War Game Takes Colleges by Storm

Somewhere, Harvard is plotting an assault on Yale, while Cornell forges an alliance with Princeton. Such mass maneuvers are routine in GoCrossCampus, a Risk-like online war game in which teams of hundreds of players move armies across virtual versions of real campus locations. But it’s the real-world interaction, as students hash out strategy, that could make it the next Internet phenomenon to come from college entrepreneurs, the New York Times says.

At Rice, for example, players gathered in the cafeteria during a flashpoint in their digital war with another dorm. “One of the commanders delivered Morpheus’ speech” from the second Matrix movie, one student recalled, and soon recruits were pouring in. The creators—Yale and Columbia undergrads—are planning to sell custom team-building versions to corporations; Google has already signed up. (More internet stories.)