Playing for Rice

Well, rats. I was going to post about this maddeningly adictive game/good deed after I spent hours with it during the holidays, when my goddaughter introduced me to it. But, I thought perhaps it was too trivial. A post about a videogame? But today on the Huffington Post Dan Brown has beaten me to it: This Videogame Makes You Smarter and Helps the Hungry. Not, of course, that the HuffPo avoids things trivial. Nor, with apologies to Bruce, for that matter, does The Blue Voice.

This is essentially a multiple choice vocabulary game where for every correct word selection twenty grains of rice are donated to The UN World Food Program. Site advertisers whose banners flash across the bottom of the screen with each word choice, pay for the rice. In my most recent bout of FreeRice I noted: Toshiba, iTunes, Virgin Mobile, Sirius Radio, Office Depot and Lego among many others. Between Christmas and New Year's I piled up tens, maybe hundreds (I lost track) of thousands of rice grains playing this game. I am almost anal enough to want to take a bag to Whole Foods and fill it with rice grains, then count up what ten thousand of them looks like in real time. Almost, I said. For a vocabulary geek like me, the big fun of this game is seeing what vocabulary level you can attain as you play, and try to beat your former personal best. A knowledge of French is extremely helpful here, as many of the words are taken from that language. Give it a go, I guarantee it's the most fun way to feel morally superior you're likely to find any time soon.

Technorati Tags: Dan Brown, freerice, Huffington Post, UN World Food Program, vocabulary

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