Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #23 - The Color Pie

Episode Date: March 1, 2013

Mark Rosewater talks about the concept of the Color Pie.

Okay, pulling out on the 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 was the trading card game genre. So today I'm talking about the second part of the Golden Trifecta. And 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 combined 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, it's 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 podcasts on all of them. The color pie to me...

So if you asked me, if you said, Mark, what is the single greatest thing to making Magic the awesome game it is? I would say the color pie. Which is interesting, because the other things are very important, but why? And I think that so, one of the things

I've often talked about is how I love psychology, I love if you look back at, so I took a writing class a while ago and the writing class, the teaching writing class

said something awesome, which 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, just something that runs through their writing, there's something they care about that is core to what they have to say as a writer.

And they say, 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 Lego 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 about 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 is I love emotions. I love sort of the quality of the human experience.

And, for example, the trading card game I made, when I can make any trading card game, was called Mood Swings, which all the cards represent 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 enjoy sort of understanding how people, like, 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 feel 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 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, well, he was talking about magic.

Well, clearly, historically, or flavorfully, I don't know historically, but flavorfully, through literature and such, 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's a sense of aesthetics is a little more there when you have an odd number. Also, I know Richard liked the idea, the reason 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'm 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 30 minutes sort of talking about what each color

does and I'm fascinated by it you know one of the reasons I'm one of the color pie gurus is I'm fascinated by the philosophy and the understanding of how each color functions. If you've 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. And so the color pie, the neat thing about it is Richard decided that at the core of the game, he was going to 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 such a way. And, and this is the awesomeness of this, is Richard set up such a way that each one of the colors connected to two colors and was enemy of two colors. And one of the neat things, by the way, is the five conflicts of magic, which means the five opposite color conflicts, are five of the classic concepts

of humanity, of literature. So let's talk about those real quick. Because I think, in some ways, the conflicts of the colors speak much louder than the ally, the connectedness of the colors. Because I think that through the conflict, you kind of 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 sort of revolve around. It makes something which, it gives substance to your characters. Okay, so let's talk about the five conflicts, because they are awesome. First off, we have red versus, well, white versus black. We'll start with the classic. We have white versus black.

White is the color of light, of morality. You know. Black is the color of darkness and immorality, or sorry, amorality. So basically, it's the clash of what people think of as good versus evil. I mean, I think how white and black think of it is a little different, but the basic conflict of white conflict is externally is thought of as a good versus evil conflict. There's other ways to look at it. It's clearly the group versus the self. There's a sense of morality versus amorality. You know, I mean, white believes there's 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, you know, and black says hey, I'm doing what's right for me. So white is very much about the good

of the group, black's 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 versus evil. You know? 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, yes, I can.

Well, I'm not sure if this is red and white or black and white, but, like, 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, like doesn't want to bury him. And Antigone is like, no, no, no, we need to bury our dead. We need to, you know,

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. It's a very white bad guy. Now, I guess it's interesting

that there's a good conflict whether or not Antigone's a red-based character or a black-based character. You know, is she truly selfish or is she based on interesting that there's a good conflict whether or not Antigone is a red-based character or a black-based character. Is she truly selfish or is she based on emotion? That's a fine question. But anyway, the black-white is an archetypal, though, of good versus evil, a group of herself. I mean, like I said, there's a bunch of ways to play it out.

The white versus red conflict, by the way, is the idea of, we say order versus 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 versus red is, white is like, the idea of structure versus freedom is another way to think of it. Chaos versus order is the nicest soundbite-y version. In the sense that white believes there are rules and things need to follow a rule, and 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's all about absolute freedom, and white's all about absolute rules, so they come in conflict with each other. So, red and blue is my favorite conflict, is the intellect versus emotion conflict. A lot of my writing is about this one.

And I think that the idea there is, I mean, there's, once again, each conflict has more realms to it, you know, cold versus hot or inaction versus 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 for 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 had that nice conflict. Now, blue versus green is another classic, nature versus nurture. That's the conflict where blue believes that you can become anything. Any baby could turn into anything, you know, and that there is such thing as knowledge and learning and training and tools and, you know, technology, and that 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. You know, and green believes in destiny. 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 versus 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 is 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.

And green will understand something being killed for a purpose. I'm going to eat you. Fine, I kill you. But I just kill you for the sake of killing you. Green is not as much a... 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, this is the 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 slash 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 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 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, I know it's an awesome scene. Because Sherlock Holmes is an awesome character. James Bond is an awesome character. James Bond is an awesome character. Each one of them has conflicts and motives and desires

