At the 2008 Social Gaming Summit, GameCyte happened to run into Brad Hargreaves, CEO and Co-Founder of GoCrossCampus, and couldn’t help but strike up a conversation about the promising local gaming endeavor. While I was rather disappointed to learn that the company is expanding its game topics beyond simple college turf (and losing some of its enviable local focus in the process), we gleaned some interesting tidbits from Hargreaves and his Director of New Games, Henry Finkelstein, about how these new games are set up.
While affinities are important to a good game of GoCrossCampus, I asked the pair if rivalries also played a role, and Finkelstein admitted that they did indeed. When consulted about a new game, the GXC team will meet with a member inside the sponsoring organization, whether it be college or company, to look not only for affinities but also existing rivalries (between dorms, departments, etc.) upon which the game can be divided. Furthermore, Finkelstein explained his belief that the lack of such rivalries may have led to the relative failure of GoCrossStatus, a recent variant that pits those with different Facebook relationship statuses (”single,” “in a relationship,” “it’s complicated,” etc) against one another.
But what happens, I wondered out loud, if a successful game of GoCrossCampus between rival company departments led to real-world resentment and discord among parts of an organization that needs to cooperate? Finkelstein responded with the always-apt line about how that would be a problem they’d love to have, but Hargreaves himself chimed in with the revelation that campus-goers, at least, go crazy for GXC as it is.”We’ve had people arrested because of GXC; we’ve had people drop out of school because of GXC,” he said.
EverCrack on two minutes a day, anyone?
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