Depending on which friends I’m playing with, and who we’re playing against, Fortnite and I have a bitter sweet relationship. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s basically a video game version of Hunger Games where my friends and I enter a video game world and spend the next 20 minutes trying to eliminate every other player in the game. It can be frustrating, but also rewarding when you win.

Fortnite often hosts tournaments that can sometimes earn players up to $3 million dollars when they win. This would be an incredible opportunity to earn some real money for charity, however, I have yet to even come close to winning any of the tournaments I’ve competed in, even for small dollars.

There are some games that make it much easier to donate. For example Forza (a racing game which I also love) has created races that allow players to race for Microsoft points which then go to charity. The charities can turn these points into money and gift cards. Overwatch (another team-shooter game) created a $15 skin players could buy that ended up earning almost $13 million for breast cancer.

While I look forward to future events like these coming out again, and with there being pretty much zero chance of winning a Fortnite tournament, in the end I negotiated an agreement with my parents to donate for every elimination my friends and I got, even if we didn’t win.

While I suspect my parents hadn’t anticipated how well we would do, I still think we could have done much better and earned more. Nonetheless, we made $$$ toward cancer research from doing little more than playing a video game.