Ivy League schools now have a new area to compete in - that of online gaming, via GoCrossCampus, or GXC. Developed by four undergrads at Yale and one at Columbia, GXC is a strategy territory-conquest game, much like Risk. The difference is that the battlefield consists of college campuses across the USA. Each player is given a set number of armies, and allowed to move once each day. The goal, of course, is to conquer everything. (Last Winter, Cornell turned the armies of Dartmouth into their vassals, apparently.) So far, more than eleven thousand players have taken part, and the game has been funded by both WGI Fund and Easton Capital.

What differs between GXC and any other online game with a twist? GXC extends across the realm of digital and common day life. Rather than individual people sitting at separate computers all the time and doing things towards their own means, the network of players is grouped by school, and act as a team, making GXC’s structure resemble a school intramural group. Additionally, GXC’s impact on players’ lives involves them banding together, rather than setting each person apart. In some schools, it’s a social event. (Commanders are designated, and even give motivational speeches.) It can even be seen as an online supplement to real-life networks.

The article compares the phenomenon to Facebook - while not nearly as widespread and with different purposes in mind, both applications are a networking service between schools and within them. The game has popular enough that it has extended into the political realm, with GoCrossPoliticalBash08, which, as you can guess, pits presidential candidate supporters against each other instead of university students.

Original Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/technology/21ivygame.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin