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?

Speaking at a roundtable luncheon in New York earlier today, Sony’s John Koller revealed that the PlayStation Portable will finally receive its long-awaited keyboard peripheral. According to Koller, Sony’s director of hardware marketing, it should arrive within the next 12 months.  Continue Reading

Next-Gen is reporting that PMOG, or the “Passively Multiplayer Online Game,” has been launched by GameLayers. Played in a Firefox browser by surfing with a free extension, PMOG transforms a user’s typical web-crawl into an online battlefield, where visiting one’s usual sites can allow you to find missions and items, or stumble over booby traps left by other users. Continue Reading

GameCyte looks at a new casual browser game that might have the power to teach. Continue Reading

What do you know, MI6? The future of online gaming is upon us, and it is a social networking title for players to get together and share their hatred of deer. Continue Reading

Social networking is huge these days. Popular web metric Compete.com estimates that on average, nearly one hundred million unique users visit the pages of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn every month. That number, if accurate, is one-third the entire population of the United States, the third-largest country in the world.

While its climb is not nearly as pronounced, social gaming is also on the rise. Just look at the work of New York Times writer Seth Schiesel. Writing about gaming in American society for one of the most influential newspapers in the world, Schiesel has been closely monitoring the paradigm shift — from gaming as a niche hobby to gaming as a social phenomenon — for the past several years. Continue Reading

Remember how you and your buddies made Tommy, CJ and that unnamed dude from GTA3 do all kinds of crazy ****, then checked out their rap sheet to see how many prostitutes you flattened and how much collateral damage you caused? Well, yesterday Rockstar announced they’re expanding that feature a little bit: Continue Reading