The residential college armies are coming in November.

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.
One of GoCrossCampus’s most engaging facets, added Brimer, was the level of personal involvement students could share in the game.

“The cool thing about GoCrossCampus is that it’s your campus,” he said. “You can walk around and say, ‘my team is holding this territory here.’ It’s an interesting competitive spirit.”

Over the summer, Herman and others from the Washington University Student Union worked with GoCrossCampus developers to make the University one of the institutions whose students would be able to test the Beta version of the game.

Because of its residential college system which resembles Yale’s, the University stood out as a prime candidate for continued testing of the game.

“I knew that [Washington University] had a residential college system similar to Yale’s,” said Brimer. “Wash. U. would be a great inaugural school with which to launch [GXC].”

The structure of the game sits at the level of the residential college. While individual students can spend relatively little time each day on GoCrossCampus, they can also elect-or impeach-commanders that coordinate the team’s attacks and defenses as a whole.

“You’re not playing just for yourself; you’re playing for your entire residential college,” explained Brimer. “How we built cooperation and team effort in the system is that you can democratically elect leaders. That’s a way for the team to come under the leadership of one or several commanders.”

The strength of a team rests on both strategy and members, as the size of a team depends on how many students of its residential college have signed up for the game.

“If one residential college has recruited five hundred people to play, that team will have [that many] people. Everyone has incentive to recruit friends and people in the residential college-it’s a casual game, two minutes a day-place your armies and you’re done. But for the people who want to delve into the strategy, that kind of stuff is more than available.”

Although GoCrossCampus covers the entire Danforth campus, the game will be restricted to South 40 residents until at least next year.

“We plan next year to open this to everyone, to Millbrook or Greenway, but it’s difficult to coordinate it,” said Herman.

Once GoCrossCampus becomes available to Washington University students, they can register at GoCrossCampus.com.

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