Happy new year everyone! We’re continuing our Best of 2012 Series with the top articles on Social Good from last year. From new startups and successful programs, to Gabe Zichermann’s challenges for game designers, 2012 had some very interesting moments for social good gamification:
I see some issues that require immediate attention with the Games for Change world. Principally a rapidly emerging gap between the promise and the track record of socially-oriented gamified interventions. Why, with all the good intentions, is success so fleeting? And what can the high-minded practitioners in the industry do about making it better?
The Following is a Guest Post by Andris Rubins, Managing Director at DDB Latvia The Stockholm School of Economics is a business school in Riga, recognized by the Financial Times to be one of the finest in Europe. Ever since its inception in 1993, the School’s mission has been to facilitate economic growth in Baltics by educating…
In almost all of India, you can go into any village and find cell phone towers. In Juanga, a village of less than 3,000 lives off rice, lentils, and scarce supplies of water, but lives comfortably with their cell phone. Due to the size of the village, running family businesses and keeping strong family ties…
Games can be an effective medium of communicating a social cause to its targeted audience and SGN’s Rescue Reef is a prime example of social gaming done right. Rescue Reef is developed by social game developer SGN and it has recently joined forces with Phillip Cousteau’s nonprofit Earth Echo International. The new partnership has resulted in a…
US college tuition fees have been skyrocketing for the past decade and estimated student debt loans just exceeded over $1 trillion earlier this year. These signs are a cause of concern for higher education students but rest assured, Grantoo is on the case. Co-founded by Dimitri Sillam and Mikhael Naayem, Grantoo is a social gaming…
On September 29th, more than 60,000 attended the Global Citizen Festival to see the likes of Neil Young, The Foo Fighers, and Black Keys to perform and raise awareness for extreme global poverty. Those lucky enough to attend the event may have found themselves paying upwards of $250 for a single ticket but the fact…
First off, we’d like to welcome our newest members to the gamification space: Snoop Dogg, Edward Norton, Sophia Bush, Kristen Bell, Eva Longoria, Jonah Hill, John Legend, and Paul Pierce. They have all taken part in Zynga & American Express’s Words With Friends Celebrity Challenge to donate $500,000 to their favorite charity. Here’s how we…
Want to see Neil Young, The Foo Fighters, and The Black Keys for free at NYC’s Central Park? All you have to do it earn a few points and badges by fighting against poverty! This year’s Global Festival Concert will be taking place on September 29th to help the Global Poverty Project. The date coincides with a U.N….
Today in our Gamification Company Database we have three unique gamified applications to share with you today: TravelSmart Tracker – is a gamified experience focused around creating your own personalized travel infographic to show the health impacts of your traveling. Changers – is a solar company that sells a solar panel bundled with a device to monitor…
What’s the best way to combine eco-awareness, public sector education, and extreme coupon frenzy into one neat package? Why, through gamification, of course! At least, that’s what the good people over at RecycleBank are doing. Because, let’s face it, most people aren’t going to trip over themselves to learn more about composting, for instance. But they might take a…
Hello GCo Readers! Today in our Gamification Company Database we have three unique gamified applications to share with you today: Education Cents – is a financial education site that incentivizes financial literacy for students by offering potential scholarships for completing finance lessons. SPARC520 – is a consumer and enterprise level energy monitoring tool that manages energy consumption…
Hello GCo Readers! Today in our Gamification Company Database we have one up and coming company and two old but classic examples of great gamification. SessionM is HTML5-based platform that adds a lightweight gamification layer to mobile applications that recently raised $20M in Series B funding. The Fun Theory was a contest held by Volkswagen to…
Half the Sky, the bestselling 2009 book by Kristof and WuDunn, sparked a global movement (www.halftheskymovement.org) to address “the central moral challenge of our time” – ending the oppression of women and girls worldwide. The Half the Sky movement is producing a number of big projects to raise awareness for their cause, including educational materials, a four-hour miniseries on…
On day 3 of the Games for Change festival the opening keynote was by James Paul Gee, if you are unfamiliar with the name then I would recommend you read “What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy”. He is a professor at Arizona State University and a well respected researcher in…
