Games that do good

This Folding@Home ruckus has got me thinking. Are there any games out there that do good as you play them?

I know about games like Food Force, of course, but I'm wondering whether people in rich countries could somehow contribute their avatarpower to help people or animals or other good causes. The folding@home idea is such a good one, I think. Makes you feel like you're giving back a bit, even if it is only a very tiny bit (shame about the PR bickering, urgh).

Can you donate WoW gold to charity? Can you do your daily grind in a mine that can be converted into physical goods? Are there games or game mechanics that could be used to fund-raise or awareness-raise?

I'm sure there are plenty of examples within Second Life, and probably all over the place, it's such a broad question. I'd like to see more games and virtual worlds being designed with some sort of 'give-back' mechanism in place from the start though, that's for sure. Sony had the right idea, and I hope many, many more copy them.

Comments

[Hanford]

Depending on your definition of good, here's a few productive games:

The Google Image Labeler game (where you label images in a time limit, and score points, but it improves google's image search):

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/

Askville, where you help out real people by answering their questions and score "quest coins" in the process:

http://askville.amazon.com/askville/Index.do#answers

[Jimmy]

Luis Von Ahn (the pioneer of human computation) has a pretty accessible magazine article on "games with a purpose" -- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ieee-gwap.pdf

(The Google Image Labeler is a less entertaining version of his ESP game.)

A lot of researchers are excited about human computation these days, so it should show up in a bunch of interesting applications.

[mikej]

There's also an excellent presentation by Luis on Google Video that covers some of his games/ideas:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143

[Emily]

Don't forget SETI@home from a few years back.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

[jason]

Don't forget Jane's World Without Oil project.

http://worldwithoutoil.org/