For example, there was a time not too long ago when everyone left their trash in the movie theaters. Our culture shifted somehow and in time now most of us have cut that reflex.  With AOK, we hope to track, illuminate and so “gamefully” nudge these paradigm shifts of behavior into becoming more mindful.

I’m reminded of a video from Estonia, a small European country with beautiful forests except that for decades they were dumping grounds for people’s trash. Thousands of acres. With leadership and the power of the internet, 50,000 volunteers cleaned up in 5 hours what would’ve taken the government months to clean. That was one VERY BIG Act of Kindness (AOK) – but there are millions of ways that similar behavior can be replicated even on an individual level in fractions of the time that they spent.

And it need not be so “cause” related either – kindness comes in many forms and sometimes it’s just about having fun, celebrating life and the people and things in it by choosing to do something selflessly cool – so we’ve identified six different potential recipients of AOKs:  People, Animals, The Planet, Organizations, Places and Objects (aka monuments/artifacts). No AOK Act or Observation is too small and we have ways that players can self-measure how difficult and how time consuming each one was.

Those were just a few of the thoughts Ira Liss speaks about when describing what inspired their new game for good, AOK.  As you may see on the site, they’ve partnered with us to offer you Challenge #3:  Missions of Kindness.  We’ve included the rest of our discussion below.

We’re excited about launching our product with the Gameful community because Gameful members recognize social change is most effectively delivered by people who feel like they’re not doing it arduously, but for fun.  Right now there’s only a minority of people plugged into the concept of games for good, so we at AOK are thrilled to work with the thought leaders of the movement and to make it a more prevalent and embraced approach to learning and social innovation.

Where did the inspiration for the idea come from?

Lynn (who’s our Chief Operating Officer) and I got the idea for AOK from another project we’re running called The Golden Opportunity which explores the question of how people might behave with found money IF they knew they were being watched.  Users received branded tools like a Flip Cam and a cash card loaded with $250, and were invited to a digital community that received the video.

They were told they could do whatever they wanted as long as they recorded their actions on the site. We were blown away with how much mindful and even philanthropic content came back and so we sought to find a way to scale the concept even further. But it wasn’t until we met with Adrian Grenier’s producing partner on SHFT, Peter Glatzer, who relayed an idea that Adrian had around an acts of kindness picture-sharing community, and reflecting on the popularity of Foursquare and Farmville, that a light bulb went off for us to flesh out the solution as a game. TGO still serves as community for micro-activists enjoying our new “Film it Forward” concept, geared more towards organizations looking incentivize certain positive actions, where the Flip camera gets passed from user to user, inciting a ripple effect of action.

The same investor who had invested in our previous project invested in this project, AOK.  From that point in time we talked to smart people and built the team up from scratch.

How long did that take?

We launched TGO in April 2010 and met Peter Glatzer in late August.  Most of the game mechanics design (as opposed to creative design) occurred between November and February and we’ve been building it ever since.

We had a work session between Christmas and New Year’s while most people in America were still in their Pjs, huddled around fireplaces.  We brainstormed on what AOK could be and it was an incredibly energizing session where philosophy met psychology and business.

What was the biggest learning lesson on the project?

Our goal was to increase mindfulness for acts of kindness, bringing awareness of what was happening in that moment itself.

In terms of building out a game like this, we had ambitious goals to think it was all possible – to launch a mobile app and website at same time, April 28th – but we realized that we were building a niche version of Facebook on the web side, as the lead developers have been calling it lately, and that is a bigger undertaking than we anticipated.

We had to make use of our current strength so we made a recent decision where instead of launching both the mobile app and website at the same time, we’ve decided to take a novel approach, sinking all the time and effort into the mobile game, have the mobile experience be end to end complete and with each mobile registrant recording AOK’s on the mobile side that data is feeding to our web side simultaneously – that way when we do release web a few weeks later, it will already (hopefully!) be a vibrant community.

As a treat for our wonderful Gameful users, and what other alpha testers won’t have access to, is visibility to all those AOKs actions posting to website. They’ll also have full access to its functionality and so we hope to hear all of their candid and constructive feedback so we can adjust real time.

We recognized an opportunity in what appeared to be a challenge.  It sounds cliché, but – lemonade from lemons – we realized we couldn’t get too attached to any one process or idea in the development.  Technology often drives go-to-market strategy and in at least our case it revealed a better one than we could have thought of in the initial plan.

What were some interesting choices you had to make in getting the game design just right?

One interesting aspect was trying to get the incentives right.  For example, we didn’t want to encourage spam-like behavior.  We tried to get the incentives to be encouraging enough to make you want to share but not so encouraging so that you’ll pull out your black book and the telephone book (do they still exist?) and send to everyone with an email address.

An interesting feature we included was Confessions.  Maybe you didn’t complete an AOK one day – you saw a piece of trash and for whatever reason (too rushed, bad neighborhood, whatever) didn’t pick it up. Or maybe you believe that putting weights away at the gym is counter-productive for the next person who’ll be using them, but you’re not sure.  Or maybe you tried to do an AOK for someone and it went horribly wrong – a misunderstanding or misperception of your intentions. So you’re reflecting on the moment later and maybe feel guilty or just not sure what the right thing to do was – at Confession submitting your thoughts is as another way to contribute to the community, to earn from the experience and reconfirm that, indeed, no one is perfect.  It’s OK to not always be AOK. We’re not rewarding points for posting individual Confessions but it’s a cool place to work out your own relationship with the game. Kind of like Postsecret.com but for Acts of Kindness.

Ultimately we’re hoping to take the points accrued through Acts and Observations (and in version 2.0 Social Hero Journeys, where players level up through several different tracks of increasingly challenging AOKs, like starting with picking up a piece of trash and 6-7 steps later the “epic win” of organizing a community-wide clean up of a local park) and in the short term and beyond, these points will convert into “Cause Currency” to donate to charities and causes beyond your AOK action. We’re also in talks with branded partners to both increase the amount of rewarded Cause Currency as well as SWAG and discounts.

Any last things you’d like the Gameful community to know?

We hope people will start with micro-actions and eventually get to the point where they’re organizing others to take actions with AOK, generating a new social network that address the activists in us —whereas Facebook captures your social life, and LinkedIn your business contacts, if we’re right and if AOK is fun and rewarding, it can be a place where you connect with people who want to impact the world the same way you do.

One sound bite that I tinkered into being (other than our overall tag line “A new kinda kind”) is around our Cause Currency concept- whereas it was once said “act locally, think globally”, with AOK it can become “act locally, impact globally”.

Thanks for the chance to chat Ira!

In addition to the great interview here they also shared some of the creative assets used in the production of the game to give the community a chance to see some before and after parts of the process, although often wireframes can change more than they did this time.  We hope that as game designers its helpful to see some of these building blocks and hear about their process.

Take a look and if you have any questions, thoughts or comments submit them below.  Hope you all enjoy the mobile app!