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How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

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Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#112

On a side note: If you were successful in MtG and other 'deep' games, would you list it on your CV? Or does it still have the image of a children's card game?

From the other point of view - as someone who frequently interviews people for technical positions in the video game industry - I definitely wouldn't take it as a negative thing and most likely would ask about it in the interview. After all, we're usually looking for passionate people, and if your passion is playing MtG at a competitive level(or maybe you just love the game), I definitely would like to hear about it.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#113
post #107

On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.

Spoken like a blue mage ;)

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#114

Every time “Magic: The Gathering” is mentioned it seriously throws off my phrase parsing for like half a minute. What about “the magic”? What is “the gathering color wheel”? I wish “Magic: The Gathering” was in quotes.

One of the best law schools in India is called "National Law School of India University". I had a great time there as an exchange student, but boy, there is some heavy parsing involved in that name.

This is what happens when you want to adhere to all local, national and international standards. A National XX is a protected term in education (well sort of) and the use of that term signifies that the government is involved to make this place good. School is there because its modeled after Harvard Law School (not really sure why that one is special in its structure). University is another more protected term. You cannot call an institute a university without ministry of human development's approval.

What is weird is because I know all this the name doesn't really sound that weird. They are just expressing a lot of things in the name which is normal to me.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#115
Not the author's intent, but the descriptions would make fantastic mottoes for a totalitarian state:

PEACE THROUGH ORDER

HARMONY THROUGH ACCEPTANCE (of your place in society)

PERFECTION THROUGH KNOWLEDGE (of the Party's teachings)

FREEDOM THROUGH ACTION (go to work in the factory, that is the true freedom!)

SATISFACTION THROUGH RUTHLESSNESS

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#116
post #107

On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.

The reason why it seems so appealing might be some kind of barnum effect [0] - the effect that makes horoscopes work:

There's a lot of tiny bits of concepts that might resonate with someone (or rather resonate with the learned cultural stereotypes carried by this person) and so one buys into the whole package, disregarding the parts that don't pattern match.

This idea is also applied at a larger scale by Susan Blackmore in her definition of a `memeplex` [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memeplex

(Sidenote: I think a lot of the current cultural clashes in the western world can be interpreted as two big memeplexes fighting each other, having each developed strategies to be incommensurable [2] to the other side.)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Lyotard

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#117
post #8

It is fun to see how much of this overlaps with the official guidelines for colors [0]. I think that the five colors are better explained in terms of deck strategies and win conditions. Crucially, by design, no color is best, nor is any combination of colors best. White represents not dying, both by preventing damage and by healing damage. White wins by having more health than their opponents, and outlasting them in…

> Crucially, by design, no color is best Except for blue of course.

Right now it's green closely followed by white. Though I've been too busy to play in the last two months and have so far totally missed Ikoria, it's clear to see that Jamie Wakefield's favourite colour of magic has finally become OP just by the June 1st banned and restricted list:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-fo...

Three of the six cards (still) banned in standard are Green and two of them (Oko and Once Upon a Time) are also banned in Modern.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#118
post #107

On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.

Yeah, "explains" is rather strong, but "pseudoscientific mysticism" is straight-up harsh. It's an inevitably subjective way to organize the world of human behavior and motivation. Like colors themselves, which reside just as much in our internal perception of the world as they do in objective physical processes.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#119
post #107

On some level, I love this, it's just wonderful, lots of neat diagrams and words and numbers that make intuitive sense. But "explains" is a rather strong word. It's pseudoscientific mysticism, in the spirit of Pythagoreans or Jordan B. Peterson. As long as we all understand this, good.

The author says as much at the end, and also underlines that the area where it helped him a lot was in writing fiction, which inevitably deals with stereotypes.

This isn't a system to describe the human psyche as one how society likes to think about it.

Re: How the Magic: The Gathering Color Wheel Explains Humanity

#120
post #50

> To keep reading this story, create a free account. Yeah, no. If you're the author of this piece or you have a blog on Medium, get off it. There are plenty of other, less user-hostile options.

Block JavaScript on the domain and you're set.
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