There is a war raging in New York City to determine which of the five boroughs is the most tech savvy, restaurant-hopping, museum-going, nightclub-VIP clan. Over 100,000 battles have been recorded among the more than 3,000 players of World of Fourcraft, which turns the Big Apple into a giant game of Risk, in which each check-in represents an attack or defense. Today the service is rolling out a bunch of new features with its first update since it was created at General Assembly’s Game Hack Day.
“It seems like Foursquare is more focused on creating a loyalty card and has avoided diving too deep into gamifying their service,” says Ricky Robinett, one of Fourcraft’s founders. “They have such an incredible API that it was really simple to build a complex strategy game in a short, 48-hour hackathon.”
Not surprisingly, Manhattan and Brooklyn have the most active armies and the greatest number of conflicts, with the warriors of Williamsburg currently holding the lead. Brooklyn controls the most territory, with six percent of other boroughs and a commanding 84 percent of its own turf under its control, including large sections of the Bronx annexed by their troops. Queens is the second biggest landholder, followed by Manhattan, the Bronx and everyone’s favorite underdog, Staten Island. The new version released today allows users to track the ownerships stats from a map key on Fourcraft’s website and when users are logged in from their mobile. A nifty FAQ is now up at the main website and users can see their victories tweeted out in real time from @wofbattles.
Brooklyn has, by far, the largest concentration of iPhone Toting, fixie bicycle riding, PBR drinking, Foursquare using “hipsters”. They can afford to go out to cool places all week because the rent was / is very very cheap. What happens when you give a lot of social 20 somethings with iPhones and lots of free time a way to “compete” with other boroughs? Well, you get this.
Why is anyone surprised Brooklyn is leading this battle. There are very few other boroughs that could give a crap about this.
Discover more from Adam Chandler's Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.