3/1/13 Episode 23: The Color Pie

All podcast content by Mark Rosewater

Okay, pulling out of my driveway. That means it’s time for another Drive to Work.

Okay. So last time, I talked about the Golden Trifecta, and I talked about the first part of the Golden Trifecta, which is the trading card game genre. So today, I’m going to talk about the second part of the Golden Trifecta—by the way, for those that may not have heard the last part, Richard Garfield, when he invented Magic, I believe he came up with three awesome things that combine together to make the awesome game we know as Magic. I call that the Golden Trifecta. Those three things are: the trading card game genre, the mana system, and the color pie.

So today is about the color pie. And I’m excited, because the color pie is my favorite of those three things. Mind you, I like the other two, obviously I’m doing a podcast on all of them. The color pie can be—so if you asked me, if you said “Mark, what is the single greatest thing to making Magic the awesome thing it is?” I would say, “The color pie.” Which is interesting, because the other things are very important, but why?

And I think the thing that—so one of the things I’ve often talked about is how I love psychology. I love—if you look back at—so one of—I took a writing class. A while ago. And the writing class—the teacher of the writing class said something awesome, which she said, “if you take any author’s body of work, and you look at it, you will find that they have a theme. That there’s some theme. There’s something that runs through their writing or something they care about that is core to what they have to say as a writer.” And they said, “Now that you know that fact, here’s another fact: you as a writer, the same thing is true of. So why don’t you figure out what your theme is? So that you as a writer can be more in touch?”

So what I realized when I looked back at my stuff is, as a writer, I think my core message as a writer is, this idea that people are at their core run by their emotions. In fact, I wrote a play in college called “Leggo My Ego” and the premise of the play was that the main character has a chance—he’s in a relationship, he has been for two and a half years, but the object of his lust offers him a one-night stand no strings attached. And so the whole play is his emotions arguing over whether or not he should take up this opportunity.

And the play—like, you never see the character, it’s just—it’s his emotions. And—anyway, what I realized was, I love emotions. I love sort of the quality of the human experience. And, like for example the trading card game I made when I could make any trading card game, was called Mood Swings. Where all the cards represented emotions. I like emotions. I’m a big fan of emotions.

And more so than that, I think I like psychology. The reason I came up with the Timmy, Johnny, Spike, you know, the psychographics, was I really enjoyed sort of understanding how people—how games evoke emotions out of people. And when I talked about Innistrad a few weeks ago, I was talking about how I always try to create a mood or a tone in my designs. I want to specifically make players feels something.

So, I am a big fan of emotions. I’m a big fan of psychology. And so of course I’m a big fan of the color pie—the color pie says, “Let’s”—like, the cool thing about Magic is, at the core of its being, if you dig down deep, at the very center of the game is the color pie. And what the color pie is is, Richard said, when he made the game, that he needed–I talked about this last week. That he needed to have some separation. That if everything could go in every deck, it just caused a problem. So he needed some way to create different—to force you to have to play different kinds of things. And the mana system, which I’ll talk about next week, plays into that. But anyway, he needed something.

I think he liked five, he thought five was a good number. And to him, he was talking about magic. Well, clearly, historically, well flavorfully, I don’t know about historically, but flavorfully through literature and stuff, there’s been different kinds of magic. And he was very excited by the idea that, you know, different—mages would wield different kinds of magic. And so what he did was, he tried to take all the different ideas that he saw, and just get them into five buckets.

I think the reason he picked five, real quickly, is—I mean, this is me guessing, I don’t know for sure—one is that odd things resonate better, and that there is a sense of—aesthetics is a little more there when you have an odd number. Also, I know Richard liked the idea—which is why five was attractive, was the idea that you had two allies and two enemies worked really well. But anyway, Richard came up with this idea of five. And I mean—maybe he worked it through and figured out how many things there were, but anyway he ended up with five.

And what he found was, he found a neat way to create these five concepts. And the thing that’s awesome about the color pie is—each of the colors has a very cool philosophy to it. I’m sure, by the way, I am sure I will do a color pie—sorry, I will do a podcast dedicated to each color. I wrote articles about it.

And I’m sure I will do one in which I sort of spend thirty minutes sort of talking about what each color does. And I am fascinated by it. One of the reasons I’m one of the color pie gurus is, I am fascinated by the philosophy and the understanding of how each color functions. If you read my writing, I love—I love doing stuff in which I give voices to the colors. It’s so much fun. Because they have such a clear voice. You know.

And so, the color pie—the neat thing about it is, Richard decided that at the core of the game, he was going to base everything on the definition of these colors. And the colors—the core of the colors is philosophy. Each color wants something and functions in such a way. And—and this is the awesomeness of this, is Richard set it up in such a way that each one of the colors connected to two colors and was the enemy of two colors. You know.

And one of the neat things by the way is, the five conflicts of Magic, which means the five—two dual—you know, opposite-color conflicts—are five of like the classic concepts of humanity. Of literature. Of, you know… so let’s talk about this real quick. Because I think in some ways, the conflicts of the colors speak much louder than the allies—than the connectedness of the colors. Because I think that through the conflicts, you get the core of, you know, I mean conflict is the key of story. Because through conflict, you sort of, you know, it makes something to sort of revolve around. It makes something which—it gives substance to your characters. Okay. Let’s talk about the five conflicts. Because they are awesome.

First off, we have red vs. blue… white vs. black. We’ll start with the classic, we have white vs. black. White is the color of light, of morality, you know, black is the color of darkness and immorality—sorry. Amorality. So basically, it’s the clash of what people think of as good vs. evil. I mean, I think how white and black think of it is a little different, but the basic conflict—white conflict is, externally, is thought of a good vs. evil conflict.

There’s other ways to look at it, it’s clearly the group vs. the self, there’s a sense of morality vs. amorality. You know, white believe there is right and wrong. Black doesn’t. Black believes you can do whatever you want to do, and that morality is an artificial creation of man. And so, white sort of believes that there’s the right things to do. And black says, “Hey, I’m doing what’s right for me.” So white is very much about the good of the group, black is about the good of the individual. I don’t inherently think, by the way, that black is all evil, but I do believe the white/black conflict plays into, archetypally, the sense of good vs. evil.

Now that said, you know… because people ask me all the time. You know, can you give me an example of a conflict in which black is good and white is evil? And I go, “Oh, yes I can!” Well, I’m not sure if this is red and white or black/white, but Antigone is very classic where, you know, Creon—basically, in Antigone, it’s the daughter of Oedipus, and Oedipus has done horrible evil, and the leader of the world—leader of the land Creon doesn’t want to bury him. And Antigone is like “No, no, we need to bury our dead. We need to—even though he did great injustices, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve a proper burial.”

And the idea there is Creon’s the bad guy, and he’s like “Here are the rules, we’re following the rules.” He’s a very white bad guy. Now, I (???), whether or not Antigone’s a red-based character or black-based character in a way. Is she truly selfish or is she based on emotions. That’s a fine question. But anyway, the black/white is archetypal of good vs. evil. Group vs. self. Like I said, there’s a bunch of ways to play it out.

The white vs. red conflict, by the way, is the idea of—we say order vs. chaos, but that’s a little unfair. And maybe Antigone is more of a white/red conflict now that I think about it. The idea in white vs. red is, white is like—the idea of structure vs. freedom is another way to think about it. And chaos vs. order is the nice sound-bitey version. In the sense that white believes there are rules and things we need to follow, while red is like “We should do what we need to do and we shouldn’t create these artificial things that limit our freedoms.” And red is all about absolute freedom and white’s about absolute rule, so they come into conflict with each other.

So red and blue, my favorite conflict, is the intellect vs. emotion conflict. A lot of my writing is about this one. And I think that—the idea there is,    I mean, there’s the—once again, each conflict has more realms to it, you know, cold vs. hot, or inaction vs. action. I mean the core to me about the blue/red conflict is the idea of blue is like “Look, we are rational beings, we should think.” You know. And that “Yes, we could act, but emotions tend to run—we tend to make poor choices. And our brain makes much better choices if we sort of are cool from intellect.” And red is like, “We are what we are—the passions are what define us. You know, if we think too much, we deny the essence of who we are.” And so they have that nice conflict.

