Color Wars 2008
Color Wars 2008 is an internet-wide game in which players from a number of self created teams compete for prizes and medals. It was created by Ze Frank and Erik Kastner.
What’s the idea?
Ze and Erik used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball - sort of like the movie Meatballs, except all within the same camp.
During the summer they were divided into discreet units, older kids here, younger kids there, Hiawathans by the lake Tawasenthans by the ropes course, etc… But when it came time for color wars you had no idea who would be on your team. It was a release, and it was viciously fun.
Ze says, “For a while I had been thinking about how a color war might look online. How would you play tug of war, or other group games that were silly, time limited, and awesome… and more importantly how could you create teams within an already functioning environment to have that same people-mash-up effect that we did at camp.
Twitter seemed perfect. So shortly after signing up I posted this tweet, this tweet, and this tweet.
There are hundreds of teams, some of which are hundreds of players deep, and the self organizing properties of twitter hasd provided a perfect implicit structure that can be used to start setting up the colorwar events. Beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future, and create opportunities for ambient identity and events that are not bound to the ‘place based” metaphor of the web.’ “
Neat!
