Word Games and World Changes

I am a sucker for a good word game. Though I’ve never really liked Scrabble, I did enjoy studying for the vocabulary part of the GRE’s. Now that I’ve admitted this and will be forever hip and popular, let me use my new found social capital to point you all at a word game that applies the simple exponential logic of the web to turn your idle game playing into food.
It’s called Free Rice.

Set up like the simplest part of the vocab section of SAT’s or GRE’s you’re given a word and 3 options for it’s meaning. Pick the right answer, and 10 grains of rice are added to your bowl. This is literal rice, purchased with the ad revenue from the companies supporting the site with their banners beneath the game, and the rice is bought from local farmers and distributed by the UN food program. When you get one wrong you don’t lose the rice (thank god, or I’d go crazy with guilt) and in just 1 month it’s raised enough to feed 50 000 people for one day. In one month. It’s amazing. I’ve added it to my browser tool bar and I play whenever I’m between things or waiting for something to load, and man it’s nice to have a small way to help with problems that seem enormous and far away. This is a direct application of the possible good in advertising I think, plus getting into the wealth of words will help you be a better writer and artist generally, I suspect, as new words (and games!) have the power to stretch our view of what is and has been imaginable… might even help you be a better terpsichorean, who knows!