I’m a fan of pretty much any vocabulary with decent construct validity and a large installed base of pre-existing users, so I’m positively disposed towards this :-)
However one thing that makes this system a bit hard for me is my object-level familiarity with the original card game that this vocabulary is extracted from.
Like… in MtG itself I often wanted to make blue decks because I value knowledge and cleverness and blah blah blah, but counterspells and library manipulation can usually only be part of a well rounded deck. It is rare in my experience to find a pure blue deck that wins reliably. I’ve seen a really strong deck using mermen… but this is the exception that proves the rule because the inspiration was “How do I make a white weenie deck without actually using white cards?”
And like… what about flying creatures? Blue and white are the classic colors for this, and green’s spider webs and hurricanes are mostly anti-flying. Is “flying” a symbol for something or not?
Red tends to be easy to play. You just hit hard and fast and then fireball at the end and hope it works. Is that a humorous commentary on people who are ruled by their passions, or… ?
And what about colorless artifacts?
And the primary resonances of black is about is death and rot. It has cards like Royal Assassin, Terror, Gravebind, Blight, and Pestilence. This doesn’t make me think of Ayn Rand, it makes me think of Sid Vicious, suicidal goths, crack houses, and Aum Shinrikyo. So like.. uh… what?
I guess my core question is about the degree to which you think this archetypal vocabulary system is separate and different and more useful than the card game from which it was abstracted, and how you tell which parts of the card game’s stereotypes are “just game mechanics” or “unproductive imagery” and which parts of the card game’s stereotypes “encode useful psychological abstractions”?
The system here is largely an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize particular themes in the card game, privileging simple and “interesting” themes. To the extent the rationalization resonates, I think it’s for reasons like: People associate “white” with goodness and Christian imagery (even though quite a bit of the unusual character of Christianity has historically been its blueness). If black is then treated as the “anti-white” color, then it gets both the opposite set of virtues (personal ambition, etc.) and the opposite set of associations (death, darkness, corruption, etc.).
Rebellious punk/goth/etc. seems about right. Cf. most versions of Satanism, Slytherin, etc.
I’m still super curious about the process you used to distinguish color patterns in the game that are “mere mechanics” from color patterns in the game that are “useful for a larger motivational ontology”.
Could you maybe talk about how you sift the ontology using the idea that “White and blue have more than their fair share of flying creatures while green tends to have few flying creatures but many counters to flying” as an example?
Is there a such a thing as a “way to be wrong” here? If so, how do you notice that you are more or less wrong in this domain?
Is flying just a game mechanic or is it a symbol (perhaps for “openness to new experience”) or is there some orthogonal issue to pay attention to that is much more important?
I’m a fan of pretty much any vocabulary with decent construct validity and a large installed base of pre-existing users, so I’m positively disposed towards this :-)
However one thing that makes this system a bit hard for me is my object-level familiarity with the original card game that this vocabulary is extracted from.
Like… in MtG itself I often wanted to make blue decks because I value knowledge and cleverness and blah blah blah, but counterspells and library manipulation can usually only be part of a well rounded deck. It is rare in my experience to find a pure blue deck that wins reliably. I’ve seen a really strong deck using mermen… but this is the exception that proves the rule because the inspiration was “How do I make a white weenie deck without actually using white cards?”
And like… what about flying creatures? Blue and white are the classic colors for this, and green’s spider webs and hurricanes are mostly anti-flying. Is “flying” a symbol for something or not?
Red tends to be easy to play. You just hit hard and fast and then fireball at the end and hope it works. Is that a humorous commentary on people who are ruled by their passions, or… ?
And what about colorless artifacts?
And the primary resonances of black is about is death and rot. It has cards like Royal Assassin, Terror, Gravebind, Blight, and Pestilence. This doesn’t make me think of Ayn Rand, it makes me think of Sid Vicious, suicidal goths, crack houses, and Aum Shinrikyo. So like.. uh… what?
I guess my core question is about the degree to which you think this archetypal vocabulary system is separate and different and more useful than the card game from which it was abstracted, and how you tell which parts of the card game’s stereotypes are “just game mechanics” or “unproductive imagery” and which parts of the card game’s stereotypes “encode useful psychological abstractions”?
The system here is largely an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize particular themes in the card game, privileging simple and “interesting” themes. To the extent the rationalization resonates, I think it’s for reasons like: People associate “white” with goodness and Christian imagery (even though quite a bit of the unusual character of Christianity has historically been its blueness). If black is then treated as the “anti-white” color, then it gets both the opposite set of virtues (personal ambition, etc.) and the opposite set of associations (death, darkness, corruption, etc.).
Rebellious punk/goth/etc. seems about right. Cf. most versions of Satanism, Slytherin, etc.
Loren ipsum
I’m still super curious about the process you used to distinguish color patterns in the game that are “mere mechanics” from color patterns in the game that are “useful for a larger motivational ontology”.
Could you maybe talk about how you sift the ontology using the idea that “White and blue have more than their fair share of flying creatures while green tends to have few flying creatures but many counters to flying” as an example?
Is there a such a thing as a “way to be wrong” here? If so, how do you notice that you are more or less wrong in this domain?
Is flying just a game mechanic or is it a symbol (perhaps for “openness to new experience”) or is there some orthogonal issue to pay attention to that is much more important?