kwerk is a game of four colors – green, red, yellow, and blue.

each color corresponds to a different way of looking at the world.

green is the color of foundation and structure – of plans, logistics, and routines; the rhythm of physical existence.
red is the color of action – of work, economics, and ‘progress’; the creation of material things that didn’t previously exist.
yellow is the color of reason – of science, logic, and formal language; the development and articulation of ideas.
blue is the color of intuition – of memory, emotion, and art; the sense of connection to something beyond the self.

i am happiest when swimming in blue, comfortable with yellow for sport, alarmingly reluctant to devote time to red until the last possible minute, and nearly totally oblivious to green when it is not being actively enforced by other people.

if that makes sense, you actually know quite a bit about me now.

there are four colors for the same basic reason that there are four elements, and four suits in a deck of cards, and four continuums of the myers-briggs personality survey; fourness just seems to keep popping up when people go about trying to subdivide the human experience into meaningful chunks. there are lots of theories about why, and i am devoting a good amount of yellow time to studying them, but that is not the focus of this post. on the whole, the crosscultural persistence of the meme is enough to capture my attention, and when it comes to the initial decisions about how to structure kwerk, i am inclined to respect my elders.

playing kwerk is about learning to think in four colors, as if your life is one of those video games where your character has different health bars, and you go around collecting items or playing minigames or talking to tree sprites in order to build up the different bars. thus, you prepare yourself for the different sorts of challenges that present themselves as the story unfolds, and you improve your chances for success.

to get started in kwerk, you color code your actions and your goals, and then you log what you spend your time doing. over time, you get a color distribution of your life that is increasingly informative. it’s kind of like using quicken to keep track of how you spend your money in order to help you figure out your budget, except it’s keeping track of how you spend your time in order to help you figure out your dreams.

kwerk is a game that i am inventing for myself, to incentivize red and green activity that i tend to procrastinate or ignore completely, and to reward myself for blue and yellow activity that i tend to dismiss as easy and therefore undervalue.

on the whole, kwerk is a tool for cultivating balance.
and it’s a game because i see no reason that such pursuits should not be fun.

right now, kwerk exists mostly in my mind, but bit by bit, conversation by conversation, it is taking root in more minds and sending out fragile little shoots that we can see and touch and nurture and name.

it’s kind of exciting. :)

so… an online version is the goal.
hopefully by the end of the year.
who wants to play?

more broadly, i suppose, who’s still reading this blog?

and what should i talk about next?

metapost, after the jump, for the intrepid amongst ye…

this post has been a long time coming, and i am proud of myself for writing it, but also kind of intimidated by the specter of getting myself to keep writing regularly, which is always what scares me when i come back to blogging after a break.

overall, i like the post pretty well, though i want a description of kwerk that is much shorter, eventually. right now i’m still playing with different metaphors to see which ones work best.

the hardest part about writing about kwerk right now is not going off on really big tangents, because, in my mind, kwerk is only the first piece in a bigger game, which i still refer to as workball, even though initial market research seems to suggest that a better name might improve my chances of recruitment. :)

workball is a network of microbusinesses that are run out of homes, not offices, with a network-wide game where money is not the only currency.
there are also points, and you get points for different kinds of work, and for balancing your workload, which is where it will draw from kwerk.
i like the idea of transforming work into a game, rather than relying on traditional business models for your rules of engagement, because games have the potential to be both fun and fair, and capitalism has the tendency to be neither.

so anyway, i love kwerk, and i am convinced that i need to develop it fully before diving more deeply into workball, but workball is really exciting to me, so i want to talk about it, too, and therein lies the danger once i start writing, because there is only so much people can absorb at once.

so i guess what i should do is make an outline of all the posts about kwerk and workball that i want to write, and just start moving through them, one at a time.
at the end of that process, i will have a bunch of stuff to look at and cull from, and maybe i can write a summary of the whole.

that’s a really good idea.

and it seems really basic, now doesn’t it.

outlines are very green, and did i mention that i am pretty much oblivious to green?
:)

so ok, that should be my next assignment.

this whole metapost thing could work out well!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 6:07 pm and is filed under design, entrepreneurial spirit, games, kwerk, psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.