A London video game company has raised a whopping $20,000 for Haiti relief efforts in under a week.

Tall Tree Games, the small London video game company, first developed the Fish World application for Facebook in August 2009. The application has grown in popularity, reaching a current average of 1.5 million users per day.

According to Kimberley Day, the spokesperson for Tall Tree Games, the donations for Haitian relief efforts began last Tuesday and finished this past Monday, accumulating $20,000.

Users of the application were able to contribute to the Haitian relief effort by purchasing a special fish called the Haiti cichlid. For each fish purchased, $2.00 was contributed to the cause.

One hundred per cent of all proceeds will be donated to UNICEF for its Haiti relief efforts.

“Our decision to raise money for UNICEF was made because it is one of the leading organizations in the effort to help and protect children in Haiti,” Day said.

Day noted the popularity of social and casual games has been rising for some time now and no one had yet tapped into the virtual aquarium market.

“Our applications are accessed by millions of users all over the world. The users have shown that they are generous and willing to help out — even in small ways — when called to action,” Day said.

The Fish World application can be played within a user’s web browser. In the virtual Fish World, users can decorate and maintain a fish tank. Users accumulate coins and gain experience by buying and selling virtual fish.

“Everything is moving into the virtual world and now users who aren’t otherwise able to or interested in maintaining real fish tanks can put their creativity and efforts into maintaining virtual ones,” Day said.

Facebook applications are becoming increasingly popular tools to raise money and awareness for global causes.

Yordanos Woldemariam, a co-ordinator for the University Students’ Council’s Have a Heart for Haiti campaign, noted she found out about a lot of initiatives and campaigns for Haiti going on in and outside of Western through Facebook.

“We are using Facebook to raise awareness. It is one of the best ways to reach out to the Western community,” Woldemarian said.

The Have a Heart campaign began when a group of presidents, executives and members of the USC came together and set a common goal of raising $30,000 for Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

“If you couple a reasonably popular game or application with the social networking capabilities of Facebook, you have a pretty good chance of getting your message out there, and attracting a fair bit of attention, awareness, and donations,” professor Mike Katchabaw, of Western’s computer science department, said.

“The increasing popularity of social networking sites as a platform both for games and for connecting people together will only enable more of this to happen in the future,” Katchabaw added. “They’ve got an entertaining product, a loyal fan-base, and a very worthy cause. With all of that coming together on a social networking site like Facebook, they have a pretty good recipe for success.”