Not so long ago, on my mandatory semester on the Missourian copy desk, I got addicted to Text Twist when copy was slow coming in. Next semester’s copy editors will have a chance to play a word game that will pass the news eds’ scrutiny AND make a difference.
NPR’s Foreign Dispatch podcast has turned me on to Free Rice, a word game from the United Nations World Food Program. It’s simple: you match words to their synonym and advertisers donate 20 grains of rice for every word you get right. It doesn’t seem like much, but with the game’s growing popularity among SAT takers, English Language Learners and procrastinators worldwide, the spokeswoman on NPR said they’d already gathered enough to feed 350,000 people. And the game’s only been around for a few weeks. Not too shabby.
The game has 50 levels of increasing difficulty, but they say people hardly ever get past level 48. We’ll see about that.
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