Now, blue vs. green is another classic, nature vs. nurture. That’s the conflict where blue believes that you can become anything. Any baby can turn into anything, you know. And that there is such thing as knowledge and learning and training and tools, you know, technology, and blue’s like “Anybody can become anything.” Green is like, “No no no no. You are who you are. You were born with the things you have. You know. Genetics is important.” And green believes in destiny and green believes like you are the sum of your parts, you are from where you came, and you do not escape your destiny.

Finally, we have the green/black conflict—classic life vs. death. Green is all about sort of letting nature live its way, and black is all about subverting nature and saying, you know, I mean—black will power-grab anything, and so black really has latched onto death as being a very powerful tool. Probably black’s favorite tool. And green—the funny thing about green is green understands the cycle of life and death, but it doesn’t understand an artificial death. Right? Where something could have lived and was killed, it doesn’t understand that.  Green will understand something being killed for a purpose—“I’m going to eat you, fine I kill you,” you know, but “I just kill you for the sake of killing you…” Green’s not as much a—if there’s no natural order to it, green feels it’s unnatural and wrong.

So anyway, Richard created this conflict of colors. And the neat thing—there’s this awesome thing about the color pie is, that it not only defines the flavor, it defines the mechanics. That the core of the game, when you dig down deep and you look at the game, the game has, at its core, a psychological underpinning. And not a lot of games do that. You know what I’m saying? Like when I’m arguing about whether something should be white or not, I’m kind of having this philosophical/psychological argument about the essence of what white is. And there’s not a lot of games that do that, you know what I’m saying? There’s not a lot of games that go, “Well, can I do this? I don’t know. Is this in the essence of what this thing is?” You know.

I feel like… so in writing, one of the things they say is, the way to get good scripts is, get good characters. And the idea is, if you have interesting characters, just stick interesting characters with each other and then the thing is, “Well, they’ll write themselves.” You know. You just get two good characters… and the perfect example is, imagine you wanted to—I have Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and I throw them in a scene. That’s going to be an awesome scene! I haven’t even written it yet and I know it’s an awesome scene because Sherlock Holmes is an awesome character. James Bond is an awesome character. Each one of them has, you know, conflicts and motives and desires and each one of them is a very rich, interesting character. You know.

In fact, one of the things that’s fascinating to me about Sherlock Holmes is, you know, there’s a British show right now called Sherlock. Awesome. By Steven Moffat, so obviously. There’s an English version called Elementary. Also, actually, very interesting. You know. There’s a movie version right now—a series, basically, with Robert Downey, Jr. Also interesting. Those are three completely different takes on the same character, but the character is such a compelling character, they’re all actually interesting. Even though they’re not quite the same. I mean, they keep the core of the essence of the character. You know.

And James Bond! How many people played James Bond? How many times have you seen James Bond movies? Like, that’s an awesome character. And the point is, if you have awesome characters, I guarantee if you throw them together, you’re going to get an awesome scene. So by the way, when the movie comes out, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes—I hope I get a little “idea by” for it.

Anyway, but it’s the same thing, which is if you get cool ideas—and the colors are interesting characters. They are fascinating characters. All five colors… like I said, the reason—one day, we will make a Magic movie.  And what the Magic movie just wants to be is, “Give me five planeswalkers to represent the five colors, and let them go to town.” Kind of like the X-Men. Just my two cents.

But anyway, you know why that would work? Because those are five amazingly interesting characters! The colors are very cool. They’re very cool. And the neat thing about it is, when I’m trying to figure things out, the colors tell me a lot. You know. Like one of the arguments—I have a blog, called Blogatog, which some of you might read. And on my blog, I argue with people. I mean it’s kind of the place where I will say something or answer questions. People respond, and we get kind of a dialogue going where people argue about some issue.

