South 40 to unveil online rescollege version of "Risk"
David Song
Issue date: 10/22/07 Section: News
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GoCrossCampus, an Internet game that allows students to participate in an ongoing battle over Washington University's campus, will be online for South 40 students in the coming weeks.
Each team will represent one of the South 40's residential colleges competing for dominance in the massively multiplayer social gaming platform.
GoCrossCampus (GXC), first launched at Yale University this spring, resembles strategic board games such as Risk and Diplomacy, but will be entirely online. The game currently remains in its Beta version.
"Every day is a turn where you get armies, place armies, attack countries with armies, etc.," explained Matt Herman, the Director of Finance of the Congress of the South 40, who helped initiate GoCrossCampus at the University. "You make all these moves, and GoCrossCampus simulates the battles. Everyone's on a team, so you have to coordinate your moves with the members. It's the residential colleges playing against each other, and the map is the entire Danforth campus."
Matthew Brimer, a Yale sophomore, the Chief Marketing Officer of GoCrossCampus and one of the game's developers, noted that the prototype for GoCrossCampus proved surprisingly popular after its first release on Yale University. Over half of Yale undergraduates have registered with GoCrossCampus.
"The whole thing started with a prototype game we ran in spring 2007, but right now we have a platform on which we can launch several games at once," said Brimer. "Over 60 percent of the entire Yale undergraduate body was logging in daily and playing the game; that number, almost 3,000 people, was blowing everyone away. What that inspired us to do was to bring the game to the next level…to new schools."
Students interested in GoCrossCampus, noted Brimer, were not just those heavily interested in computer games-that is, "hardcore" gamers.
"We found that people playing this weren't just hardcore gamers, but they were recruiting all their friends to get involved-student leaders, people with big social contacts, people loyal to their residential colleges," he said.
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