It's not an MMO or real-time strategy game. It's not a crazy-weapon shooter/platformer or another skeleton clicker (as our friend Crispin Boyer likes to call Diablo). But it does feature achievements -- and not the kind you're thinking of, either.

Booyah is a new start-up founded by industry veterans from Blizzard and Insomniac, and their first project, an upcoming iPhone app called Booyah Society, isn't really a game. It's part social-networking experiment, part personal journal, part virtual pet...and a bit confusing to make sense of.

I know other people who saw it were a little perplexed by Booyah Society. What is it exactly? Who is it for? What is the point?

After talking to a couple of other gaming journalists, I had a feeling we all went through this same four-step thought process when we got our first demo:

1. Oh, awesome! Real-life achievements!

Instead of getting achievements for completing a level or mowing down throngs of parking-lot zombies, you get them for accomplishing real-life tasks. You went to the gym. You had a healthy meal. You made people laugh. You did your green thing and took public transportation....

No, a Booyah representative doesn't follow you around documenting your every move. You write down what you did in app and tag them to different categories (entertainment, health, etc.).  When you meet certain criteria -- say, you blasted your glutes today and wrote about it in the health category -- you get a Booyah achievement in "health."

2. Wait...what?

Yeah, the app doesn't actually know you've blasted your glutes. You have to write about it, and your tag is actually what tells the system what achievements you've earned or are working on.

In other words, it's completely up to the user to stay honest about his journal entries and tagging in order to earn achievements legitimately. And yes, you can pretty much make up whatever you want to game the system. Booyah can't really tell the difference between "I scratched my ass today" and "I did three sets of squats today." That health tag is all it really cares about.

That said, some of the higher level achievements, while not foolproof, are not as loose. Booyah is meant to be tied to your other social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and the app will reward you based on feedback from your community of online friends.

So later on, if you enter "I did three sets of squats today," and that post goes to your attached Facebook feed, you may only get this more advanced achievement if so many of your friends "like" that update, thus, validating your activity. Of course, you risk annoying people with even more inane details of your personal life, and who's to say you won't get even more "likes" with "I scratched my ass today"? Again, Booyah can't tell the difference -- only what you tagged it and if people "liked" it.

3. Why didn't they...

It was very odd to us that earning achievements in Booyah is all dependent on the user being honest with himself. Why not take advantage of iPhone technology to make more legitimate, automated achievements? The system should be able to tell if you really called mom today, if you read the news, or if you walked a certain distance or visited the gym (via the GPS).

I'm hearing rumors and getting a few vague hints that some of these features may show up in future updates of Booyah, though...especially the GPS-based stuff.

4. Wait and see

It's hard to predict how well Booyah will be received. Gamers -- the natural target audience of achievements -- probably won't be getting into this so much. Gamers need tangible, specific sets of rules and guidelines: Do A, then B happens. With the flexibility in Booyah's "honor rules" system, it just doesn't feel like a game enough to make the achievements feel relevant or truly rewarding.

On the other hand, people who love documenting their every move, thought, conversation, meal, headache, etc. on Twitter or Facebook -- and there are a lot of them -- might like having a layer of rewards stacked on top of what they're already doing daily.

Of course, everything I just stated might not be fair anyways. Booyah is a product that's meant to be used over a period of time, not shown as a brief demo (plus there are a few other features I won't bother getting into, such as being able to play with your virtual-pet-like avatar or compare achievements with others). It just released today, so you can give it a try for yourself.

You can interact with your Booyah avatar, if you feel like playing with yourself.