October 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

By Tom Kessler
Green Right Now

Adam Archer thinks the world would be a much better place if people would only spend more time playing games on their computers and mobile phones. And he may just be right.

Archer, the founder and CEO of GamesThatGive, has a simple but compelling proposition: You sign on to play casual games on the site, designate a charity you want to support, and then sit back and have 70 percent of the revenue from advertising on those games go to your charity.

He calls the concept “guiltless gaming” and says it can get a child in Africa vaccinated against Polio, teach a low-income child to read, or help feed a family of four. Simply by playing online games, you end up making a difference in the world.

The GamesThatGive site is only a couple of months old, but has attracted 4,000 registered users and so far has raised almost $2,500 for charities. Leading brands such as Dominos Pizza, Pepsi, and Mastercard have signed on as charter advertisers.

Among the charities you can chose to support are Feeding America, the United Way, the US Fund for UNICEF, DoSomething, and about a dozen others. Archer said they are limiting the number of charities they will support in the early stages so they can raise a meaningful amount of aid for each, and not dilute their impact.

Archer first saw the need for something like this after graduating from college and spending two years backpacking around the world. He saw people who were barely subsisting and who lived in deplorable conditions.

“I came back to the States and this culture shock ensued. I started to notice all the opportunity and privilege here,” Archer said. “After backpacking through Africa for eight months, I actually flew back from Johannesburg into Las Vegas . It was like going through a time machine and literally people were throwing away money. I was like: There ought to be a way get people to give some of that money to the people I saw (who were less fortunate).”

After working a few years at Microsoft and Apple, Archer began thinking about connecting technology to the greater human needs he had witnessed.

“I started going around and asking people why they didn’t do more to help people who were less fortunate and I kept getting the same answer. Everybody said, ‘Well, I actually wish I was doing more.’ If you pressed them they would say, ‘I don’t have time’ or ‘I don’t have the money’ or ‘I don’t know how to help.’ So I started thinking about the ways we could use new technologies coming with mobile devices and the Internet and thinking about existing behavior.”

About a year and a half ago, he finally arrived at the solution: Let people play games and have fun and marry that with advertising that supports leading charities.

“It’s pretty simple,” he said. “The better you do at these games, the longer you play, the more you donate. There’s 145 million casual gamers in the US alone and they play on average over 5 hours a week, so that’s more (time) than magazines or newspapers, that’s more than they’re watching online video, that’s even more than they’re spending on social networking sites.

“But you’ve got to make it fun, you’ve got to make it easy, you’ve got to use technology and you’ve got to get people to tell their friends – and that’s games.”

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media