FreeRice.com

[Tatar Khan]

I was not sure where to stick it and decided that this would be the best place

Free Rice from games for Windows magazine

Politically active, financially reactive, and creatively proactive, John Breen has been struggling to do something about world hunger for the past 20 years. In January of 2007, he started Poverty.com to educate the well-fed Internet masses about the need for international action to feed the 850 million people worldwide without enough to eat.

By the spring of 2007, the self-employed computer programmer from Bloomington, IN faced a different kind of struggle: His son wouldn't study for his SATs. "He hated studying vocabulary," explains Breen, "like normal people, including me."

Killing two birds with one stone, Breen devised FreeRice.com, a humble online vocabulary game with the not-so-humble goal of ending world hunger.

In an era of increasingly sophisticated browser-based games, FreeRice.com is anachronistic. Simple and silent, the site features the game itself, a rotating banner ad, and virtually nothing else. The rules are as simple as the layout: You are presented with a word and four possible definitions. Choose the correct answer, and the quiz becomes harder--and FreeRice.com donates 20 grains of rice to feed the hungry, primarily refugees in Bangladesh.

It sounds simple, even simple-minded, so it's hard to imagine such a game could actually make a difference. But in the four months since FreeRice.com went live, more than 17 billion grains of rice have been distributed--enough to feed 850,000 people for a day. As the days grew shorter in 2007, FreeRice.com spread across the Internet like a philanthropic LOLcat, propelled by early notice on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and a Facebook support group that garnered 85,000 members. FreeRice.com's traffic continues to grow. Traffic brings advertisers. Advertisers keep the rice flowing.

FreeRice.com is addictive for the same reasons most good games are: It's challenging, it rewards success with progressive difficulty, and it empowers players. "It's a lucky combination. I didn't think the vocabulary would be fun. I kind of just settled on it. It turns out people just got addicted to it, grinding the levels," Breen says, with no apparent knowledge that the word "grind" has a special entry in the lexicon of gamer hell.

Breen did more than just make a word game. He convinced the United Nations World Food Programme--the world's largest humanitarian organization, with a $2.8 billion relief budget--to partner with him. Jennifer Parmelee, the public affairs officer at the WFP, says FreeRice.com isn't really all that much about the rice. "The gift that John Breen has given us, which in a way outshines any amount of money, is that of public awareness," she says. "This is an invisible issue."

But for the 500,000 people a day who mitigate staff-meeting boredom with FreeRice.com instead of FreeCell, the issue is just a little less invisible. And for the thousands of refugees in Bangladesh who are living on John Breen's rice, the world is just a little less cruel.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Ziff Davis Media Inc.

I think we all should give this a try, since it is for a good cause.

[Andrew]

Saw this back when it was released (summer 2007?).

Was interesting. But I wasn't sure about the money being donated. I guess I'm cynical.

Used it for about 10 minutes and havn't used it since.

[Acriku]

That was addicting for a while ;)

YOUR BEST LEVEL: 35

You have now donated

2760 grains of rice.

i feel special :P

[Egeides]

Well I'm giving a try. It feels like giving while being sure I won't have to pay a thing. But if some company's money is transferred to bet on buying my time, why not. And it's "heart-warming" to see that some anonymous individuals pay for it as well.

Some years ago, I was going on some "curehunger.com" website, especially while stuff loaded. It got better.

[Dunenewt]

[coor=lightblue]There was this link on the 'World Hunger' site, which claimed that if you clicked it, one cup of grain would be donated to people in Africa.  I was never sure if it was telling the truth.