Child's Play

Child's Play

"Gamers give back."

Child's Play is a charity that aids children's hospitals in acquiring gaming equipment for the children at the hospital. It is funded entirely on cash donations or purchases, and is tax deductible. The Child's Play charity is entirely non-profit, though they do spend 2-3% of the donations on such things as shipping, etc.

Direct donations of cash through PayPal are readily accepted, and quite appreciated; however, there is also the option to buy an item for the hospital. The hospitals write up a wishlist, and when it is finished, doners may buy the item on Amazonand have it sent to the hospital, through Child's Play.

The site was announced on November 24, 2003, by the creators of the popular Penny Arcade webcomic, with the intentions to aid the children in hospitals and to reverse the bad public image of videogaming. The original post by "Gabe" (aka Mike Krahulik) can be found here.

Within the first month of kick-off, the charity raised about $250,000; overall, Child's Play has earned $6.7 million for various children's hospitals around the world, in such locations as U.S., Canada, New Zealand, and England. If you want to contribute to this growing charity that supports not just one, but two causes, at once, check out Child's Play!

The Fuzz Academy

The Fuzz Academy

"Environmentally friendly"

The Fuzz Academy is a networking site that combines simple, fun games along with valuable lessons and intellectual stimulus to create a worthy site that also happens to aid environmental causes and charities. The Fuzz Academy, or "FA" as some of its users call it, donates to several strong charities focused on saving the environment.

Fuzz Academy allows users to create an account and a personal pet, or 'cadet'. The cadets can be dressed up with various items that are bought with hairballs (the site's currency). Hairballs are earned by playing games, or showing some love to other cadets. Special, more intricately designed items are available for premium members, who spend real currency on the game. However, most items are available to normal users as well.

The site functions largely like the popular Neopets, in which the user has a social network profile, dressed up pets, and plays games for currency. What separates Fuzz Academy from your everyday pet site is that it donates to causes such as, according to their About Us page, the Nature Conservancy's Adopt-An-Acre, Plant A Billion Trees, the ASPCA, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Interested in helping one of those environmental charities yourself? You can do so, just by playing some games over at The Fuzz Academy!

GamesThatGive - You Play. We Give. No Catch.

GamesThatGive

"You play. We give. No catch."

GamesThatGive is another very intriguing site that utilizes advertisement money to give to causes, much like FreeRice and The Hunger Site. Unlike those two sites, though, GamesThatGive is oriented around causes other than food, such as education, veterans, etc., as well as games, as the title gets across quite well.

How you earn money for the available causes is by playing games. You can bring up such games as Solitaire, Gems, FreeCell, and Bubble Burst, in your browser. You play these games, as sponsored by select advertisers, and the cause gets money for the time you spent playing (and, thus, the time you spent viewing the ads of the sponsors).

GamesThatGive does this by changing the background of your game to one of the select advertisers (such as Dominos Pizza or Propel Fitness Water), which you will view the entire time you play the game. For the amount of time you are playing, you earn the GamesThatGive site advertisement money. They, in turn, send a portion of the money earned to the cause you selected (you may permanently select a cause by selecting one here, if you are signed in).

While this sounds like a much more fun alternative to what some may consider dull trivia or clicking a button once a day, it's also good to note something very important. GamesThatGive only donates '70% of... ad revenue' to the charity you chose, which means they do make a profit instead of donating the full amount earned.

However, the selection of charities is actually quite respectable; there are currently 14 to choose from. Here is a list of available charities to select on the site:

The Wilderness Society
United Way
Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
City Year
Breast Cancer Network of Strength
Unicef
ACCESS
Jumpstart
American Heart Association
Mercy Corps
ServiceNation
Ronald McDonald House Charities
Feeding America
DoSomething.org

If you're the kind of person who takes pleasure from doing something you enjoy and helping the world at the same time (and who isn't?), then get on over to start a game and help a cause: GamesThatGive.