added.

“They pulled together his favorite content creators that played the game, that are ambassadors of their brand, and also gave him some rare skins, discontinued skins...”

It was a great moment because it really, you know, sort of let him capture his wish before he then has to relearn how to access the game, and how to play the game with impaired vision. Impaired vision doesn't end his journey with that game, but it changes it.

Brawl Stars is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game made by Supercell that was published in 2018; images courtesy of Supercell.

Posner changed gears, inquiring if Stallings found “studio buy-in fairly easy, or is it still, like, pulling teeth sometimes?”

“It can be very challenging,” she said flatly. “I hear ‘No’ way more than I hear ‘Yes.’”

“The bigger a studio is, the more complex that is, the harder it is to find the right person. It can be challenging when you're talking to, like, a AAA studio with, you know, multiple offices around the world…Indie gaming is way more flexible…way more grassroots…”

“A lot of people,” she added, “see my email or my name land in their inbox, and, you know, there's, like, a guilt. Like, they don't even wanna open it because they're afraid they'll have to say ‘No.’”

“We all know what the games industry has been going through…It's, you know, 2,500 people laid off from a studio that you thought was secure…And you're just like, ‘What is happening?’”

Sometimes opportunities come to her…and punch her in the face.

“I'm gonna give you an example of probably the easiest fundraising moment of my career, and it came from New Blood” Interactive.

“I don't know if you guys know Dave [Oshry] or not, but, you know, he's the CEO.”

New Blood Interactive is a SoCal-based video game publisher that was founded by Aaron Alexander, Kreyg DeZago, and Dave Oshry in 2014. Oshry is indeed the current CEO. They’ve published games such as ULTRAKILL, a blood-soaked, retro-style first-person shooter that went into Early Access on Steam in 2020.

“New Blood's games are not exactly, you know, brand aligned with Make-A-Wish,” said Stallings with a wry grin.

“Dave just reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, we're gonna do this thing, and we want you to be, you know, part of it. And we wanna donate this money to help you grant wishes.’”

The studio, she added, had its “birthday celebration in February [and] gave us a percentage of their sales from that month. And Dave became the biggest gaming industry donor for Make-A-Wish International. He and his company gave us a $100,000 this year, which is massive.”

Yeah, it is. But it’s also the exception to the rule.

For most game studios, Stallings underscored, “giving is just not possible. And that's when we talk about ‘Who can you introduce us to?’, ‘Can you give game codes?’, ‘Can you help a child learn what it means to be a game developer?’”

“We get a lot of wishes for studio visits, and it's really hard to explain to children sometimes, that game studios are just, like, a bunch of people sitting around in computers and whiteboards.”

“It's not Willy Wonka-esque at all, unless, you know, granted the Minecraft headquarters in Stockholm is very Willy Wonka-esque! It's fantastic.”

I didn’t need ChatGPT for this one.

Pics of Mojang’s HQ in Stockholm, Sweden, courtesy of various tourists/visitors.

Stream for the Wishes

A question I had for Stallings involved Stream for the Wishes, a Make-A-Wish program that leverages gaming-focused content creators and media influencers.

First, I pointed out that my 10-year-old daughter is obsessed with a Canadian family of YouTubers, KREW. They mostly make Roblox-focused videos (and, yes, I’ve watch countless hours, and know all their names and favorite colors).

Stepping back from my personal experiences with videogame content creator fandom, I asked Stallings if she could “give me some sense” of how Stream for the Wishes (aka StreamFTW) “fits into the picture?”

She obliged.

In “my role, I can kind of divide into two things,” she began.

“There's the industry side, you know, which is connecting with the games industry for support, and then there's the content creator side.”

“Charitable fundraising by content creators, for a long time, was kind of built into the culture of content creation, especially on the Twitch side of things. It was very much, like, kind of an expectation and a given, you know, that people in that space would be doing some sort of charitable events and things like that.”

“Now,” she continued, “things seem to be coalescing into, like, a top 10% scenario with content creators…Now they're not just they're not just the talent behind the content. They're a brand. They're a force. There's endorsement deals and, you know, they're making their own beverages…”

In this sense, it’s become more challenging for Stallings to work with top creators to leverage “their content, their community, their talent to do some good in the world. A lot of times what they'll do is they'll pick a charity and they'll do, like, a few live streams where the sole goal is not subs or bits…It's solely to raise money for a charity.”

“The more awareness we raise that we're in the space, what our kids need in the space, that we have a reason for being there…I think that's probably one of the most compelling things about us, is that we're not just parachuting into these spaces.”

“We really have a legitimate reason,” continued Stallings, “from our wish children to be there, and to be doing what we're doing.”

Posner nodded.

“You gotta be tough skinned, I imagine, to be in this,” he said, “because there's highs and lows everywhere. It's must be, like, whiplash.”

“Using each other as just a good ugly cry, you know, shoulder, is something that we do regularly,” replied Stallings. “There's no one at Make-A-Wish who's afraid to cry. Like, they're absolutely not. You have to be able to shed some tears. Happy and sad.”

That triggered a connection to Game for Change (G4C) 2026 in me. Readers of Player Driven’s Design Desk column will know that I recently posted a conversation I had with G4C’s President, Susanna Pollack. In it, she used the story of Mats Steen to illustrate the important topic of impact.

