Akoha

» see akoha.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

In April 2008 a Montreal startup raised $1.9 million from a list of angels that included the film producer behind Gandhi and one of the founders of Lavalife. What they were funding was a card game about being nice to people. Akoha had been incorporated in December 2006 by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts, took the stage at TechCrunch50 in September 2008, and opened a public beta that December calling itself the world's first social reality game.

The object of play was a mission. Each one was a small real-world act written on a physical card: give somebody a copy of your favorite book, or hand somebody a compact fluorescent bulb. A deck of 24 cards cost $5. You performed the mission, you gave the beneficiary the card, and the card carried a code that let them log into the site, confirm it happened, and write up what it was like, usually with a photo. Then the card was theirs to play forward onto somebody else.

It worked well enough to keep going for three years and to earn a strange press file, including an academic blog post arguing about whether a points system attached to charity counted as direct action. An iPhone app arrived in March 2010 so missions could be logged from the street instead of from a desk. The service never got past the problem it had on day one, which is that the people enjoying it were not paying for it and the people paying for it were $5 at a time.

On 2 August 2011 a post went up on the Akoha blog addressed to "Dear Akoha Community Member" announcing that the site would close on 15 August. The team wrote that they had set out in the fall of 2007 to build a community around real-world activity and felt they had reached that goal. Then came the sentence that actually explains the date: despite their best efforts, they could not generate enough revenue to cover their expenses. Members were given instructions for saving a PDF archive of their own activity. Archive Team ran a panic download on 14 August, one day before the lights went out.

~ the record ~

~ how a card moved ~

The design decision that makes Akoha worth remembering is that the token was physical and the scoreboard was not. Every other social game of the period kept the entire loop inside the browser, where the cost of an action is a click and the supply of actions is infinite. Akoha put a manufactured object in the middle, which capped the game at the speed of the postal service and at the number of people you were willing to walk up to.

That constraint did the work. A card had a serial number, so the site could draw the path it had taken from the person who bought it through everyone who had been handed it since, and a well-traveled card accumulated a chain of other people's write-ups. The archived user pages carry an awards section and a list of gifts given, which is what the scoring looked like from the outside. The panic download that Archive Team took in August 2011 preserved user profiles and missions, so the chains are still readable.

~ why it never paid ~

Five dollars for 24 cards is a price that has to cover a printed object in the mail and a web platform behind it, and it only lands at all if the buyer keeps buying decks. Akoha was asking people to pay for the privilege of giving things away, on top of whatever the mission itself cost them. The only obvious way out was corporate sponsorship of mission decks, and GamesBeat reported them moving toward cause-related games on that basis, which is a slower business than the burn rate of a venture-funded startup in 2011.

None of this reached Turkey, and the reason is in the physical layer rather than the language. The game needed decks of cards arriving in a mailbox and a local population dense enough that handing one to a stranger was a reasonable thing to do. That is a North American product with a North American distribution assumption baked into the box, and shipping a $5 deck to Ankara cost more than the deck itself. I read about Akoha years later, as a design idea rather than as something I could have joined.

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