Inside Social Games

For those of that were watching what came out of TechCrunch50, you may have heard about a new game called Akoha. The game combines real world play with a social network to support it. Inside Social Games had a chance to check out Akoha and sit down and talk with the co-founder and CEO of the company, Austin Hill.

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. For those that do not know, what is Akoha?

Akoha is a real world and virtual game in which players carry out missions that involve performing small acts of kindness for others. The activities of Akoha players are described on “mission cards” that involve real world and virtual challenges like “Donate an hour of your time,” “Give someone a book,” and “Send drinks to a couple in love.” As Akoha players perform more missions, they advance in the game, recruit new players, and spread good deeds across the planet.

Unlike virtual worlds and massively multiplayer games, Akoha takes place in the real world and turns everyday life into the ultimate playground. Playing Akoha is simple and will ultimately combine offline activity with social websites, cell phones, and barcodes so that every public place becomes part of Akoha’s game play. Akoha brings people together, creates novel experiences in players’ lives, and allows the community as a whole to help make the world a better place.

Akoha is currently in beta-testing and we are still introducing and fine-tuning features with our play testing community that make it fun. Beyond specific features, we are excited about two distinct elements that we think make Akoha unique:

- Casual reality based gaming: Reality based games have been incredibly innovative in their ability to use the world as their playground, encouraging new modes of play with interesting social elements. Unfortunately even the most successful of these have appealed to very niche audiences and have had a high barrier to participation requiring lots of organizing, setup and administration. They also tend to be short-lived experiences; we have not seen an ongoing multiplayer reality based game that has continued for many years and appealed to the size of audiences that MMPGs like WoW and Club Penguin have developed.

- Meaningful games: There is an incredible body of work by researchers and academics showing the potential of using games to create change, and the power of play to make the world a better place. Despite this, we are only beginning to see the use of game mechanics for meaningful social projects start to become commercially viable. Health, learning and self-improvement games (for example WiiFit and BrainAge) were at the forefront of this, but some of the larger goals of using games to demonstrably improve our world are only beginning to emerge beyond research initiatives. We hope to help usher in this trend with Akoha.

Reality based games have an incredible potential to create new social interactions and a different type of game immersion experience based on real world experiences. Unfortunately they also have weaknesses in terms of game compulsion loops (long feedback cycles), individual play and other game mechanics that have proven very popular in the software gaming areas.

We hope to find an appropriate balance of online mechanics including items such as collectibles, badges and a forthcoming virtual currency system, that can be married with the reality based elements of Akoha to create a fun and engaging experience. We want to enable a wide range of players to engage in Akoha according to their preferred types of play, with some players engaging more with virtual aspects of the game, and others seeking accomplishments in more of the reality based missions.

Some of the badges will allow users to get recognized for their progress in completing numbers of missions and specific mission theme categories (for example Green missions, Urban Adventure Missions, and Geo-targeted missions localized to communities).

Other badges will allow users to accomplish roles inside the community as they contribute to the game and create content or moderate game areas.

In terms of virtual currency, we are not ready to announce anything specific yet, but there will be a mix of the ability to use virtual currency to increase your abilities or privileges in the game, as well as the ability to use it for some purchases of offline game kits related to Akoha.

Right now we are collecting great ideas for missions from the community. In some cases missions are great ideas, but don’t fit our pay-it-forward game model. These include things you do by yourself (for example bike to work) that don’t involve interacting with someone else. In addition we are developing a few basic principles to ensure missions are appropriate, safe and fit within the type of community we are building.

Many of the missions being approved are great examples of our players’ creativity, and we are adding them to the Mission Headquarters as soon as possible. Users will then be able to add them to their mission inventory, print them at home, or play them online or via email with their friends.

In the future, mission cards can be assembled into decks that can be ordered on demand, or put into a community store available for purchase by other players.

So if you were to create a mission, what would you add?

There are a bunch of missions that fit my personality that made it into the initial decks. “Read a blogger, feed a blogger” was one I pushed for. This is a mission where you find a blogger you enjoy reading and simply invite them out for a meal and pick up the tab. Then you pass the mission card to them, letting them continue the chain and taking a blogger they like out for a meal.

We brainstormed hundreds of missions while creating Akoha, but we wanted to limit the ones we included in the starter kit to some of the simpler missions that are easy to understand, accomplish and share. As we evolve we’ll be able to introduce some of the more adventurous missions that might appeal to a smaller number of players, but could create really interesting and fun moments of play.

What sort of user missions have you seen or do you predict seeing from the player base?

A couple of player-created missions that grabbed our attention were:

- At the airport: let someone go first. The example was if you see someone who’s late for a flight, you let them go ahead of you in line, and you go to the back. It would make someone’s day.

- Bone marrow transplant: one player created a mission to register blood for a bone marrow bank.

Both of these are great ideas and we are working with the community on how we can incorporate these into mission themes and ensure the play around these missions works.

How many different types of mission cards to you think you will end up with by the end of beta?

Right now we are focused on quality of mission content and also making sure the supporting features, ease of use and level of engagement are deep enough to start to plan dates for a public release.

Once we have those elements working well together, we can start to increase the variety and number of missions in the Akoha Mission HQ and store.

