On Friday at 7 p.m. in Higgins 310, the Entrepreneur Society hosted what could possibly become the next big phenomenon of Web 2.0 - GoCrossCampus, an extensively multiplayer, team-based online game (or according to its creators, a "sport") for affinity-based communities such as college campuses. Web 2.0 is considered the second dot-com boom - a generation of Web-based communities, comprised of Web sites like Facebook and Wikipedia. As of now, the game is in private beta form. In other words, only those who attend or used to attend schools involved in the game can play; one needs a "school.edu" e-mail address. The notion of "affinity" is very important. GoCrossCampus is not primarily concerned with being a "massively multiplayer" online game like World of Warcraft or EverQuest. Instead, it is a merging of social networking services like Facebook and MySpace and massively multiplayer online gaming, taking elements from both to create a new form of entertainment and interaction between the aforementioned venues.
Nonetheless, the gameplay is very simple. According to the company's Web site: "Each day, you will receive new armies. You will need to place these armies on a territory your team owns. If you wish, you can then command your armies to attack, defend or move." The creators intend the more complex parts of the game will be learned over time via interaction with players, both allies and enemies. It is somewhat like the board game Risk.
"Risk is essentially a world map with various countries and territories. You can place armies on that map and compete with three to six friends. You can take over other countries. You can hopefully take over the whole world. It's sort of a model of megalomania," said Brad Hargreaves, the CEO and CFO of GoCrossCampus, who is a senior molecular biology major at Yale. "Anyway, we've taken that model of megalomania, made it so that more than one person can be on a team, and changed some rules."
Instead of a board with six players, with GoCrossCampus you now have an entire college or university on each team.
2008 Woodie Awards
