The Future Of Social Change Is...Video Games?

While it sounds crazy, there is some early evidence to suggest that video games may provide a new avenue for raising awareness and engagement. The $800,000 Facebook-based game Farmville raised for charity by selling virtual seeds in just two weeks should be enough for all of us to take notice.

One of the great problems nonprofits face is the "preaching to the choir" effect, in which organizations harness a few diehard supporters to great magnitude, but they're never really able to captivate the masses and push toward any sort of broader tipping points.

One of the greatest points of excitement around the expanded power of user generated content and social distribution channels like Facebook and Twitter is that they make it easier for active individual change agents to share their passions with their peers. This is definitely happening, and is immensely exciting. Still, the process of social self-selection still predisposes the most engaged to know and communicate with, well, the other most engaged, and that leaves a whole lot of people - many of whom would care if they don't already and all of whom have talents to contribute to whatever they do care about - out of the picture.

Which is one of the reasons that there is some buzz and excitement around the notion that video games may be an amazing new channel for capturing attention for social good.

Time Magazine has just published a piece online called "Can Video Games Save The World?" that tells a few interesting stories about how video games and social change have come together, as with 'Darfur is Dying,' a controversial but extremely well-publicized game designed to raise awareness about the violence in Sudan, and at the same time, better familarize players with complicated issues like international law.

The piece also dives briefly into what seems to me an even more relevant story, which is the explosion of gaming as an everyday pastime, and particularly the emergence of virtual worlds driven by social networks as a new platform for awareness and philanthropy.

One of the unexpected things about the iPhone was how quickly it became one of the top gaming platforms in the world. With 40+ million units being sold a year (a roughly equivalent number to Nintendo systems) and thousands upon thousands of titles (compared to hundreds for the major video game systems), the iPhone has delivered gaming back to the masses.

At the same time, social networks - particularly Facebook - have made massive multiplayer worlds a normal thing, rather than something on the fringe or relegated to the realm of the geek. Zynga, the leading social gaming company, has 50+ million daily users and has raised something like $220 million in venture capital.

Indeed, Zynga's experimentation with embedded philanthropy in their Farmville game is one of the leading indicators of the power of social gaming to get causes in front of new audiences. Farmville is a virtual world where gamers are constantly upgrading their properties with purchased virtual goods. Last year, they tried selling a special type of sweet potato seed and promised gamers that 50% of the revenue would go to two charities in Haiti.

Well, in just two weeks sales of the seed raised over $800,000 - which is over a million by now. Let's put that in some perspective. Around the same time, a consortium of foundations and online giving platforms were sponsoring America's Giving Challenge, which put up almost $250,000 in bounty for nonprofits to engage their supporters. In a month, almost 8,000 competing nonprofits raised a total of just over $2 million. One of the biggest pushes in our field basically had the same level of return as releasing a virtual freaking seed.

If that doesn't raise some eyebrows, it should.

But of course, the jump from gaming to good is not always an easy one. The thing that worries me most is that, in the world of video games, every action has a predictable reaction. When you learn enough, you can assemble the pieces in a way that you win, every time. Life is the exact opposite. You can have everything in order, all the pieces assembled and still fall flat. This is especially true in the difficult world of doing good.

I worry a bit that for those whose first taste of good is this sort of video game embedded philanthropy, they will feel like their experience of having contributed is good enough. That the input of buying a charitable good equals an output of feeling and having done good, and that is that. Of course where the real opportunity lies is in the conversion of those passive supporters to active users. That may be a great place for creative nonprofits to focus next.

(Photo: FarmvilleFreak.com)