And one of my—one of my, one of my notes I constantly give is, stop trying to solve this color’s problem with another color’s tools. Solve it with this color’s tools. You know. Red being the poster child we’re normally talking about. And my idea is, red doesn’t need awesome things. Red is a very cool color. Might be my favorite color, as far as—I think as a character, it’s my favorite color. And my point is, I want red to be red. I don’t want red to be white or red to be black, I want red to be red. You know what I’m saying?

And one of the reasons I love red—sort of, I think of them as characters. And if you’ve read my writing, I love to write them as characters. Is red is just a fascinating, fascinating character. Because red just acts. He does what—he or she, whatever (???). Red does what red wants to do, you know, and that is a very uplifting sort of—that is a neat character. That sort of isn’t confined but just kind of does what it wants to do.

And one of the great things about telling good stories, by the way, is great characters make great mistakes. Anyway, today’s like a writing lesson. And the reason why I keep coming back to writing today is, the color pie in a lot of ways is the same reason I love writing. It’s all about motivation. It’s all about philosophy of character, of understanding what they want, what desires. You know, each character—each color wants something.

But each color has conflicts to stop it. You know? Like, like, you know, blue seeks knowledge. Blue is like “Look, anybody can be anything, and all I need to do is learn what I—you know, once I have the knowledge, you know, power comes from knowledge.” You know. But blue’s problem is it’s afraid to act. Like it’s—it so wants to do everything perfectly that it sort of—gets caught in inactiveness. Anyway, I swear. I will do a podcast on every color because the colors are awesome. And I need more subjects to do the podcast on. So. Win/win.

So when Richard came up with this, what he did is, he put it at the core. So not only is the flavor coming out of it, but also the very mechanics. And by the way, that’s one of the reasons Magic is a very flavorful game, you know? Like one of the things I’ve started talking about is how we’ve been trying to do more and more flavor-building with mechanics. And obviously Richard—go back to Alpha, Richard did.

We have a lot of things that are grandfathered into the game because a single card, it was flavorful. Terror, for example, it didn’t make any sense that black would scare another black thing. They’re used to the creepiness, so they aren’t affected by it. And then all of a sudden that became a core part of its identity that black has this weakness of dealing with black. You know. And that all came from flavor, you know.

And I think that that’s a big part of—when people play Magic, one of the things I get a lot—I’ll talk to people, and they’ll play and they’ll go “This all feels right.” And the reason is, Richard didn’t invent the color wheel in the sense that none of those philosophies—none of them—are Richard’s creation in the sense that he—like, he didn’t make any of those five conflicts. He didn’t make any of the core colors, he didn’t do any of that. What he did is, and this is the brilliant part, is he looked and was able to say “Here’s different ideas, I’m going to capsulate each of these ideas into five distinct things.” You know.

And as someone who’s messed with the color pie for now—almost twenty years, very close to twenty years, it is an amazing, living, breathing thing. Like, I love—I do this on my blog. Pick a character. What colors are they? And like, I can identify things by color. I can go “Oh, this character’s this” or “A combination of these.” You know. And, by understanding what color they are, it gives you a little better sense of the character. Because like “Oh, I have a little better understanding—I understand, you know, green’s motivation, so I say this character’s green, oh, I got—I understand some of their motivation.” You know.

And I love the fact that the—it provides a cool reservoir to provide answers. Because one of the big problems in game design is, oftentimes you don’t have answers. You’re like “I need to do something.” “Well, what are my limitations?” And like I’ve said time and time again, and I’ll say it again now, I love to say “restrictions breed creativity.” And part of that is not just that they’re good for creativity, I believe that creativity really needs the restrictions. You know.

I believe that—I mean, the human brain just wants to go where it’s gone before. And you’ve got to force your brain to go to new places. Our brain is an amazing thing, and it can do all sorts of greatness. But you have to guide your brain. Your brain is lazy—it’ll go back to the same place, that you need to solve a problem, it will solve it the way you’ve always solved it. And the way to get your brain to sort of work a little bit, how you work out your brain, is you take away its normal go-to answers.

