What is the "Caffeine Factor" to Akoha?

My suggestion would be to integrate some sort of "mini-world", like in World of Warcraft, for example: you can explore a certain world and find hidden missions (chest loot factor), or gain access to 1-3 new missions when you complete a mission (quest loot factor). (The monster factor will do no good here, hehe)

In addition, missions could be linked to categories or tags to simplify the selection of missions discovered/achieved.

I thought the thing that will keep you coming back is when other people play missions to you. That's why it's better to play missions to people who you see frequently, rather than strangers. The video tutorial at least makes it look like that's the intended use.

I like the idea of encouraging people to play within their social circles. A lot of the ideas seem very local in scope; maybe more could be added, like "Babysit a friend's kid" or "Shovel a walk/mow a lawn" or "Care for a neighbor's pets".

You could set up time-based rewards, e.g. extra karma points for playing 10 cards in one month or 100 in a year.

You could slip "rare" cards into mission decks--unusual missions, or common missions but with karma point bonuses--to encourage people to collect more decks and prioritize some missions over others. (See also Magic: The Gathering.)

You could create connections between missions that generate new missions or other bonuses. Think of it like Akoha Fluxx: if I make someone dinner and take someone out to a movie (not necessarily the same person), I then get a bonus "dinner and a movie" combination mission that's worth more points. If I play ten missions that have to do with cooking, I win the "chief cook and bottle-washer" moniker on the site.

You could translate karma points into unlocking higher-level missions. (Actually, I'm not really clear on the purpose of karma points in general. I don't just want to rack up a high number; I want to do something with it. I got a message saying "welcome to level 2"--well, what does that mean?)

You could set up a charitable foundation and let people trade in karma points for monetary donations to charities. I paid $5 for a deck that contains 24 cards; I haven't looked at their different karma values but I assume that's about 5000 points. Once I play the missions, I'd love to trade those 5000 points for a $1 or $2 donation to Mercy Corps or the Heifer Project or whomever. Of course, the current set-up where people can add unlimited virtual missions to their accounts might make this less feasible. On the other hand, if you set the exchange rate fairly high, most players won't rack up enough points to trade in. I'm sure there's a way to make it work.

You could create geocaching-style missions like "Help this card travel at least 1000/5000/10,000 miles from _____" or "Help this card travel to _____". The person who starts the mission fills in the blank and puts the card in a geocache, or gives it to a visiting friend, or takes it on a trip. It's less about the good deeds and more about the nifty, but sometimes nifty is what keeps people coming back. (You could also make it a two-mission card: "Help this card travel... by buying a traveler a drink." "Help this card travel... by hosting someone from out of town.") For bonus points, cross-pollinate with geocaching.com or dopplr.com.

You could set up a version specifically for kids ages 5-10. They would make great gifts!

Great ideas! I'll address each seperately:

Time-based rewards: this plugs into the "caffeine" factor alot and that's something that we're closely looking at. Alex Eberts, the co-founder of the company has a game design background (he's worked for a few mega video game publishing companies). He's got plans to increase the 'addictive' factor of Akoha which we're dying to implement. In time, you'll see more gamey features that will help push you and your friends to get involved with spreading more kindness.

Rare Mission cards; i love it! Great idea. Sort of like that sf0.org's one million point mission (no one's been able to pull it off yet).

Mission combos: I haven't heard this idea tossed around the office yet. I think it would be super cool to find hidden "combos" as you complete different types of missions. Certainly would appeal to the addictive factor. I can think of quite a few challenges associated with this (especially if the missions themselves are community generated), so something like this probably wouldn't see light of day for some time.

Karma points into levels: We're working on that point system right now so that it makes more sense. Karma ties directly to levels which will eventually unlock some neat things.

Charitable foundation: That's what we're currently doing with the Room to Read challenge. We've done a poor job at making it obvious that every single mission played equates to a school brick being laid down (www.akoha.com/challenge). I think your idea focuses more on the ability to let *you* cash in on an charitable cause, pushing you to play more missions so that you can give a bit more. Very cool. I'll make sure it's heard internally.

Geocaching: we *love* geocaching and have been looking at ways to implement some of the "travelness" behind it with Akoha. We need to be careful .. we have to make sure that what we're trying to do right now is well executed before we widen our scope too quickly.

Kids: We think that this could be a very, very cool concept, but we're just not ready for all that this entails (regulations, liability, etc). We need to get Akoha as it is right first, before we start targeting segments.

Thanks Rose. This is great, great, great feedback. All of this will be heard by the team. You rock!

Thanks for the long reply, Sean! I know a lot of this is pie-in-the-sky right now; I just figured I'd toss out ideas as they came to me.

The only other site where I've seen this sort of community-generated content is OkCupid, where users write questions. As part of the approval process, each question is tagged with various attributes, i.e. if it's a math problem, answering it correctly makes you more mathematical, and if it's a Monty Python quote, completing it correctly makes you more nerdy. It looks like community-generated Akoha missions also need to be approved, so maybe they could be tagged in a similar way during approval.

I had no idea about the Room to Read challenge! I saw the "Community challenge" thing on my home page but didn't know it was linked to a charity. That's really cool. And yes, I'd definitely like to feel more like I can make my personal karma go twice as far.

Also an idea that I haven't heard in the office (OkCupid). I really dig on the idea that playing certain missions might make you more "environmental", "coffee addict", "gift giver", etc. Neat!

Thanks again Rose. :)

I was thinking of tagging as a way of generating combined missions--say you do a bunch of cooking missions and a bunch of volunteering missions, you might get one tagged as both, like volunteering at a soup kitchen--but using them to generate trends and labels for people would be great too, especially if one could search for other users by their trends. (I like to get gifts, so I'll look for people who like to give them! Heh.)

I love the OKCupid idea as well.
As an added bonus, it shouldn't be too hard to implement tag-based mission search. So I could look at all missions related to "travel" or "gastronomy" or "gifts".

I realized the other day that Akoha's focus is too external. It's almost 100% external. Besides competing with friends to see who gets a higher score there isn't a lot of interacting going on within the Akohan community. I think an initiative needs to be put in place that encourages Akoha players to interact with other Akoha players more often.

Thinking about Pareto's principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) I would say that 80% of Akohan's activity should be spent interacting with other members in the system and 20% should be spent "recruiting." There should be cards that reflect this as well (some of the "game based" cards I recommended before could handle this).

The recruiting process is long and takes a lot of energy. It's a lot more fun interacting with members who already understand the system and WANT to play. Then, every now and then (20% of the time ;) ) you go out on a limb and try something on a new person.

This may sound extreme, but I say this from probably 1000s of hours spent on an old internet discussion forum with a focus on helping foreigners with life in Taiwan (Forumosa.com for the curious). I'm certain that over 80% of my posts and reading had nothing to do with that mission, but the 20% that did was VERY effective (and this would be true for other members of the community).

I was wondering if there were any new developments, in this particular area?

Aurora