It will be hard to outdo Brandon Balan this Christmas.
The St. Albert resident has already built three computers from donated used parts. These gaming “rigs,” some as large as a medium-sized dog, and others with brightly lit internals, can play graphic-intensive video games. Balan said he hopes to build even more before Christmas.
It’s all part of a project Balan calls “Rigz4Kids.” He donates the computers to families that could use some extra support during the holidays.
The project started when Balan ditched his gaming laptop and decided to build a more powerful desktop gaming rig for himself. Soon he amassed a collection of PC fragments including graphics cards, CPUs and hard drives. A hobby had turned into a habit.
“I was just looking for projects where I could do something that gave to the community and not get in trouble from my wife for tinkering too much because it’s for charity,” he said.
Balan’s love for technology and computers began when he was a kid. He remembers that an uncle with whom he was particularly close would hire him to do odd jobs and then pay him in computer parts. The same uncle helped him build his first gaming PC.
“Then I grew into an adult and I kind of lost it,” he said. “But here we are now, Rigs4Kids is going into its third year.”
When he started the project in 2021, Balan was working at Suncor in Fort McMurray, where a local donated a bunch of used parts for Balan to tinker with.
He built two computers, which went to kids in Fort McMurray.
“I found out that first year that I kind of made it a little too easy to become a dumping ground for people,” he said.
Since then, he’s been more specific about which parts can be reused for his purposes and which need to find new life elsewhere.
Last holiday season Balan built three computers “complete with beautiful monitors and light-up keyboards and the whole jazz.”
Although the computers are built from older second-hand parts, Balan said they’re still capable of playing newer games. Some can even play certain games released this year.
It also gives kids the chance to try out some modern classics. Balan installs games such as Batman Arkham Night, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and older Assassin’s Creed games on the computers before he gifts them.
He canvasses St. Albert Facebook groups and upcycling pages to find the parts.
When he started this year, he feared he’d already picked over everything St. Albert had to offer. But he’s been receiving more donations than ever.
“This one machine that I’ve got as a donation is really going to bring a smile to some kid’s face, for sure.”
Games as art
Evgeny Kuznetsov is a researcher and PhD student at the University of Alberta who studies the educational and cultural impacts of games as an artistic medium.
He said researchers and education professionals often need justifications for allowing kids access to video games.
“There is this question of whether we should be doing this,” he said. “Maybe we should play more games because they’re good for our brains, they’re good for coordination, they’re good for improving how we orient ourselves in space. And there seems to be evidence for things like that, in very particular circumstances.”
However, Kuznetsov finds these justifications miss the point.
“Do we ask ourselves whether we should give kids more access to music?" he said. "Should kids be reading more literature? This is only a question that we tend to ask about games.”
Video games can be big-budget affairs that dazzle gamers, but they can also be intimate works of art meant to convey ideas and feelings, and even challenge players’ beliefs or deepen their understanding of an issue, he said.
A similar anxiety about youth — particularly young women — being influenced by art and entertainment erupted in the late 18th early 19th centuries, when many girls were reading romance novels.
Unlike books, however, games require technology to play, which can lock people out of the gaming experience, Kuznetsov said.
“Providing more people with access to this art form … is, I think, very valuable and very important.”
