Already know what Desert Bus For Hope is? Awesome, you can skip this post. It's going on right now, go give those guys a few bucks.
For the rest of you, if you've been reading about video games online for any significant length of time, you may well have heard of Desert Bus, the most (in)famous part of Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors minigame collection on Sega CD. If you haven't (and didn't immediately go read the Wikipedia page I just linked), here's the important bit:
The objective of the game is to drive a bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada in real time at a maximum speed of 45mph. The feat requires 8 hours of continuous play to complete, since the game cannot be paused. The bus contains no passengers, and there is no scenery or other traffic on the road. The bus veers to the right slightly; as a result, it is impossible to tape down a button to go do something else and have the game end properly. If the bus veers off the road it will stall and be towed back to Tucson, also in real time. If the player makes it to Las Vegas, they will score exactly one point. The player then gets the option to make the return trip to Tucson—for another point (a decision they must make in a few seconds or the game ends). Players may continue to make trips and score points as long as their endurance holds out. Some players who have completed the trip have also noted that, although the scenery never changes, a bug splats on the windscreen about five hours through the first trip, and on the return trip the light does fade, with differences at dusk, and later a pitch black road where the player is guided only with headlights.
It looks like this:
Obviously, it's a joke - a prank played on the player by a notorious set of tricksters. Nobody in their right mind who wasn't being paid to do it would sit for hours at a stretch, staring at an endless desert scrolling by their screen as they kept a virtual bus on an empty virtual road, right?
Well, as it turns out, torturing yourself is a pretty swell way to raise a bunch of money for charity.
The fine folks over at LoadingReadyRun (Canadian comedy troupe putting nerdy hilarity online since 2003) got the idea a couple of years ago to see if they could convince people to sponsor them to play Desert Bus, the way "normal" folks might get sponsored to run a marathon or dance all night in a gym somewhere for charity. All donations would go to Child's Play, which I won't describe in great detail right now but probably will eventually because it's amazing and inspiring. The more people donated, the longer they would play, 4 of them switching off, 24 hours a day until the money stopped. Thus began "Desert Bus For Hope."
The punchline: Year 1, they played for 4 days, 12 hours, and raised over $22,000. Year 2, they played for 5 days, 5 hours, and raised over $70,000. That's nearly $100,000 of charity for children's hospitals raised by a few arguably crazy Canadians with a website sitting around playing a game that barely even qualifies as a game. It's ridiculous, and sort of stupid, and awesome.
As I said at the top, Year 3 is currently in progress. They've been playing for about 1.5 days right now, and have raised about $28,500. Go check this thing out, and if you have the available income, make a donation of whatever size you're comfortable with. These guys may be nuts, but I can tell you firsthand that Child's Play is a worthy cause, and what they're doing is obviously just crazy enough to work.