Ever since I first heard about Alternate Reality Games, I've been interested in the crossover of gaming ideas into the "real world".
I came across a game called Akoha a few months ago that promises to use mission cards to encourage good deeds and interactions with new people. They recently made packs of cards available for a few dollars and mine arrived just before Christmas. However after looking at the concept in more detail I feel that they've misjudged people's motivations for playing such a game and have therefore got the interaction model wrong. Has anyone else heard of or tried this game? I would be interested to hear people's thoughts. Here's how it works. You get a mission card (either from another player or in a pack from the website) which has a simple bit of text such as "Thank someone", "Give someone a book" or "Send drinks to a couple in love". They're all nice things that we probably ought to do more often. In order to "play" the mission, you do the nice thing to someone and also give the card to the person you did the thing to. And that's where the first problem is. It just doesn't seem natural to say "Thank you for being my friend, I really appreciate your company. Oh, and here's this mission card. No, but I really meant it... I'm not just saying thanks because it says to on the card!" It's inevitable that presenting a mission card will devalue the apparent kindness of whatever act you performed because it reveals an ulterior motive. For the book mission it's a bit easier to imagine hiding the card between the pages but how do you give the card to the couple in love? And which person do you give it to? My second issue is the scoring system. Each mission has a number of karma points associated with it and some missions score higher than others (i.e. the missions mentioned above score 125, 125 & 200 points respectively). As you play successive missions, you acquire karma points and "level up" accordingly. It's not clear at this stage whether the points will have any value other than prestige but the concept of "levelling up" smacks of World of Warcraft and other role playing games and seems more likely to put people off than encourage play. Another problem is the missions themselves. Some of them don't make any sense to me and there's no accompanying text to clarify. "Read a blogger, feed a blogger" What? "Wild mission card" Does that mean I just make something up? "Donate an hour of your time" To whom? And who do I give the card to afterwards? Finally, a key point of the game is "playing it forward". Each mission card has a unique ID which players are expected to be key into the website upon receiving a card. This allows you to see how long a card has been in circulation, how many times it has been played and trace where it has been in the world. That's pretty neat but unfortunately I suspect the vast majority of cards will make exactly one hop before being forgotten under a pile of papers on someone's desk and eventually binned. Additionally players must supply an email address in order to register having received a card and that's likely to dissuade quite a few people. I'd like to think anyone receiving a card would jump at the chance to get involved but, for the reasons above, I just don't see it happening. So what would I change? Well I'd get rid of the karma points and include a better description of each mission, that's easy. Solving the other two problems is harder. Perhaps you don't have to give the card to the person you did the act of kindness to. Perhaps you can give it to anyone who witnessed the act. And perhaps you need to give more of an incentive to first time players who receive a card. Perhaps you could encourage people who don't like the idea to "pass" the card and give it to someone else who they think will enjoy it without playing the mission themselves. Phew, that was a long-un. Well done for making it to the end. Now take this "Share your thoughts with the IxDA mailing list" mission card I've got... ;-) Tamlyn. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
