Magic the Gathering’s color wheel is a marvel of modern game design. Magic is a game with a lot of complicated mechanics and the color wheel offers an overall structure that helps organize and make sense of them. It also grounds these mechanics in a rich narrative framework, so that one of the deepest strategic games in history is also an exploration of fascinating psychological and philosophical ideas. Listening to Mark Rosewater talk about the color wheel is a master class in how to build a complex, living world out of rectangular pieces of cardboard.

But recently something about the color wheel has been gnawing at me. It started after reading this well-written piece about how the color wheel could be applied as a psychological framework to predict and explain human behavior in the real world. In this piece, the author notes:

Traits like “good” or “evil” do not map to the color wheel, since every color has ways in which it can be either.

When I read this, I nodded along in agreement. One of the appealing things about the color wheel is how it avoids simplistic moral dualism. But then a question occurred to me: what would someone within the world of Magic think about this idea? What would a White mage think about this? Would they agree that Black magic isn’t evil, just different? Probably not. Presumably they would find such an idea repulsive. They would have their own, entirely different way of organizing and explaining the metaphysical logic of magic.

The standard color wheel, our wheel, represents a coherent, internally-consistent, overall worldview. It organizes and explains everything in the world of Magic, including entire societies, cultures, traditions and philosophies. But wouldn’t each of these cultures themselves have their own coherent, internally-consistent, overall worldview? This is, in fact, basically how the standard wheel presents the various colors, each of them is a complete point of view. White cares about certain values, has certain beliefs, uses certain concepts, applies certain methods, and so on. Red has their own values, beliefs, concepts and methods. Blue has theirs, and so on around the wheel.

But — and this is the crux of the matter — even though each of the colors represents an entire explanatory framework, a complete system of thought and action for making sense of the world, all of them are forced to have their worldviews expressed through our explanatory framework — the standard color wheel.

Maybe we don’t use the good vs evil binary as a core concept, but someone within the White moral framework probably would. For them, Black isn’t just another color, one that they happen to disfavor. From the White point of view, the battle between good and evil is the central defining concept that organizes and explains everything, and the standard color wheel’s symmetrical division of the world into five even slices is confusing and misleading. And some variation of this disconnect would presumably be true for every color. Some of them, like White, might have binary systems, others might have tripartite systems or fuzzy spectrums or monist systems or whatever, but each would have it’s own coherent, internally-consistent system that didn’t fit neatly into the five-wedge pizza of the standard color wheel but was, instead, every bit as big and inclusive and explanatory on its own.

The standard color wheel presents itself as a neutral, objective, universal system. But in fact it’s a particular, historically-situated, ideological framework, with its own beliefs, values and methods. The color wheel is a cultural perspective, but one that presumes to place itself above all others as a total, global, natural, inescapable truth. It’s a perspective that we can’t see because it’s ours.

And so I set out to answer the question: what would it look like to see the world of Magic through the worldview of each of the colors, to understand them not just as features of the color wheel, but each one as a fully-developed system of thought, each one as coherent and persuasive as the color wheel itself?