Bernie DeKoven, funsmith: Ze Frank's Virtual Color Wars

As you know, I am a great fan of Ze Frank's work. No, make that Ze Frank's play.

As you might also know, I am a Twitter dabbler. Recently, Ze once again launched something new into the cybersphere. Something oddly like a giant, world-wide game of Virtual Color War. I'll let Ze explain:

We 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 we 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.

So, for a while I've 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 yesterday AM I posted this tweet, this tweet, and this tweet.

And now it has gone haywire. I regret having caused a day of spam...but...

There are dozens of teams, some of which are hundreds of players deep. Many of the players don't really know what they joined or why, but for me and the wonderful coders that are working on this, it is a perfect implicit structure that can be used to start setting up the colorwar events. And beyond this, it is an idiom that can be used to create rapid affiliation and action models in the future.