Gaming for Good

Pierce Burnett developed an app to raise funds for SCI. He hopes it will inspire others to harness opportunities to help charities.

Online gamers are prepared to pay real money for virtual objects, a concept some people find difficult to understand. Some, like Pierce Burnett, see this as an incredible opportunity and want to play a part in developing the huge altruistic potential video games can offer.

Pierce Burnett decided to try his hand creating an app, crafting a game with charitable giving at its core. He wanted to develop a game that would support a charity rather than a straight ask for a donation. "Droplet" is the result. 

Self-taught, it took Pierce a year to complete the game design and a few months more to obtain approval for sale in the Android Google play store. Apple app store approval took a little longer and finally came through on 25 March 2015.

Including charity as a core component of the game was more challenging that Pierce anticipated. What spurred him on, why didn’t he throw in the towel, and why did he choose SCI to benefit from his project?

“It was the culmination of four years of trying to figure out how best to donate to SCI and how to repay a debt. I heard about SCI in my first year of university when my roommate introduced me to the parasite schistosomiasis, how prevalent it is, and the enormous effect this impossible to pronounce disease has on developing nations. Chronic fatigue, just one of the symptoms, leads to a fall in school attendance and attainment, children dropping out, and decreased chances of earning a livelihood. My roommate then told me about his fundraising initiative to convince everyone in the dorm to donate any spare change they had throughout the rest of the academic year to pay to deworm children in Africa. He ended up collecting $200. Unfortunately, I came on hard times and had to take $100 from the donation money. I naturally felt guilty taking from a worse-off group of people. I wanted to repay him as soon as I was able, but I also wanted to help him spread both word of the charity and create new fundraising channels to collect donations from. I ended up repaying him my sophomore year, but I still had no idea how I could help to spread the word about SCI. Then the opportunity of creating a video game that generates money for SCI presented itself” (Pierce Burnett).

Droplet raises money for SCI in two distinct ways. If you download the ‘free version’, any time you click on an irritating advert a nominal amount is paid to Pierce, approx. 5¢/3p, of which 50% goes straight to SCI. If you download the paid version, 99¢ in the US and 79p in UK, 50% goes straight to SCI!  Every penny counts! Remember, for just 50p SCI can treat and protect a child for a year against schistosomiasis and intestinal worms.  So, show your support for SCI and let’s see how many treatments Droplet can make possible in 2015.  The app can be downloaded from Android Google play store and the Apple app store.

At SCI we like supporting proof of concept initiatives. If the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hadn’t given us the funding to enable SCI to prove the concept that deworming is possible on a national scale, cost effective and has a huge impact on development, millions of children and at risk adults across Africa would be in much worse health today. Droplet is an opportunity to demonstrate to other developers that doing social good is possible while also making a living. It also provides a fantastic and novel new source of income for SCI.

“I really want to set an example and encourage more video games to incorporate an element of social good. Games are an extremely powerful medium touching the lives of millions of people. Games incorporating charity at their core will increase awareness and support for worthwhile causes” (Pierce Burnett).