“Pay It Forward,” the movie based on a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde, is one of the more recent pop culture examples of our inspirations for Akoha. Akoha is based on a study of aboriginal and Internet gift economies. This is where economics of abundance come into play, where what we value moves from “finite resources” that are accumulated, to things that are abundant and easily shared. It’s where we see mercantile economies shift to become more of a social economy. These principles have existed for a long time and helped pave the way for open source software, Wikipedia, and many aspects of the blogosphere.

Now some people assume gift economies must be related to a type of “Kumbaya,” free love, do-gooder set of principles. In fact often there is a fair amount of competition in these systems that drives the community forward. Open source software has many competing projects where people attempt to “out-code” or “out-innovate” each other. They may not do it for monetary reasons, but the competition creates innovation. Wikipedia has similar dynamics as people compete in what could be considered “knowledge wars” to improve and establish better articles. The end result is still the collective creation of something that couldn’t have existed through the work of just one person acting alone. If we can create that type of effect with people competing to “win” and doing good, then compete away Akohans! It will be fun to see how and where the community takes it.

Users can currently confirm a mission and claim their card by entering a unique mission card ID found on the mission card at the Akoha website.

We’ve also developed an iPhone app that works with versions of mission cards with 2D barcodes and barcode scanning capabilities. This is still in development, and we’ll be releasing it to a select group of players to get feedback and improve it before making it publicly available.

In the future we will also support the ability to confirm and claim missions via channels like SMS and Twitter, to make it easy for anyone to confirm a mission while they are out in the real world.

You mention that there is an iPhone app for scanning the cards. Do you expect to see further applications like this for other mobile devices such as Blackberries?

The iPhone application we have under development is a great technology showcase that incorporates geolocation, photos and barcode scanning into the game play. We are going to work with our community to figure out the best way to extend these same features to other mobile OS’s that offer similar functionality.

From what I have read, players need a card in order to register on the Akoha site and start playing. Is it possible for interested parties to start playing without receiving one of the cards?

Right now we’ve restricted some of the more viral ways to play (for example via Facebook). Our goal is to focus on quality before a large number of users can join via those fast-growing channels.

If an Akoha player is in the system, they can bring you into the game by playing a mission card with you physically or via email. If you don’t know an Akoha player, you’ll have to be patient and wait to get your own starter kit. This will change as we improve the experience and start to open up the community to more players.

Okay, so let’s get out of the technical stuff for now and talk about some of you company’s new relationships. You had also announced a partnership with “Room to Read” for the beta in order to sponsor the construction of a library in Nepal. What more can you tell us about this endeavor?

In the future Akoha players will be able to link their game play to various charitable organizations of their choice. But when we started the private beta we wanted our players’ activities to already help make the world a better place. So we announced a “Community Challenge” with Room to Read to sponsor the construction of a library in Nepal. Once Akoha beta players complete 25,000 missions, we will partner with Room to Read and a local school community to build a new library and fill it with books, games and posters for local kids.

Room to Read founder John Wood’s book “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World” was an inspiration to me and my co-founder Alex Eberts, so we were thrilled to name Room to Read as our first charity partner. The organization started in Nepal in 2000, when John left Microsoft and started bringing donated books to rural communities. Since then, Room to Read has expanded its work into nine countries throughout Asia and Africa and impacted the lives of over 2 million children.

Are there any other community partnerships you are considering for the future?

Our partnership with Room to Read is just the beginning. There are many organizations working around the world on a myriad of issues that reflect individuals’ personal goals for how to make the world a better place. Education, poverty, disease, social justice, animal rights and human rights are just a few of the many areas that our players may want to associate their play in Akoha with. We have to get a number of items working well to ensure the game is fun and scalable, but once we do we’ll be opening up ways for players and mission content creators to have philanthropic tie-ins to their contributions in the Akoha game.

Obviously your next major goal is to launch in 2009. What is next for Akoha after that?

Akoha is focused on getting a number of things balanced, healthy and fun before we start to push for growth. Our first priorities are to get the rest of Akoha’s features introduced to the community, polish and improve the features we just introduced, and make sure that our players are having fun, coming back and ready to share Akoha with their friends.

Due to the nature of Akoha, where players complete missions with anyone they see an opportunity with, we have to ensure it is easy to use and understand for everyone, not just early adopters or gamers. We still have a lot of work to do in this area.

That goal may extend well into 2009. Once we are sure we can handle accelerated growth, we’ll be looking to increase the depth of Akoha play by increasing the type and number of missions that players can take on, and looking for opportunities to integrate Akoha into a number of other services and trends occurring in the technology area. These include elements such as mobile and geolocated play, incorporating mashups of services into the Akoha game, and incorporating Akoha into other services such as Facebook and OpenSocial. There are a lot of opportunities in what we’re doing — reality offers the richest possible playground for a game environment, but we need to get a few things right before we start moving too quickly into those areas.

Thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure speaking with you. One last question before you go: For those that may be interested, how would they go about getting an invitation to your beta testing?

We are currently rationing beta invites on a schedule as we collect feedback and work to improve some of the more glaring issues our users have identified. As we put in fixes for these issues, we bring in a new batch of beta players, and then we do a bit of rinse and repeat J If people are very eager to get in on Akoha, they can try to find an existing Akoha player on Twitter or blogs, since they can bring you into the game by playing a mission with you. For most others, we ask for your patience, and you can sign up for our beta at www.akoha.com. We will also be appearing at community meetups and conferences where we’ll be distributing Akoha starter kits, so check out our Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/akoha) and our blog (http://community.akoha.com/blog/) to find one near you.