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October 26, 2007 > Arts & Entertainment > Residential colleges go to war in new online strategy game

Residential colleges go to war in new online strategy game

By Matthew McKee | Thresher Editorial Staff

Armies will fill the Academic Quad next week. Battles will rage over the Rice Memorial Center. Hanszen College should watch out; they might be flanked by Wiess College or Will Rice College. No one is safe — online, that is.

GoCrossCampus, an online strategy game based on conquering territories on maps, will open a game for Rice students Monday. Undergraduate students will be able to join forces with other members of their residential college to command virtual armies and take over sections of an online campus map. College rivalries will become simulated military encounters — online versions of what Beer-Bike water balloon fights always want to be.

The nine teams, one for each of the nine colleges, will be comprised of individual members who command their own armies and a team commander, elected by team members before the battles begin, who dictates team strategy via the game’s online interface. Each turn of the game lasts one day, so each day players can log on, see what strategy their team is following and move their armies.

The analogy to the board game Risk is tempting, but Yale University senior Brad Hargreaves, who created GXC with a small group of people, said there is a key difference.

“Calling us Risk creates a lot of confusion,” Hargreaves said. “Each person in this game controls their own armies. … It’s not the strategy of any one person that’s important; it’s really the whole of anyone on the team.”

GXC also features tools for player coordination and communication. Team commanders can e-mail their team and give orders via text wikis so individual players can know how to move their armies. The game also uses live chat for all players in a game so team members can joke and rib one another.

The game was provided to Rice for free, and students do not have to pay anything to sign up.

Student Association President Laura Kelley said Hargreaves contacted her in June about the possibility of opening a GXC game for Rice. Kelley, a Brown College senior, said she supported the idea and is excited about what it could do for students.

Kelley said Rice’s Student Association plans on advertising the game as much as it can because the game appeals to students who do not attend the SA’s usual tailgates and sports events.

“The one thing I’ve been trying to do this year is reaching out to students that we haven’t reached out to much in the past,” she said. “This will be one way to engage the campus in an inter-college competition in something that is non-athletic.”

Hargreaves said he asked Kelley about bringing GXC to Rice because Rice’s strong culture of college competition supports a casual game like this.

With housing systems similar to Rice, campuses like Harvard University and Yale University have participated in GXC, and Hargreaves said students on those campuses had no problem jumping into the competition.

“When we just pair up dorms, it doesn’t behave with insanity and doesn’t become a phenomenon like it does on campus with colleges,” he said.

On GXC’s online blog, Hargreaves writes that competition becomes seditious, as well. He points out that in the game currently going on for students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are offering to sell team secrets for real money in acts of espionage. Students at other campuses have also tried to hack the game in order to sign up dummy players so their team could have more armies.

Hargreaves said that half of students at Yale and Harvard signed up to play the game when it featured their campuses, and players have spent from two minutes to two hours a day on the GXC Web site.

Kelley said the game appeals not just to hardcore gamers, and she also wants to see casual players who do not want to invest much time online but want to support their college become involved. For students who like to have fun without sacrificing too much time, participation in GXC is possible.

“I’m hoping that it won’t adversely affect grades for anyone, that’s for sure,” Kelley said.

Registration for Rice’s GXC game begins Monday, Oct. 29, at www.gocrosscampus.com and students can sign up at any time their team is still in the game.

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