And that’s why restrictions are awesome. Because restrictions say—I mean, like I said, I’ve talked about this before, like a really good thing for writers is to have a friend of the writer say “Okay. I want you to write, but you have to follow these restrictions,” in which they stop you from doing what you always do. And then you as a writer have to really work at it because you grow lazy on the tools that you know. And your brain, just that’s the way it functions. Like, “I know how to do thing X, well that’s how I’ll do thing X.” And part of becoming kind of better at whatever the thing is is learning how to do things differently. Learning how to break out of that. And learning how to do things in a different way.

And the color pie does that, which is awesome, because I go “Oh, I need to deal with this, but I’m red. Okay, I have restrictions, I’ve got to be red.” Or blue, or black. Or white. Or green. Whatever. I’ve got my restrictions.

And the perfect example of that was, trying to figure out how green could deal with creatures. And the idea of that was, green was always supposed to deal with creatures with its creatures. That was the idea. You know, I didn’t have spells that killed your creatures, I just had my creatures, and early on it would Lure them or it would do things that would sort of force conflict. But we had this thing of like “Oh, the game kind of needs some sort of creature control, but it has to be green. I don’t want to just give Terror to green.” You know.

And finally we figured out “fight.” And fight is like “Oh, perfect!” Just… (???) We were running through hoops trying to get this creature to fight that creature. And the thing that’s awesome about fight is, fight says, “I can deal with your creatures, provided my creatures are bigger than your creatures. If they’re not, I have a huge problem. But if they are, then I can deal with them.” And it’s like, “Oh! Well when green plays to its strengths, large creatures, it can deal with things. But when it doesn’t, it has a problem.” And that was like a super green way to do something green needed issues with. You know.

And to me it’s the same as some of red’s issues, which is, you know, red can’t deal with nontangible things. Like, “I will blow up things I can blow up. If I can blow it up, I have no problem. I’m a destructive guy.” (???) But sometimes, like enchantments, they’re not things that are tangible. Red has problems with that. I think that’s an awesome part of red, you know, that red’s all about the tangible, when you get to the intangible red’s like “I don’t know.” You know.

But that doesn’t mean red has to throw in the hat. But it also doesn’t mean red’s supposed to be able to blow them up! You know. I think the key is trying to find a medium here red’s doing what red does in the way red does it, that answers the problem.

You know, and the genius—the joy of the color wheel I think is, is that not only does it provide answers for the game designers, it provides answers for the players. You know. A lot of Magic, a lot of any game design, but Magic especially, is what I call intuitive design. Which means, people are happy when the thing they are using works the way they think it’s going to work.

I talk a lot about how design on games is not that far from design on lamps. You know. Somehow my go-to lamps. I think Dieter Rams is making me go to lamps. And if you haven’t read it yet, I wrote an article on the ten principles Dieter Rams did of what makes great design. You should go read it if you never have. I’ll probably do a podcast on that at some point too. Because that was awesome.

Anyway, if I want to make a lamp, I want you to understand how to use the lamp. And I want the lamp to do what you expect it to do. You know. And games are a little different, I’ve talked about this, and how you don’t make it so easy in games, you’re trying to challenge the player a little more. But the idea is, you want things to work the way they feel they should work.

An awesome mechanic just dose what feels right. Like a lot about Ravnica, for example, right now in the middle of Return to Ravnica, is doing guild mechanics is like you just want to nail the guild. You just want to go “Ooh, this feels like the guild.” You know, when I was doing Innistrad, “This feels like the monsters.” Or Lorwyn was “This feels like the tribe.” You know, whatever you’re doing, that’s—part of game design is figuring out how you’re dividing things up, and then making sure that you’re evoking that thing.

And the more you have something to evoke, the more that you have a bullseye. Like I said this time and time again, I’ll say it again today, design is about setting bullseyes. It’s about setting vision, and saying “Here’s what I’m trying to do.” The better bullseyes you set, the better design you get. Because the more you know what you’re trying to do, the more everybody’s working in the same direction, the more you get innovative and come up with cool answers to that.

