Don Sim Jianqiang, Xiaojuan Ma, Shengdong Zhao, Jing Ting Khoo, Swee Ling Bay, Zhenhui Jiang
Volunteering is an important activity that brings great benefits to societies. However, encouraging volunteerism is difficult due to the altruistic nature of volunteer activities and the high resource demand in carrying them out. We have created a Facebook game called “Farmer’s Tale” to attract and make it easier for people to volunteer. We evaluated people’s acceptance to this novel idea and the results revealed great potential in such type of games.
Addition information:
Farmer’s Tale is a Facebook game which aims to promote volunteerism in Singapore. From the Individual Giving Survey 2010 by the National Volunteer and Philanthropy Centre, the volunteerism rate in Singapore is 23.3%. Compared to the U.K. and the U.S., Singapore is lagging far behind as they have a volunteering rate of 48% and 44% respectively. Thus there is definitely a need to promote volunteerism as we believe that a strong society has to be rich not only in material capital but also in social capital. Jumping on the hot bandwagon of social media platforms, we hope to attract more young adults to volunteer in Singapore. The game (under alpha testing mode) is now available on Facebook.
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