Play With Your Garbage

The idea behind Guerillapps’ Trash Tycoon is simple and elegant: Reward gamers with points for performing environmentally conscious tasks in the real world and reward them with tangible goods for succeeding in the virtual world.

"When we looked at so-called green games and none of them were fun, we asked, ‘How do we motivate consumers to do the right thing?'" Guerillaps CEO Raviv Turner says.

Now that he has come up with a solution, Turner has set his aim high, saying “we want to be the Angry Birds of change.”

The aim of the game is to unlock new corners of the virtual city by cleaning, repairing, and “upcycling,” or improving, accessible parts of the city. Like FarmVille, Trash Tycoon lets the gamer purchase virtual goods, but they're all of an environmental bent, such as free-trade coffee, falafel, a worm farm, a plastic crusher, garden sculptures, and more.

By making purchases, players qualify to "vote" for real environmental programs like a bio-digester in California, reforestation in Louisiana, and truck-stop electrification across several states. After they vote, players can then have 10 percent of their purchases donated to Carbon Fund, an organization that offsets carbon footprints. The game is part education, part activism, and part fun. But if Turner succeeds at his goal, it will be mostly fun.

Gamification—tech-speak for the process by which some companies disguise their agenda as entertainment—can go awry. The end result, says Turner, is often a boring product that is 70 percent corporate agenda and 30 percent fun. One example might be Big League Bites at www.nba.com, which lets players travel from one basketball arena to another to “whip up the tastiest food in town” and “give it to your hungry customer.” A decade ago, this would probably have just been map of stadiums designed to bring in visitors. The concept of gamification turns a plain-old map into an interactive experience…of questionable entertainment value, unless serving hot dogs with cheese sauce at the Philadelphia 76ers stadium appeals to you.

Guerillapps aims to flip this practice on its head. “Fun is key,” says Turner. His goal is to create a game that really entertains. No "edutainment," no pop-up message asking, “Did you know?” Just games. And the games, he says, came first. The thinking is that by letting the game drive the experience, whatever the player happens to learn is organic and easily translates into their daily lives.

Turner’s philosophy is simple. If the games aren’t fun, we won’t play them. And if we don’t play them, we won’t learn what he has to offer.

Turner says Trash Tycoon has registered 350,000 game players in its first two month of business, and it has gathered more than 16,000 likes on Facebook. It’s no Zynga, but not bad.

---

Get more business intelligence from Portfolio.com:

• Event Embed: For a dose of inspiration, a look into intriguing startups, and advice from top entrepreneurs, Portfolio.com takes you inside Fast Company's Innovation Uncensored gathering in San Francisco. And you don't have to pay a cent.
• Highly Funded and Hot For a Deal: How many rounds of financing are companies getting before they get acquired? Significantly more than they used to, a new study finds.
• Entrepreneurs to G20: Help Us Out: Young entrepreneurs are asking G20 leaders to help them pull the world's economy out of the ditch.

---

Michael del Castillo is a freelance reporter for Portfolio.com.