Rice completes first run of GoCrossCampus
Will Rice defeats other colleges among potential campus-wide cheating, game bugs
What began as a simple way to pass the time soon turned into an all-out battle of strategy, diplomacy and many sleepless nights. Now the battle has ended.
GoCrossCampus, an online game in which residential colleges vie for territory, finished competition Dec. 31 at midnight.
Due to the highly competitive intercollegiate atmosphere on campus, GXC saw an exceptional number of participants from Rice. GXC co-founder Brad Hargreaves said that out of the ten universities that played this year, Rice’s participation was the highest. Fifty-five percent of undergraduates played the game while participation from other schools varied from 15 to 50 percent.
However, this percentage may not be accurate because of the possibility that one student could register for multiple people and play on that account.
Will Rice College won the competition, capturing 33 territories. Junior Matthew Dahlgren, who commanded the team along with seniors James Deyerle and Eastman Landry, said his college had a highly coordinated and intense system for staying on top of the game.
“We lost sleep over this game,” Dahlgren said. “When they switched to four-hour turns in the middle of the game, we’d have to take shifts and get up at midnight or 4 a.m. It was a killer during finals. My roommate would say, ‘Look, I have a final today, and I can’t play,’ so I’d have to take over his shift for the day.”
The game continued long after finals finished as participants from all colleges furiously typed away at their computers over break, writing e-mails and posting army placement strategies.
Will Rice students even cheered each other on with the Gladiator theme song.
“I made a playlist of intense songs for the game. It was really fun and really nerdy,” Dahlgren said.
The intensity of this game was largely due to the fact that alliances were often made and broken among the colleges.
“My inbox was flooded with over a hundred e-mails about GoCrossCampus in less than a week,” Dahlgren said.
He also said that the reason why Will Rice came out at the top of the game was probably because they had been loyal with their alliances.
Although students enjoyed GXC, Hargreaves said there will be some changes made to the game in the following years to fix some of the problems players encountered this year, such as cheating. Hargreaves said all colleges recruited people from their colleges to sign up and then had a single person playing multiple users.
Will Rice also accused Jones College of signing up “new” users using vanity e-mail addresses. Each Rice e-mail account is given three vanity addressees a student can use in addition to the address with his or her Net ID. GXC registered these vanity addresses, as if they belonged to separate people, though all addresses went to the same inbox.
“There’s eventually going to be a major shift in the way games will be created and how the users interact with the site, but let’s just say that next year things will run a lot smoother and there shouldn’t be any significant bugs,” Hargreaves said.
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