The Young and the Ruthless

Banning military recruiters from this campus is fully justified; Harvard students are dangerous enough without basic training.

It’s been less than a week since the College Events Board launched its first-ever cyber-event, Harvard Risk. In that time, more than 3000 undergraduates, House Masters, and tutors have savagely butchered each other online, each of them determined to help their House take control of the stylized campus map that is our digital game board. In the process, papers have been abandoned, lives rescheduled, and House formals abandoned for the sake of placing troops before each of the game’s three daily turns.

I’m one of the people who receive the roughly 30 e-mails sent each hour through the Risk interface by game players. Most of them are fairly technical and straightforward—“How do I change my password?”—while a few are just plain nice—“YOU ROCK! Whoever you are.” Others, however, are malicious: Some undergraduates are taking Harvard Risk far too seriously.

One player, from one of Harvard’s smaller Houses, contacted us just hours after the game began. He pointed out that Harvard Risk gives large Houses an advantage, by virtue of their being able to sign up the most residents to play and therefore to command the largest armies. He was spot on, but with no House, big or small, successfully signing up its entire population, the injustice didn’t seem that major. “Sorry, but war isn’t fair,” we wrote. Curt, perhaps, but honest.

His response was swift and alarming: “It is too bad so much time and effort was put into a game that clearly favours some people against others,” he wrote. “Where I come from they’d say you guys did a shitty job. Well I’ll only say that you are incapable.” It wasn’t yet 10 p.m. The first turn had been played at 5 p.m. We didn’t think we’d yet had enough time to screw up so badly.

I half expected to be attacked by a barbarian horde bearing pikes and torches on Monday, when we increased the number of bonus armies a team receives for successfully controlling an entire region of the map. The reaction was fast and quite furious. “REPLAY LAST ROUND!” one player exclaimed. “What a douchy rule,” another hissed. “I’m continually amazed at what some of the smartest students in the world can screw up.”

The tactics involved in the game itself are a whole other matter. Accusations of cheating and spying have run rampant. So, too, have actual cheating and spying. One player wrote to us fingering another House with signing up pre-frosh to bolster their ranks. “Councils of War”, which have sprung up in each House to plot strategy, jockey constantly to keep tabs on their opponents’ plans, with the help of dummy accounts, stolen passwords, and secretive informants. Open email lists and the Web site’s built-in private chat rooms have been dismissed as unsafe and prone to other House’s prying eyes.

Tech-savvy players immediately found novel ways to register multiple user accounts and increase their supply of armies, only to be brought to justice by honesty-prone teammates and, more often, by stubbornly vigilant rivals. We invalidated dozens of duplicate Leverett House accounts and unsubscribed more than 100 Adams House residents who had been signed up on a single computer—without their permission. “I did not sign up for whatever this is,” wrote one Adamsian. “If someone else is messing with my name/account that is very very very uncool.” Another wrote: “I did NOT sign up for Risk. Please take me off any e-mail list.”

It’s distinctly unoriginal to point out that Harvard students are born and bred overachievers, hypercompetitive by nature. Harvard undergraduates tend to be the sort of people who are practiced at delivering the exhortation that “winning isn’t everything” without a shadow of irony, yet completely disingenuously. Put them at the helm of make-believe armies in a campus-wide game of Risk and you’ll find yourself face-to-face with their darker side; a ruthless ambition to win so intense that anyone who dares get in the way had better watch out.

Perhaps the most incredible lesson of Harvard Risk is that this College’s best hope of forming communities quickly may just be to put people into competition with each other. Folks in Adams might do everything in their power to get an edge against other Houses, but they’re brought together in the process, in a way with which few other events can compare. As one player wrote: “I definitely got to meet some new people in my House while discussing strategy for this game. Props and keep up the good work!”

In the brainstorming sessions earlier this semester that produced the idea of Harvard Risk, the College Events Board flirted with the concept of a campus-wide game of Assassins. I really don’t want to know what that would have looked like.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. He is chair of the College Events Board. His column appears regularly.