By Olivia D’Angelo, News Correspondent

Instead of awkward name games and freezing ice breakers, Utsav, Northeastern’s South Asian student group, introduced a new activity to campus at its first meeting of the year last night.
The group made use of the cell phone-based scavenger hunt game ‘SCVNGR’ as an opportunity for new members to mingle and learn about campus.
‘I wanted to do an innovative icebreaker for the club,’ said Roshni Mirchandani, co-president of Utsav.
About 100 students participated in hopes of winning tickets to the upcoming SPICED Cruise, a South Asian event on the Boston Harbor tomorrow night.
According to scvngr.com, the game is a Boston-based start-up company, modernizing the scavenger hunt by using text messages to relay locations, clues, and hints to competing teams.
Each team receives a location and must travel there before receiving a clue to information they must find there. When the team successfully texts the information they find to a designated number they earn points, which ultimately determine the winner. Each team receives a new location only after submitting the correct information.
The SCVNGR company prides itself on their ‘proprietary game-dynamics engine.’ The team is given a list of commands they can text in to a designated number to help them on their quest. One such command is ‘HINT’ which sends the teams helpful advice they can use to find answers.
According to Aneequa Islam, co-president of Utsav, her group was worried when planning the game because they thought it might lead all players to the same locations at the same time, which would make it easy to cheat.
Islam found the game spread out the teams to different starting locations. The game also makes sure to lead teams on a chain of nearby locations, so no one has the unfair disadvantage of running across campus five times.
Mirchandani, who just started using SCVNGR, said it only took about four hours to fully design the game on the company website.
‘It’s amazing, it will take 15 to 20 minutes at most,’ said Islam.
The designers of SCVNGR have made it user-friendly with no cost for small, non-commercial events and the ability to work with any phone that can receive standard text messages.
‘That’s why we wanted to use it,’ Islam said. ‘Everyone has cell phones.’
While members headed off to scavenger throughout the Northeastern campus, leaders of UTSAV stayed behind to monitor’ scores of the individual teams. SCVNGR also conveniently provides a feature that tracks players so that the leaders have updated information about how the game is progressing.
The winning team showed up no more than twenty minutes after the start of the game. ‘It worked very well,’ Mirchandani said.
‘It was a lot of fun and really well organized,’ said Kirti Kewalramani, a sophomore health sciences major.