In Game On: Is your nonprofit ready to play? Jaime discussed why games were effective tools to motivate people, how the careful structure of games work, and offered some suggestions on what areas games as complex systems can be beneficial in a nonprofit or charity. In this follow-up he takes it to the next level by sharing examples of games in action, along with his thoughts on why they’re successful, and also how they can improve.

There is growing awareness that games can be used for change: the best-known organization to do such work is the aptly named Games For Change. Nonprofits often deal with serious and complex issues that some critics think might be trivialized by games, but I’d counter that games are already an important tool in helping people understand complex systems.

Take the popular game SimCity, where players act as city planners crafting residential, commercial, and industrial regions for a virtual population. Very few players have actual urban planning skills, but because the game was crafted in an expert fashion, helping to guide players through basic principles, it was very easy to jump into the action and begin growing and building a functioning metropolis. Along the way, players began having to consider the tough choices involved in creating a livable, successful city — perhaps, causing reflections upon their own city life that wouldn’t occur otherwise.

In the game Survive125, created by the poverty-fighting coalition Live58, players are placed in the shoes of Divya Patel, a brick maker in India trying to raise a family while living in extreme poverty. With just $1.25 a day, players are asked to make difficult choices that would be common for women like Divya, such as whether to keep her 12-year-old daughter in school or to send her daughter to work in a potentially dangerous area.

As players realize the situations that confront Divya — like how getting ill can place families in dire financial straits — the game presents statistics to reinforce the game’s concept as well as examples of how charitable work can be done, such as building of wells for clean water and the introduction of microloans.

The game’s intensity increases as it tracks the number of days the player can survive and the amount of money the player has: the former encourages players by providing a goal to continue playing, while the latter adds tension as it requires players to manage their finances carefully.

The game is simple in execution, lasting a mere 10 minutes, yet it is highly effective because it asks players to consider how others live and to weigh the complexities of their actions.

As an instructive counterpoint, albeit one with good intentions, there is the quiz game Battle For The Bay. Battle was created to bring awareness to environmental shifts to the San Francisco Bay. The game engages players by having them answer trivia questions about San Francisco. Game show-style games aren’t per se poor choices to share an organization’s message, but as I warned in the first part of this series, just because something is called a game doesn’t necessarily make it fun or engaging.

The game’s intent is to educate players about environmental damage but a few areas make the game’s design not as successful as possible. The game attempts to sugarcoat the message and intent by inserting pop culture questions, in addition to those about the Bay. This becomes a problem, however, when simple pop culture questions about, say, Clarence Creedwater Revival, jar with the much harder environmental questions, such as about the amount of shoreline. This wavering difficulty lowers engagement as players can find it “unfair.”

What’s also problematic is that the game sets players up as a game about proficiency — how well you can answer questions — set against a ticking clock, rather than with a goal of learning more about the environment. Thus, players will likely guess on questions they don’t know without necessarily stopping to absorb the content, pressured by the clock. Two better strategies would have been to either have players learn about the Bay first, then test their knowledge, or remove the ticking clock so that players would have more time to absorb the correct answers.

Now, let’s move on to a game that isn’t as directly tied to one cause as Survive125 or Battle of the Bay: WeTopia takes a different approach to incorporating charities and nonprofits into the game. Rather than a focus on player awareness about why the causes are necessary, the game assumes the player’s acceptance of this, instead framing the game as a chance to be philanthropic.

Over the past few years, a new genre of games called social games has sprung up and introduced games to a much broader audience. If you’ve ever heard of FarmVille, that’s probably the most well-known social game. Social games guide players to interact with others, often through a social network. In social games, players are given simple tasks that hinge mostly on resource management rather than skill. In FarmVille, players can compare the farms they have built and help out on one another’s farms. Similarly, WeTopia players can connect with any Facebook friends also on WeTopia to visit their cities. Players must know other people playing the game or else are forced to pay a fee (through purchasing Facebook credits) to finish quests.

In WeTopia, which is free to play and accessible to anyone with a Facebook account, players populate a town with shops, grow crops, and accrue something called “Joy” that can be given as a donation to participating charities. As with most social games, players cannot lose per se in WeTopia. They can run out of resources, however, and must wait for an allotted amount of time for resources to accumulate. Alternatively (and controversially) they can choose to pay real money for virtual goods within the game.

Let me expand on the last point, since it’s important to the game: WeTopia generates revenue through the sale of virtual goods as well as advertisements. WeTopia gives half of the profit made from the game to charities, promising that this is almost at least 20% of revenue. Joy, the virtual currency I previously mentioned, when donated by players becomes a proxy for an actual financial donation.

While I think playing a game can be a useful fundraising tool, there are some obstacles that are worth bringing up. First, the content of the game is weakly or not tied at all to the work being done by the nonprofits and charities involved. The only example of true integration is that players can build a well for Sunspring water and every few hours can click on it to donate some water. Otherwise, charities and nonprofits are sidelined to only when players donate Joy.

This suggests that players, while gaining some awareness of the organizations involved, will have a lower engagement than, for example, with Survive125. I played the game for more than 20 hours to test what a typical experience might be like and while I knew generally where my Joy was going (children in Haiti, books for schools) the game would have left a stronger impact if within the game I had felt a sense of accomplishment tied to the charities.

In addition, it is important when using a game to fundraise that organizations carefully consider how the money is raised. In WeTopia, the game’s main engine is a series of quests for players to complete. In the beginning, quests are used to help players understand the game and can be accomplished by solely playing the game. As the game continues, however, the quests become dependent on actions outside of the game itself.

Clearly, this tactic is used to increase the number of players in the game (WeTopia prompts you to invite Facebook friends not already playing the game) and to generate income. As quests make increasingly absurd demands, such as connecting with 15 friends in the game or else paying around $5 to complete a task, it becomes evident then that the goal of the game is to make WeTopia money, and this seemingly conflicts with the message of playing for good.

Remember, games are systems that can guide behaviour. At the same time, players aren’t powerless in terms of whether or not to accept that behaviour. While not every player will come with a background in game design, people are good judges of when something ceases being enjoyable. According to traffic tracking application AppData, WeTopia currently has 430,000 monthly active users and 70,000 daily active users, down half since it launched earlier this year. The sharp decline in WeTopia players suggests that after hitting the same plateau I hit, where the game guided players towards paying to continue, many realized the game wasn’t worth the price and left.

One important key message to remember is that no game lives in isolation. Just as many campaigns for nonprofits compete for the public’s attention, so it is with games. While players may find a philanthropic slant an added bonus to a game, these games must still compete against the many, many games currently available. For future versions of WeTopia, I expect the game developers to pull back on quests that require connecting with other users or spending money, or else continue to watch as users flock to other (not necessarily philanthropic-based) games.

As games become more culturally accepted and played by broader swaths of the population, it increasingly makes sense to use them as part of an awareness campaign. The purpose of this piece has been to help you think critically about how games can be used to help charities and nonprofits spread awareness, increase engagement, and even fundraise. While games are a powerful and accessible tool, they require considerable time, money, and effort to build and thus should be done with care.

Jaime Woo is a Toronto-based writer, activist, game designer, and co-founder of the Gamercamp festival.