“Greg and I were both at Games for Change a few weeks ago in New York City,” I said, “and the dad of Mats Steen…the father…spoke there.”

“Ibelin was” was the name of Mats Steen’s character/toon, and he “played, like, twenty thousand hours in World of Warcraft before, I think, succumbing, ultimately, to muscular dystrophy.”

In the Netflix Documentary about Mats Steen, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, Mats’ father, Robert Steen, says that he estimated Mats played Blizzard’s World of Warcraft for between 15,000 and 20,000 hours. If you do that math on that, it suggests the game was basically Mats’ full-time job for the last decade of his life.

“Talk a heartrending story,” I said.

Coming back to Stallings, I wondered if she agreed that she and the Make-A-Wish team are coming in “at a very pivotal, sensitive point in a lot of people’s lives if you’re…dealing with the actual family and the actual children...[and] when you were describing what you were talking about, with the monthly cry…that [documentary] came to mind…”

She understood the connection.

“That movie really encompasses what gaming is for our kids in general. We do have a lot of children who live with muscular dystrophy, different types, around the world.”

“I know that gaming sometimes catches a lot of flack for mental health, and it kind of becomes a boogeyman in that conversation, you know, unjustly.”

For our kids, you know, they use gaming…especially the cross-platform play…to stay connected to friends and family. You know, social well-being, because they isolate…they were doing social distancing chemotherapy. Things like that just wreck their immune systems and they really have to be careful and protect themselves.

“Gaming lets them sort of stay involved with the world and they can build this whole fantasy life,” added Stallings. “They can build this whole world of their own, you know, when there are physical limitations about what they can do in the real world.”

“So that's a perfect example, you know, of someone…Gaming became this empowering, beautiful connection to the rest of the world” for Mats Steen/Ibelin.

Cosy Up for Wishes

“Cozy up for Wishes, I think, raised around a $100,000” this year, I said, pivoting to another of Make-A-Wish’s gaming-focused programs.

“Can you run through what recently happened there?” I asked Stallings.

“One of the most interesting conversations I have in the gaming industry,” she replied, “is people who think that their game, or their type of game doesn't, you know, fit our brand. It's too violent, or too whatever.”

“Cosy Up for Wishes, I guess, is a little more of what people expect from us in the space.”

The program is near and dear to Stallings’ heart “because it brings content creators and the industry together for us. It's kind of a nice hybrid of, like, a variety streaming event and the game bundle that we bring together.”

In the program, donors who give a specific amount (i.e., $35) receive a bundle of cozy indie PC games, which are donated by participating game studios; content creators are leveraged to help promote the event, etc.

“The industry gets that marketing side of it…They kinda get the exposure working with the content creators. The content creators, of course, get the resources that they need to fundraise from the games industry.”

Cosy Up for Wishes “runs for a weekend every June…We like to time it between every game showcase in the world that's happening in one month!”

“We do a small, curated game bundle that we put together. It doesn't show up on Steam. It doesn't show up on any of the other platforms.”

Stallings and others identify some “cozy genre content creators who come in for the weekend and each of them does their own thing and raises funds for us. This year was the third year of it. Each year, it's just kinda gotten bigger and better.”

“This year it hit $100,000, you know, which has always been my dream for this event: To get to six figures. We had a bundle of 20 games, all from, kind of, like, small indie studios…It was just a really feel good, happy, bubbly kinda weekend, you know? And, yeah, it's definitely my favorite.”

Stallings added that they “typically get games that are less than two years old [and have] either positive or overwhelmingly positive ratings on, like, Steam and those kinds of places. This year, the inventory was 2,500” game codes per title.

They limit this number so it’s “not such a big ask that a studio feels like it's going to impact, you know, their sales cycle or the life cycle of the game.”

I brought it back around to the kids.

“Have you found a common why as to, you know, why out of all the things they [wish children] may wish for, video games are, I don't know, a top four category?”

“A lifeline,” said Stallings, without missing a beat. “That's the word I would use for it. It really is something that keeps these kids sane, and entertained, and from despair, when they're going through treatment.”

When you’re in their position, “it's this constant roller coaster of boredom and fear, you know? When you're in a hospital or when you're waiting on treatment and things like that, I would say gaming is a lifeline for a lot of these kids. It really keeps them connected and keeps them from going a little bit into dark places when they otherwise would.”

I noted one of Player Driven’s previous guests, Mark Otero, CEO of Azra Games, told us that he’d escaped into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid growing in the 1970s in South Korea to help “manage some of the suffering” he’d felt at the time.

I got the sense from that conversation that playing “RPGs gave him fuel to keep going in a tough situation in his life…[and] that it kind of saved his life.”

“I'm a lifetime gamer,” Stallings said, nodding.

“My dad owned a coin arcade when I was a kid, you know, one of the first ones around. He would he would lock the doors at night and turn it on to free play for me and my sisters.”

“We had access to, like, the original Pole Position cabinet and Ms. Pac Man, and all that kind of stuff. It was a kid's dream.”

“I didn't know it at the time, but there are moments in time where, like, some of my role models, you know, like, powerful female figures, things like that, I only found in gaming, you know?”

“I think gaming can be a lot of things to a lot of people, but I don't think it's an exaggeration when it said, sometimes, it saves lives.”

That’s well said and rings true. We’ll leave it there—but come back next week for the conclusion of our excellent conversation about big hearts and gaming with Make-A-Wish’s April Stallings.