and each one of them is a very rich, interesting character. In fact, one of the things that's fascinating to me about Sherlock Holmes is there's a British show right now called Sherlock. Awesome! By Stephen 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. I mean, how many people have 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 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 me. Anyway, but it's the same thing, which is if you get cool ideas and the colors are interesting characters, they're 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 that represent the five colors and let them go to town. Kind of like the X-Men, in my two cents. But anyway, you know why that will 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. Like one of the arguments, I have a blog called Blogatog, something 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. We get kind of dialogues going where we're sort of, people are arguing about some issue. And 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 does neat, awesome things. Red is a very cool color. It might be my favorite color as far as, as a character, I think it's my favorite color. And the 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 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 he or she whatever they don't have a thing but red does what red wants to do, you know. And that is a very uplifting sort of,

that's 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. Each color wants something, but each color has conflicts to stop it. Like blue seeks knowledge. Blue's like, you know, blue seeks knowledge. Blue's 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

and it's like, it's, like it so wants to do everything perfectly that it sort of, it gets caught in, in,

in activeness. Anyway, I, I swear, I will do a, I will do a podcast on every color because the colors are awesome. And I need more stuff to do podcasts on, so win-win. So Richard came up with this, and what he did is he put it at the core, so not only is the flavor coming out of it, but the very mechanics. And by the way, that's one of the reasons Magic is a very flavorful game. One of the things I 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, I mean, Richard did. You know, hell, we have a lot of things that are grandfathered in 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 his identity. Black has this weakness of dealing with black. And that all came from flavor. And I think that that's a big part of when people play

magic, one of the things they get a lot, and 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 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 encapsulate each of these ideas into five distinct things, you know. And as someone who's messed with the color pie for now, I

mean, almost 20 years, very close to 20 years, it is an amazing, living, breathing thing. Like, I love, like I do this on my blog, like, you know, pick a character. What colors are they? And, like, I can, I can identify things by color. I can go, oh, well, 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 sense, I, I understand, you know, green's motivation. So, if I say this character's green, oh, I now start to understand some of their motivation, you know. And I love the fact that 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. 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 if you need to solve a problem you'll just 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 it's normal go- answers. And that's why restrictions are awesome. Because restrictions say, I mean, like I said, I've said this before, a real 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 know, you grow lazy on the tools that you know. And your brain, 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 got to be red or I got to be blue or black or white or green, whatever. I got my restrictions.

And the perfect example of that was trying to figure out how green could deal with creatures. And the idea was green was always supposed to deal with creatures and its creatures. That was the idea. You know, I 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 to sort of force conflict. But we had this thing of like,

oh, well, the game kind of needs some sort of creature control. But we're like, 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've been 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. And to me, it's the same way of some of red's issues, which is, red can't deal with non-tangible things. I will blow up things I can blow up. If I can blow it up, I have no problem. I'm a destructive guy.

No, mage. But sometimes, like enchantments, they're not things that are tangible. Red has have no problem. I'm a destructive guy. No, mage. 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, and 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 where Red's doing what Red does in a 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 supposed 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. Maybe Dita Rams is making me go to lamps. And if you haven't read it yet, I wrote an article about the ten principles Dieter Rams did of what makes great design. You should go read that 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, though, is you want things to work the way they feel they should work. An awesome mechanic just does what feels right. Like a lot about Ravnica, for example, right now we're in the middle of Return of Ravnica, is doing guild mechanics is like, you just want to nail the guild of a return to Ravnica, is doing guild mechanics is like,

you just want to nail the guild. You want to go, ooh, this feels like the guild. When I was doing Innistrad, this feels like the monsters. Or Lormund, this feels like the tribe. Whatever you're doing, 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 will say it again today. Design is about setting bullseyes, 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 that everyone'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, restriction-free creativity, magic is just born with this awesome restriction set that both provides

psychological motivation, provides restrictions, gives this intuitive flavor. One of the things I love is, so when I'm explaining magic 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 should 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 learn the game. I should 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 invested in wanting to learn the game. And you know 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'll 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 listens to you. If the person nods a lot, that's a really good sign because nodding is a way we've learned, and 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 got it. I see what you're saying. Oh, that makes sense to me. If it 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, by creation, is super intuitive. And the funny thing is, people have asked how Richard got to those five colors. And the answer is, if you describe the philosophy, 90% of the public would give you the same color. It's not like Richard invented the colors as much as like, whoa, 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, like black? You know, what's the color of anger and fire and destructiveness?

That's red. How about coolness and ice and rational thought? You know, that's blue. How about nature and ferocity? That's green. You know, like each color, like that 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, it's 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, whatever it is, that, like, Magid has these great moments that just impede me 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, or any of the game players, really. It really fleshes out and gives it a feel. It has a psychological motivation

that I love. And, like I said, it's the underpinning of the game, and I think the reason the game is awesome, 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, 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. If I put green and black in a card, ooh, man, I have a conflict already. Let me resolve this conflict. Green is trying to preserve life. Black's trying to destroy life. How do they band together?

Where do they see common ground? That is neat. That's rich material. That's something to destroy life. What, 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'm now at work and pulling into a parking space. Um, so, what that means is

we are done talking about the color pie and last week we talked about the training card game. That means next week we talk about the most 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 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 gotta go. It's time to go make the magic.