And the color pie just—like I said, restrictions breed creativity—Magic was just born with this awesome like restriction set that provides psychological motivation, provides restrictions, gives us intuitive flavor—like one of the things I love is—so when I’m explaining to somebody. If I meet them for the first time, what I’ve learned is, different people require different introductions to Magic. You know. You can’t use the same introduction to every person.

So, if I’m talking about Magic, first off I have to figure out—did they come to me or did I go to them? See, if they came to me, then they want to learn the game. I actually start talking about the game. But if I’m going to them, I need to interest them in the game before I can sell the game to them. Before I can teach them the game, I need them to be invested in wanting to learn the game.

And you know what, the best way to do that is the color pie. Because the color pie is super universal. You know. The color pie—like, I can just start explaining to somebody, and they get it. It’s the human experience. It’s not like you have to understand Magic. You know.

And the neat thing is, when I explain the color pie—a good tip by the way, when you teach something, or when you talk in general, watch the reaction of the person that’s listening to you. If the person nods a lot, that’s a really good sign, because nodding is a way we’ve learned—it’s almost subconscious at this point—to say “Oh, I get what you’re saying.” So if you talk and they keep nodding, that’s them going “Oh, I’ve got it. I see what you’re saying. Oh, that makes sense to me.” You know, if you don’t make sense, they kind of crinkle their brow. That’s the universal, like “What? I don’t get it.” Nodding is really good. And when I explain the color wheel, I always get nodding.

Because the color wheel is, as it—by creation, is super intuitive. You know. And the funny thing is, people have asked how Richard got to those five colors. And the answer is, if you describe the philosophy, ninety percent of the public will give you the same color. It’s not like Richard picked colors so much as “Well, it’s the color of light and goodness. I guess that’s white.” You know. And purity. That’s white. What’s the color of darkness and… you know, black. You know. What’s the color of anger and fire and destructiveness? That’s red. How about coolness and ice and rational thought and, you know… that’s blue. How about nature and ferocity and… that’s green, you know. Like, each color, like, that is the color that it is. It’s not a stretch to get there.

And, like I said, it is—the thing that I love is, that it is this awesome tool. It is intuitive, it helps teach people what it is, it gets people into the game real easily, it means when you play cards they just seem right, you know. I love the first time someone sees a Lightning Bolt or a Fireball, like “Yeah!” You know. Like that—it just, it speaks to you. You got it. Or you play some ferocious creature or, you know, a dragon, or whatever it is, that like Magic just has these great moments of (???) you what you need it to do.

And the color pie, like I said, it’s a great tool for designers, it’s a great hook-on entry point for beginners, for any the game (???), really, it really fleshes out and gives it a feel. It has a psychological motivation that I love, you know. And I mean like I said, it’s the underpinning of the game, and I think the reason the game is awesome, well one of the reasons, is that it just has this neat underhook to it. I don’t know of another game, or there’s very few games, that like the core—the core, the center of the game is philosophy. Is psychology. You know, that’s not a common thing.

And so, you know, I love that I can speak to my game and my game will talk back to me. You know, I love that. You know. You know, just as you can put Sherlock Holmes and James Bond       in a scene together, I can put any two colors in a card together and they’re going to speak to me and say something. You know. If I put green and black in a card, ooh man, I have a conflict already. Well, let me resolve this conflict. Because, you know, green is trying to preserve life, black is trying to destroy life, how do they band together? Where do they see common ground? And like that is neat. That’s rich material. That’s something where I go “Ooh, that’s pretty cool!” You know.

So, anyway, I’ve drooled about the color pie long enough. Because I am now at work pulling into a parking space. So, what that means is, we are done talking about the color pie, and last week we talked about the trading card game. That means next week we talk about the most maligned part of the Golden Trifecta—the mana system. And I will defend it next week. So anyway, thank you very much for joining me today on my lovely talk about the color pie which was much fun. Because I—I love the color pie. I mean, don’t tell my wife this, but I’ve always had a thing for the color pie.

Anyway, that is it for today. I’ve got to go. It’s time to go make the Magic.