I think this is brilliant, because it combines the best features of both donating and purchasing. You know that the money you give is going to help others who need it; and you also get something directly in return. (In the case of Farmville, you get access to a special crop with particularly lucrative stats, and you also get a special flag so you can show off your generosity to your friends.) This works because the marginal cost of virtual goods is effectively zero, so none of that money is required to compensate the producers, assuming that the fixed costs have been covered.

While Zynga is very much a for-profit company, seeing the effectiveness of their charity drive got me thinking about what it would take to create a game that was specifically designed to encourage people to maximize donations to a charitable cause. I think it would tap into a lot of the same traits that I discussed in my post about Farmville’s psychological hooks, but in a way that ties in-game rewards to a specific real-life behavior: that of donating money.

Let’s take the example of Donors Choose. Since they focus on primary and secondary education, if I were creating a game for them I would base it around a simulation of a school. Like Zynga’s games, my game would be tapped into some social platform like Facebook, to make it easy for people to “visit” and share with their friends. (The ability to easily check out other people’s performance is crucial; the competition and “showing off” that result are the hook upon which much of the desired behavior hangs.)

Maybe you start out in a one-room schoolhouse, with 10 students. You are given a teacherlike avatar that you can customize to look like yourself, to create a sense of ownership, and your goal in the game is to make your school a success.

The main aspect of the game is this: as you give money to various projects through Donors Choose, you get more students in your school, and you also get points that you can spend on virtual goods related to different subject areas.

So, for example, if you donate $100 to a science project, you get 1000 points that you can spend on installing a virtual science lab in your virtual school and buying things like awesome robots, model rockets, telescopes, and so on. If you donate $100 to an English project, you can buy fancy bookcases, statues of Shakespeare, comfy chairs to read in, and so on. (All very cutely and appealingly drawn, of course.) Basically, every dollar that you donate allows you to make your virtual school more and more luxe. (Think Harvard + Hogwarts + a sci-fi novel.)

This makes it very easy to show off your generosity to others, just like Farmville’s special Haiti flag does. And since we know that looking good to other people is one of the main reasons people donate, this should tap into that urge to show off, to appear generous, to make yourself look good. (While benefiting real people along the way, of course.)

Second, your school gets graded in all of these different areas, which roll up into an overall grade for you, the teacher. You start out with an F, and as you enhance different areas of your school, your grade goes up. This allows you to measure yourself against your friends in the game, and creates a leveling system. Your grade is tied to what virtual goods you have access to, with cooler or better virtual goods reserved for those with a better grade. This creates a virtuous cycle, where donating money lets you level up and gain access to better goods, which can be acquired by donating more money, and repeat.

Third, to encourage stickiness and a high level of engagement, there are regular tasks that you can do to earn a small number of points, like grading papers and talking to kids. (Hey, it’s no weirder than people virtually plowing fields and milking goats!) The number of points you can earn from these should be kept fairly low, below the threshold needed to buy a lot of the really cool items. And if you don’t check in regularly, there should be some form of consequence; perhaps your students’ morale drops, and therefore your grade goes down. Creating the potential for loss triggers loss aversion, which is such a powerful instinctive force.

Fourth, each real-life classroom that you donate to can select and send you a special gift for your virtual school. These should be really cool premium items that aren’t available any other way. This creates a very direct relationship of mutual benefit: give money, and get this rare item in return. (You should also be able to post their thank-you letters and photos in a prominent place in your virtual school, for other people to read.)

This is just a start on what such a game would be, but I think it’s a really interesting approach. Rather than denying or bemoaning the various blind spots, biases, and quirks of the human brain, I think it’s interesting to design ways that we can exploit those quirks and biases to accomplish something good.