Blog: I Was a GDQ Prize Winner
Originally written March 17, 2025
Games Done Quick is a venerable series of biannual charity marathons, designed to convince Gamers to give money to sundry causes under the guise of "speed" "running."
One way they do this is by offering prizes. How this is done is that they have segments between games where somebody presents a bunch of doohickeys, tchotchkes, and geegaws (often handcrafted), and announces the minimum donation required to be put in the drawing for the prize. Each event, there are tens of thousands of donators, but only a few dozen prizes overall. You don't expect to win anything when you donate, but the idea is that the thought that perhaps you might will sway you into donating.
(For state-specific anti-gambling regulatory reasons, there is another way to enter these drawing without donating, which entails doing something ridiculous like sending a handwritten postcard to a specific address or something (I haven't read the fine print in a good long while).)
Most prize segments are hosted by some weird gremlin named "Sent." This isn't really a relevant detail, except that I like Sent, and also he's been like promoted to head of some other internal committee so we might not ever see him again. v_v;
ANYHOW, on to the actual story:
This last December I got sent an email from Sent (the aforementioned GDQ Prizegremlin and Prizemaster). The email said that I won a prize! Apparently I had donated sometime during SGDQ 2024 with an amount of money that surpassed the donation threshold --- it was only surprising in that I had forgotten most of this five-and-a-half months later:
A needle-felt doll? That sounds awesome!
Judging by the fact that I had only a week-long window to claim it, I suppose that 20 or so people prior to me passed up the opportunity to take it (or maybe they just missed the email). As for myself, I only saw this email on the last possible day to claim it, so I snagged it without question.
Today, it finally arrived (yes I am actually writing an article for this website the day something happened okay):
The stand was included with the doll, but other than the packing material there was nothing else in the box (not even a note).
It’s a very nicely made doll – the eyes are especially impressive (to someone with no familiarity with needle felt). It has a skeleton inside so it’s posable. He’s great.
Here's a picture of him next to some other small plush dolls I have, for scale:
(oh shucks I just realized that I never wrote a making-of article about when I made a fumo plush of my beautiful self)
Anyhow, I know nothing about BG3 or this “Astarion” character, but when I shared this with some other friends this was the first response I got:
This has been my GDQ Prizewinner Experience. Thanks for reading.