socialmedian: Zynga’s FarmVille gamers donate to Haiti’s poor via virtual goods

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Zynga’s FarmVille gamers donate to Haiti’s poor via virtual goods

Source: VentureBeat

Oct 20, 2009

Summary

The capacity to do good with a video game is a fledgling concept. It has been around for a while, but has never been executed in an outstanding way. Zynga, the hot developer of social games on Facebook, is the latest to give it a shot. And the company thinks it has found a way to do a lot of good in a short amount of time with the idea.

The 56 million users of Zynga’s most popular game, FarmVille, have donated $487,500 toward the welfare of children in Haiti in the past three weeks. The “Sweet Seeds for Haiti” program is an early step in Zynga’s effort to promote what it calls “social goods.” With the program, Zynga players can purchase virtual items as part of the game play within the FarmVille game, where players buy and sell virtual goods as they tend their own virtual farms.

With this program, players can buy items that lead directly to donations. In the game, players tend to their farms by purchasing harvesting equipment such as tractors and combines. With Sweet Seeds, users buy sweet potato seeds with their virtual currency, which they earn in the game or

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