Go Cross Campus With Me?

Last Monday I sat in a tiny coffee shop on Yale University’s campus in New Haven. Two students were whispering about meetings for battle plans, maps, weapons and spies. I got up to leave while I still could when the closest guy said “Do you want to go cross campus with me?” I told him I was old enough to be his mother and he was in enough trouble already.

MY MISTAKE! I was being invited to join the hottest trend sweeping college campuses this winter. Go Cross Campus is a strategy game that brings kids out of their rooms, and into each others lives. University students found a way to combine the way their parents and grandparents used to play with the way kids think and connect today. Rather than meeting to play in sports leagues, or being separated by walls and individual habits, an “online war game invented by students” has “hundreds, sometimes thousands of players” uniting, often with faculty, on school campuses.

“This kind of game is a product of how people live and interact today, with the offline aspect as part of the draw.” The game involves ideas best remembered by a previous generation that grew up playing outside with kids from their neighborhood. The rules of play span a gap so many of us are seeking between "one’s tech time and the healthier, more ‘human’ life.” Many of us find it difficult to put aside our solitary habits, techno toys and screens. Go Cross Campus reminds us how to play with friends. “Rather than isolating us in an online world, it enhances our interactions in the real world.”

“Players gather together to elect commanders, recruit other players and discuss strategy and ways of spying on opponents as they formulate battle plans.” The play continues online, “but requires only a few minutes of online play each day.” Go Cross Campus, also known by its’ initials GXC is described as “multiplayer locally social gaming.” This describes the “online connections that are created between players who typically know one another in the real world, harnessing their energy to create really intense and enthusiastic Go Cross Country groups of online gamers, even if you’ve never played a game online before.”

Will GXC catch on? “Next month, Google will bring Go Cross Campus to its New York office, pitting sales departments against engineering groups over a map of the company’s Manhattan campus. One of the most popular offshoot games is called GO Cross Political Bash 08. It pits 2,000 supporters of political candidates against one another over a map of the United States.”

If you’re lucky enough to be invited to GOCROSSCAMPUS say yes!

- Nancy