games

kwerk is a game of four colors

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

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…
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