The Woohoo! Report

ROBERTO ROCHA, The Gazette

Can a computer game inspire its players to do good deeds? A Montreal entrepreneur thinks so, and he has the backing of prestigious Internet geeks.

The game is Akoha.com, the latest creation of Austin Hill, founder of the failed online privacy firm ZeroKnowledge, which successfully reincarnated as Radialpoint.

The game takes the pay-it-forward idea of spreading acts of kindness and gives it a competitive edge: players vie over who is the most benevolent.

Players on the website receive a pack of cards through the mail – a rare crossover between the online and real words – each with a mission. These can be as simple as making someone smile to giving someone a book to donating an hour of one’s time. Once the player completes the deed, he passes the mission card to the next person, hoping she will do the same unto someone else.

On the website, players can add details about how they played the mission. Each card has a unique identity number, which lets players track how it is being passed on and played.

“It’s a game for the Oprah crowd,” Hill told the audience at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco yesterday, one of the most prestigious launchpads for Internet startups.

Each mission has a number of “karma points.” Players with the most points are shown prominently on the site.

The site also allows players to create their own missions and print the cards, adding a user-generated element.

The game is currently in beta testing – industry speak for “not quite ready for prime time” – and will be publicly launched next year.

Early reaction to Akoha on blogs and on the popular communication tool Twitter were mostly positive. Judges of the TechCrunch50 conference, where 52 startups vie for a best in show award, saw a strong viral potential and opportunities for corporate sponsorships.

This is, in fact, one of Akoha’s revenue strategies. The company, funded on $2 million of angel money, will at first make a living selling packs of mission cards through its website and in stores. But having companies sponsor certain missions is in the works.

A card to give someone a fluorescent light bulb could be endorsed by a store that sells them, for instance.

“If you accomplish all green missions, you could get a coupon for a new bulb,” Hill said.

Akoha was inspired by the popularity of video games, but Hill lamented that many of them require a huge time commitment. Others, he said, are too violent.

“Not everyone aspires to be a wizard in life,” he said, referring to the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft.

The popularity of social networks and the competitive element of user-generated media – as in whose video is the most watched on YouTube – were the basis for the game’s social edge.

Hill believes that the good feelings players get from helping others, along with the fight for the top Samaritan, will be enough of a stimulus to keep players ordering new mission cards.

Whether people can be motivated to action through a Web game, or whether Akoha will simply become another Internet novelty of fleeting allure, will be evident in a few years.

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