Playing a video game for 57 hours sounds like either heaven or hell, depending on who you are. But when it generates massive online buzz, garnering the attention of a sitting US congresswoman and Hollywood celebrities, and nets a charity for trans kids $340,000, it’s safe to assume you’ve done something good for the world. The person responsible for playing those hours, “Hbomberguy” – real name Harry Brewis, a YouTube essayist – did not set out to get the attention of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chelsea Manning, Mara Wilson and other popular figures. But he did.

When I spoke to Brewis, he was still stunned by the attention but he seemed upbeat and elated by the experience.

Brewis’s YouTube work consists of critical video essays on everything from BBC’s Sherlock to a 45-minute debunking of modern flat-earthers. His channel is one of the more popular ones countering the growing tide of the manosphere and alt-right. He is also a passionate, insightful game critic: he has an hour-long essay on why Fallout 3 is bad, and a shorter one on why Braid is excellent. Along with other insightful, lefty video essay channels such as Shaun, Contrapoints, and Philosophy Tube, Hbomberguy’s choice of topics are not limited to any one genre or medium. Instead, the only consistent part is Brewis himself – or rather his “Hbomberguy” character.

For Brewis, because games often contain the packaged worldviews of their creators, they are an avenue to talk about a range of issues. “It turns out that video games are an important part of a lot of people’s lives,” he says. “They are definitely a part of how I learned to grow up and change as a person. By talking about games in this wider way, adjacent to talking about politics, I do end up accidentally getting people to think about things I couldn’t have done otherwise.”

For last weekend’s stream, he chose Donkey Kong 64 because it’s a game that has haunted him for years, one he spent hours on as a kid but never finished. He chose to donate the proceeds to Mermaids, a UK charity that provides support for transgender and gender-variant children and young people: “Living in Britain, I find the media discussion surrounding this issue to be woefully misinformed,” he says. He was spurred on by Graham Linehan, who helped orchestrate an email campaign that saw Mermaids denied lottery funding late last year. It was partly this publicity, perhaps, that drew attention to Brewis’s fundraising efforts.

Helping him behind the scenes were a range of trans people. Fellow streamer and Twitter personality Casey Explosion was central to the entire operation: managing the server, arranging the chats to get interesting people on, staying up longer than anyone, including Brewis himself – all without being asked. Brewis regards her as the hero of the stream. Speaking to the Escapist, Explosion said: “It felt like the entire internet showed up for trans rights.”

“What I foresaw was we would get three grand max,” says Brewis. “When we got $75,000 and I realised it wasn’t going to stop, and there was still a full day and a half to go, I actually broke down. You can see in the stream, I had to have a moment. I realised we could maybe fund a year of the [Mermaids] project by ourselves and that would make a huge difference. So to me, the event has been more than a success. Success for me would’ve been three grand”.

Brewis didn’t set out to become a lefty pop culture critic, he says. “I started doing this with the intent of having some laughs and getting people thinking about complex issues. Then an inordinate amount of people came to support me and it became the thing I did for a living. I got interested in bits of media I found fun and then one day I woke up and I was a socialist.” He laughs and says: “They tricked me!”

Given how polarised internet discussions around both pop culture and politics have become, Brewis and his fellow leftwing YouTubers’ work is important. When you talk to young men who have begun to challenge the alt-right views that are dominant in some places where gamers gather on the Internet, they will often say that Hbomberguy started to change their minds. Watching his videos, it is easy to be drawn in due to his humour and friendliness. “I try and be as friendly and open to people as possible so people feel safe… How do I welcome into the fold people who would otherwise be my enemy?” he says. “The less condemnatory I am of people, the more of an option I give them.”

Brewis’s extraordinarily successful Donkey Kong stream proves, for him, that there is hope: “There’s way more people out there who care than you’d believe.” As more famous people both within the gaming community and out dropped in to the stream, you could see him struggling to believe what was happening.

“[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez and [Chelsea] Manning attending was lovely and probably the most amazing moment,” he says. “But what really mattered to me was that people in games cared, who I never even realised did. Josh Sawyer who worked on Fallout: New Vegas – that [game] had a gay character in it, which meant a lot to me. Someone who worked on Rock Band or Guitar Hero came on to say ‘I’m looking to help [trans] creators get in to this space’. [Doom creator] John Romero came on!”

“I discovered that so many of my personal heroes in gaming, the thing that I thought had a penchant for the regressive, had always been here. That was the real thing for me.”