FreeRice.com: Pukka or Factitious?
This holiday weekend we've put aside the the more common charitable activities in favor of FreeRice.com, a web-based word game that purports to feed the world's hungry.
The game is simple enough: it presents a word (supposedly an English word, but we have had our doubts on occasion) and a list of four potential synonyms. Choose correctly, and ten grains of rice appear in a wooden bowl in the developing world. Three correct answers in a row inflates your score/ego by one point. Choose incorrectly and you lose a point (don't worry, though--the Third World gets to keep its rice). According to the FreeRice people, everybody wins: we get more words, they get more rice. And it's all paid for by advertisers such as Reader's Digest and Toshiba.
We admit that our motivation has little to do with aid to the less fortunate, and even less to do with improving our vocabulary. We simply wanted to trounce our savagely competitive word-game-oriented grandmother. Which we did: for one brief, shining moment, we attained a score of 49--"it is rare for people to get above level 48," the FAQs tell us.
"Improving your vocabulary can improve your life," say the FreeRice folks. Bitter experience has made us less sanguine: testing our improved vocabulary down at the local watering hole, we found that our newfound conversance with temerarious periphrasis was somewhat escharotic to our fellow patrons, and we barely escaped a retrose and edentulous expulsion from the establishment.
We hope FreeRice's claims about alleviating world hunger are better-founded than their claims about better living through word power.
Our newfound vocabulary has not yet brought us the benefits of "better e-mails and business letters" or "higher scores on tests like the SAT" (Warning: a grad-school-aspiring guest was traumatized by the resemblance between FreeRice and the GRE). And the jury is out on how to make foreign aid as effective as possible (see, for example, the long-running and often acrimonious debate between celebrity economists Jeffrey D. Sachs and William Easterly).
And we're slightly creeped out by the game's grip on us--it's a classic example of "persuasive technology" (shiver), according to Adam Tolnay of Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab. Tolnay writes that "The persuasive elements that make Free Rice so potent are the simplicity of the message (highlighted by visuals that graphically sow the grains of rice to be donated in a stylized bowl), the ease of use of the site (ie simple multiple choice questions one after another), the transparency of the transaction (you play, you learn, advertisers on site donate, hungry people get rice)."
Hey, we understood all of those words!
P.S. This image shows 100 grains of rice, about 1/2 teaspoon, our earnings for knowing the words bellweather, foulard, sylvatic, hebetude, llano, brindled, chiton, complot, knout, and, appropriately, blowhard.
P.P.S. Our admittedly shaky arithmetic indicates that there are 11,200 grains in a pound of rice -- the whole family has been clicking away all weekend and we're almost there.