Club Penguin kids turn MMO fun into $1 million for charities

by Samuel Axon Feb 10th 2008 at 10:00AM

After all the stories about online gaming addiction, we're glad when we see the occasional bit of goodness come out of virtual worlds and MMOs. This time, we're happy to hear that New Horizon Interactive (now owned by Disney), the developers of Club Penguin, encouraged the kids who play its game to donate some of their hard-earned virtual cash to charity.

New Horizon assigned a real currency value to each donation, and let kids choose which kind of charity to give to -- children's health, the environment, or kids in the developing world. When the donation period ended, the company donated about $1 million dollars to three charities. Among those, the World Wildlife Fund received about $330,000. Not bad!

Let's hope this is the start of a trend. As Kenny Luna over at Treehugger pointed out, this is a win-win scenario; Disney and New Horizon get some positive media attention, and charities get much-needed support. Imagine what kind of results Blizzard could get if it did something like this in World of Warcraft!

Tags: charity, children, club-penguin, disney, kids, new-horizon-foundation, new-horizon-interactive, world-wildlife-fund