Charitable gamers bring in 1.5 million for Haiti in five days

Over the past five days, premium charity items in Zynga's Facebook games, FarmVille, FishVille, Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker, brought in $1.5 million dollars for aid to Haiti. FarmVille alone was responsible for $1 million of the total.

Since last week, Zynga has been hosting premium items (which means you have to spend real-life cash for them) in each of the games above and 100% of the proceeds are being donated to the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP). In FarmVille, players can buy white corn, a Haitian drum in Mafia Wars, a Haiti fish in FishVille and a special chip package in Zynga poker. Other games from Zynga actively promoted the charity event in their other games as well, so anyone who played Cafe World and PetVille were directed to donate at Zynga.org.

"Through their donations, Zynga players are helping us to bring urgently needed food assistance to people who have been plunged into hunger by this devastating earthquake. We started distributing food within 24 hours of the earthquake, and in the coming weeks, we aim to deliver weekly rations to 2 million people," Nancy Roman, WFP's director of communications says.

Other social game companies have jumped on the change to help out Haiti by offering limited edition virtual goods, such as RockYou's Zoo World where you can donate a dollar in exchange for a limited edition flamingo.

If you are interested in donating to Haiti and don't play any of these games, you can go directly to Zynga.org. AOL Health also has a complete list of organizations you can donate to as well.