Gaming Constitution

In every GXC game, there are casual players and there are intense players. We know our players can get really into the game, and that’s awesome. We’ve had users create full music videos for GXC, players pull all-nighters during an intense battle, even two students date each other after meeting on GXC. But this is the first time one of our players has written an entire GXC Constitution!

As an act of gaming pride for GXC, Brett Yang drafted a commander constitution to establish a governmental framework for the commanders of each team. In his own words:

Brett Yang: I'm going to draft up what I call a "constitution". What does that mean? Well, I want to give some structure to this whole Commander business (and at the same time make the game meaningful for those who play but aren't in power). What can you expect? Sub-Commander ranks, Division ranks, but all of it far simpler than the US Armed Forces ranking system. :)

Here is a link to view the whole constitution (pdf file).

We at GoCrossCampus admire Brett's ingenuity, pride and ideas. His constitution brings up many unique ideas such as a supermajority and specialized commanders.

Commanders lead teams in all manner of ways, and there are many options for how to structure, organize, and lead your team. We’re working on new features for Longbow that will give even more leadership options for commanders as well as further empowerment for all players, so that everyone has more influence in the game and more to do on-site.

Taking MMOG to New Markets

If you haven't checked out Club Penguin yet, do it. It's worth dealing with the registration feature, which is (rightly) ultra-skeptical of anyone over fourteen attempting to sign up. In case you really don't want to bother, there is a great Wikipedia article here.

In case it's not immediately obvious, Club Penguin is the hottest site for kids aged 8 to 14. It's a great case study for a company marketing a game to a demographic that hasn't touched such things before. In Club Penguin's case, the effect is multiplied by the fact that not only have these individuals never played games, but their demographic has never played these sorts of games for a variety of reasons. Yet they seem to be doing a solid job of it. I'm going to assume that they foresaw the plethora of ultra-popular penguin-themed movies.

Further, Club Penguin illustrates a form of demographic arbitrage which is becoming increasingly common in the hardware industry. Simply put, it's a lot easier to get people who are doing something for the first time to adopt your way of doing it rather than win converts from another platform. The best example of this out there of this is the conflict between Linux and Microsoft over the One Laptop per Child program, which is planning to ship 5 to 10 million units this year, mostly to individuals who have never previously owned a computer. The OS shipped on those laptops, in all likelihood, will be the favored OS for those individuals for years to come.

In this case, the gameplay style and feeling of Club Penguin will be imprinted on these kids for years to come. I've been a strategy gamer for years, probably due to the fact that I spent the entirety of fourth grade playing SimCity.

Club Penguin is simply capturing a market by lowering the age at which people start playing multiplayer games. In my opinion, it was bound to happen, since the lower side of the 8-14 market has only been served by the "educational games" sector. This implies that gaming is entirely a purchase decision made for them by parents and educators. If a 10 year old girl can decide to wear makeup on her own, why can't she bug her parents to pay for a MMOG?

- Brad

Huh?

Welcome to GoCrossBlog, which will by no means be the name of this site.

As you probably know, this is an accessory to the GXStudios service, which provides custom-tailored massively multiplayer online games to affinity groups around the world. Right now, our main service is GoCrossCampus, which is preparing for a big 2007 launch.

Rather than telling the world (or the 2% of the internet that reads blogs) of our Master Plan, we have decided to use this to illuminate the theoretical, sociological, and faux-science underpinnings of what we're doing. That, and spread nasty secrets about our enemies.

Once we launch, we'll probably have to shift this over to talking about updates, site problems and other such nonsense. Until then, I'm just going to have some fun.

- Brad