How the ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Color Wheel Explains Humanity
By: Duncan A Sabien
Tags: Colors, Rationality, Psychology, Design

Okay, that’s the color wheel. Now what do we do with it?

In essence: classify things, and then make predictions based on those classifications.

By tentatively assigning things a color label (whether that thing be a whole person or a particular endeavor or even just a specific sentence), you can boot up a set of associations that allow you to prioritize your search-and-predict algorithms. The claim isn’t that a person who exhibits one aspect of redness will definitely exhibit all of the others, it’s that the bucket “red” is robust and trope-y and resonant enough that one red trait is decent circumstantial evidence of the existence of others.

(It’s worth noting that the colors speak largely to goals and means. Traits like “good” or “evil” do not map to the color wheel, since every color has ways in which it can be either. Similarly, emotions like love and hate can crop up in every color, as can characteristics like compassion or gregariousness or elegance — the difference is in how people respond to those emotions and those characteristics. All of the colors can feel strong emotion, but red responds to them by following them, while blue responds to them by investigating them. All of the colors can be polite, but white does so out of pro-sociality, whereas black does so transactionally.)

This is where I get the greatest benefit from the color wheel, myself — in interpreting how and why people have the reactions they have to various stimuli, and in predicting what they’ll do next.

For instance, I had a friend once who was suffering from a fairly serious bout of depression, to the point that they found themselves frequently having suicidal thoughts. Several of our mutual acquaintances had tried to help, in some fairly standard ways — they’d encouraged them to exercise regularly and try to repair their eating and sleeping habits, they’d tried to schedule regular visits to keep them company, and they’d asked them to commit to calling if things got particularly dark.

However, every single intervention just seemed to make things worse. My friend was chafing under every attempt to help, adding frustration and explosiveness to what was already a heavy emotional load.

What helped (for me) was connecting all of this anecdotal data to my prior, cached sense that this friend was red. Booting up my color wheel knowledge was a significant sense-making maneuver — suddenly, I had a hypothesis about what was going wrong. I realized that every attempted intervention had been orderly, structural — putting them on an exercise schedule, turning their life into a routine, forcing them into a contract that said that, in their most desperate and painful moments, they were obligated to pick up the phone and call — it was all white, white, white, white, white, and each new offer of help was like an additional bar being added to the cage.

The hypothesis generated a next action, too — I drove to their house, told them to get in my car, and started driving.

“Where are we going?” they asked.

“Dunno. Doesn’t matter. Any place you want to go?”

They were silent for a while. “Beach,” they said finally.

It’s not like this intervention fixed everything, of course. But it did make it better — that was a good day, for my friend, and in addition to the object level benefits of a day at the beach, I was able to stop kicking them accidentally while they were down.

A white character who’s depressed is going to want to do exercise routines and contracts-to-call.

A blue one is going to want to talk it over and figure out exactly what’s wrong.

A black one is going to want to take action — to regain locus of control.

A red one is going to want fewer constraints, and permission to just feel.

And a green one is going to be looking for ways to let go of the pain. To make peace with the parts of the situation they’re not going to be able to change.

The key recognition is that all of these ways of being are okay. They’re all good, they’re all evolved and refined, they’re all adaptive and workable.

But they’re different. If you’re blue/green and you walk around implicitly believing that everyone else is, too, you’re going to be confused and disappointed at how everyone is just regularly screwing up, and how they don’t even notice it.

If you’re mono-black, you’re going to see Machiavellian machinations everywhere, and you may not be able to tell the difference between someone trying to manipulate you and someone who’s actually just being their genuine self.

If you’re super red, you’re going to be confused as hell when your longtime partner starts talking about wanting to get married. If you’re hardcore white, you may not even be able to tolerate polyamory.

It’s all about perspective, and interpretation, and inference, and connotation. If I see someone staunchly defending the status quo, I boost my credence in a label of green-white. If I see someone vigorously defending their autonomy and freedom and refusing to make solid commitments, I tentatively tag them red-black. And these models help me to relate to people better on their own terms — to more rapidly understand their goals and motivations, to more accurately contextualize their actions, and to know which facet of my own personality to turn toward them.

In the end, it’s all shorthand, and clear-opinions-lightly-held. Learning the color system doesn’t really give me new information — it’s just an intuition pump, an extra library imported to my script. But like a good library, it gets me places a lot faster, and enables a lot more quick function calls than doing the whole thing in straight code.

My last anecdote is about how the color wheel broke me out of writer’s block — I’d been stuck at the same point in my then-one-quarter-finished novel for almost a year when I came across this framework, and I immediately sat down to try to classify all of my characters (as MTG game designer Mark Rosewater often does on his blog, where most of my understanding of this stuff comes from).

I was surprised to discover that, while I had an immediate stereotype about my second- and third-most important characters (red and white/blue/black, respectively) I had no idea what colors my main character was.

Thinking about it for an hour produced a decision (partly based on previous impressions, and partly solidifying and crystallizing those impressions) of green/blue, and I was off. I wrote thirty pages over the next two days, not to mention cleaning up a bunch of loose and random characterization.

There are other intuition pumps that do similar things for other people. Maybe I could’ve had the same breakthrough with word association or rolling dice or throwing darts at pictures of Robert Kegan. But of all the toy frameworks I’ve played with in my life, this is the one that keeps on giving. If I had to give you one, well — I didn’t have to, but this is the one I chose.

The five mana symbols (™ and © Wizards of the Coast)

Appendix

A sampling of how one might use color wheel thinking: