Gaming for good: are slacker gamers the new super-philanthropists?

• Author: Beato, Greg

In the old days, you couldn't combat global hunger just by buying an imaginary vegetable. Back then, if you wanted to make a trivial but virtuous gesture of pop-culture consumerism you had to make a trip to Tower Records and purchase a copy of "Do They Know It's Christmas?" or "We Are the World." Casual philanthropy required at least some effort.

Today, it's a different story. Log in to FarmVille, shell out for some cartoon corn seeds that you can plant in your virtual field, and a genuine 3D family in Haiti may get a chicken, goat, or micro-loan from one of several nonprofit organizations that are partnering with FarmVille developer Zynga.

Zynga, the San Francisco-based game developer that popularized social gaming on Facebook in 2007 with Texas Flold 'Em Poker, introduced its first in-game charitable campaign in FarmVille in 2009. Since then, the company has run nearly 150 of the fundraisers in such games as FarmVille 2, ChefVille, and Half the Sky: The Game. Some of the campaigns have been organized around events, such as World Water Day. Others arose in response to natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan.

Over the course of five years, Zynga players have contributed more than $18 million to approximately yo nonprofit organizations around the world. The company established an independent nonprofit called Zynga.org in 2012 to further promote its altruistic endeavors.

Zynga's players aren't exactly close to knocking Bill Gates or Larry Ellison from The Chronicle of Philanthropy's top CO donors list yet, but $18 million is still around $18 million more than anyone ever suspected gamers might give to charity in the course of their play. And what makes this kind of philanthropy worth watching isn't the amounts being raised: It's the way video games are repositioning philanthropy into an extremely casual, extremely public consumer habit.

In recent years, a number of writers have provided a persuasive counter-narrative to the idea that video games are little more than operant conditioning for future mass murderers. In his 2006 book Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson points out that many games are incredibly demanding endeavors that promote problem-solving, decision making, persistence, empiricism, and other desirable traits and habits of mind.

In her 2011 book Reality Is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that hardcore gamers invest so much time into their alternate environments not because they are disaffected...