Elf Island Game Play Allows Kids to Celebrate Nutrients In Food

May 27, 2009 - PRLog -- Elf Island (www.elfisland.com), the virtual world that empowers kids to make a difference in the real world through game play, announces it’s next GoodQuest,™ challenging kids to make the right food choices. This campaign is through a partnership with Fresh Producers, a non-profit that increases access to high quality produce and provides incentives to motivate kids to eat healthy.
Across the United States, there are areas where finding fresh fruits and vegetables at the grocery store are as likely as finding a hundred dollar bill on the street corner.  Neither is very likely to happen.  In these communities where there are far more fast food restaurants than fresh produce sources, obesity, diabetes, and poverty are all highly visible.
Through a newly coined term called Mirrored Gaming, ™ Elf Island works directly with non-profit partners like Fresh Producers to support real world projects – in this case, bringing fresh fruits and vegetables to underserved families in California - and then mirroring an online game to bring the project to life.

As kids meet the collective goal within Elf Island by Gaming for Good™ their actions are “mirrored” offline and to the real world. To accomplish this, nonprofit initiatives are woven into Elf Island’s lush, interactive environment using multimedia game play, social networking, storytelling and a vibrant economy.

How Mirrored Gaming Works
In the Virtual World of Elf Island: Kids must choose the right food combinations to feed their Gnome the proper nutrients. Memorization and timing is a key fundamental to this game.  Speed is key to coin accrual.
In the real world of Sacramento, California: As a result of the kids meeting the collective virtual goal, Elf Island will provide healthy produce for 100 underserved families in Sacramento, California and help jump start a community garden at the Luther Burbank High School in the Meadowview neighborhood.
Through a peer-to-peer connection, Elf Islanders are able to understand the challenge at hand and feel the emotive pull that they helped families by watching and reading their stories through video and photos. This GoodQuest also drives home the importance of understanding nutrients and the power it can bring to the body and well being.

“By mirroring game play to the real world, Elf Island shows kids that entertainment can be meaningful and actually create a social movement to better peoples lives,” said Craig Kronenberger, Co-Founder and President of Elf Island.

As part of the company’s operational structure, when the kids playing Elf Island meet the collective GoodQuest goal, funding is made by Elf Island.

“We are giving kids ownership of their lives so they can improve their health,“ Rabbi David Wechsler-Azen, founder and CEO of Fresh Producers. “With the help of kids gaming in Elf Island, Fresh Producers’ message is resonating that there are healthy food alternatives to those who don’t normally have access.”

Fresh Producers is the fifth nonprofit to benefit from Elf Island’s Mirrored Gaming model. Future Elf Island GoodQuests are in production with other non-profits that also help people in need, as well as organizations that help with environmental and animal protection.

A partnership with Plant It 2020 was just completed, with kids planting 20,000 virtual trees, which was then mirrored to the planting of real trees in the African country of Niger. The kids successfully met the goal, well within the 30-day period of the GoodQuest.

With parental permission, and a basic membership that is free, kids can enter and play limited offerings and chat in Elf Island. As a paid subscriber, kids can become an active participant in GoodQuests and upgrade features. Kids also have the unique ability to unveil secret passageways, participate in an economic marketplace and ultimately learn the Secret of Elf Island.

Elf Island is a place where parents feel good about where their kids are playing Online:

o   Elf Island has a tremendous appeal to parents who would like their children’s online play to be imaginative and anchored in positive values.

o   Elf Island brings social responsibility to a new level of fun while reinforcing a parent’s own sense of doing right.

o   Because the games immerse kids in the needs of real people, animals and the earth, they gain an appreciation of the real world and gain a greater sense of self-esteem.

o   Elf Island uses real moderators and robust Dictionary chat to ensure safety is maintained and enforced at all times.

About Elf Island  
Elf Island is the first kids’ virtual world specifically created to instill positive social and environmental values into the world’s future stewards. Elf Island turns online gaming efforts into tangible offline results through nonprofit partnerships and Mirrored Gaming. Elf Island invented Gaming for Good, Mirrored Gaming and GoodQuests and is an independent children’s interactive entertainment developer that delivers entertaining game play for kids that inspires, rewards actions and builds awareness of social issues around the world. Craig and Liz Kronenberger are a dynamic husband and wife duo, parents to twin boys, and veterans in the online gaming industry that founded Elf Island in June 2007(www.elfisland.com).

About Fresh Producers (www.freshproducers.org)
Fresh Producers provides the resources for young people to take ownership of the future.  Sales of fresh fruits, vegetables and other healthy goods and services enable all of us to build a Trust Fund making higher education available to every young person.  Creating wealth from health, collaborating for the greater good and conserving this great blue-green planet of ours just might make it possible to live like it's Eden once again.

Contact: Liz Kronenberger (404.771.8724/ liz@elfisland.com)

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Elf Island (www.elfisland.com) is the first virtual world to use gaming, storytelling and social interaction to empower kids to make a positive difference in the real world.