For any list, I find a useful generative question to be: “what if the number is wrong?” Perhaps, for example, there are in fact six colors, or merely four; in the first case, the missing color should be leaving a hole, and in the second case, one of the colors should be fake (or there should be three colors that are actually two, or so on).
So, which color is the most fake? If there were a sixth color, what would it be?
Blue strikes me as the most fake, because it’s mixing together things like “reflexive pursuit of knowledge for its own sake / need for cognition / hunger for new information” (red’s flighty pursuit of things-that-seem-interesting-in-the-moment, perhaps mixed a bit with green’s contemplative passive consumption) and “drive to optimize/perfect” (black’s love of effectiveness/winning + white’s love of order/focus/utopia).
Many games include color pies. It is very rare to see six colors (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen seven), whereas it is very common to see only four. Where you see more than five categories, they no longer claim to add up to normality or encompass everything, instead becoming factions or groups of people. So if you go above five, what you get is much higher and especially you lose the idea that we won’t spam you with more colors into the future forever. Magic did sort of introduce a sixth color—grey, or colorless—to represent alien abominations and ancient artifacts and such—as part of the Battle for Zendikar block, which will forever profane our cards with a new mana symbol. Things that are grey are wrong in a profound way, a perversion of the world. You could think of it as the color of machine learning systems and potential unfriendly AIs and bureaucracies full of lost purposes, they’ve become completely divorced from all value. I think if I added a sixth color I would indeed want to stick with that rather than go purple, and it opposes all five normal colors (and is also opposing and distinct from being merely colorless).
When they cut out a color, it varies which one it is and how they distribute the spoils. I don’t think you can cut out a color without destroying the dynamics and ideas that make the system interesting; when systems have only four colors, it seems more like a thematic ‘you can’t do everything in this game at once’ thing rather than being thought provoking. It makes sense that designers have learned that four is better for letting people play their games reasonably, but I think of this as one of those cases where I wish we weren’t following the incentive gradients as hard, because the relationships between five things are so much more interesting than the relationships between four things.
In terms of Magic’s mechanics, the color that is least essential is white. There were periods where one could speak of ‘the four colors of Magic’ in this sense, because white had only a handful of cards worth considering, so you’d play a tiny bit of white or none at all, and the only white cards you would play were cards that were ‘out of character’ for white otherwise, like Swords to Plowshares (kills a creature), Armageddon (kills lands) and Wrath of God (unique special card at the time that kills every creature). They had to reshuffle the color pie to give white more things to do, and also green.
There are seven clans in Rokugan, which means seven colors for L5R LCG—but as you say, they are factions in such a way that it wouldn’t be surprising that someday later we’ll see an eighth or ninth clan.
Which is exactly what ended up happening to L5R eventually. It now has nine (Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Mantis, Phoenix, Scorpion, Unicorn, Spider) major clans plus a number of minor ones.
It also seemed clearly to be a major weakness of the game that it had too many clans. You would open a booster and most of the cards wouldn’t be relevant to your interests, and be forced to work with only a few cards each set since people had clan loyalties (and couldn’t mix multiple clans the way Magic players mix colors). I still have a big soft spot for L5R, though. Great fun.
For any list, I find a useful generative question to be: “what if the number is wrong?” Perhaps, for example, there are in fact six colors, or merely four; in the first case, the missing color should be leaving a hole, and in the second case, one of the colors should be fake (or there should be three colors that are actually two, or so on).
So, which color is the most fake? If there were a sixth color, what would it be?
Loren ipsum
Blue strikes me as the most fake, because it’s mixing together things like “reflexive pursuit of knowledge for its own sake / need for cognition / hunger for new information” (red’s flighty pursuit of things-that-seem-interesting-in-the-moment, perhaps mixed a bit with green’s contemplative passive consumption) and “drive to optimize/perfect” (black’s love of effectiveness/winning + white’s love of order/focus/utopia).
Loren ipsum
Many games include color pies. It is very rare to see six colors (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen seven), whereas it is very common to see only four. Where you see more than five categories, they no longer claim to add up to normality or encompass everything, instead becoming factions or groups of people. So if you go above five, what you get is much higher and especially you lose the idea that we won’t spam you with more colors into the future forever. Magic did sort of introduce a sixth color—grey, or colorless—to represent alien abominations and ancient artifacts and such—as part of the Battle for Zendikar block, which will forever profane our cards with a new mana symbol. Things that are grey are wrong in a profound way, a perversion of the world. You could think of it as the color of machine learning systems and potential unfriendly AIs and bureaucracies full of lost purposes, they’ve become completely divorced from all value. I think if I added a sixth color I would indeed want to stick with that rather than go purple, and it opposes all five normal colors (and is also opposing and distinct from being merely colorless).
When they cut out a color, it varies which one it is and how they distribute the spoils. I don’t think you can cut out a color without destroying the dynamics and ideas that make the system interesting; when systems have only four colors, it seems more like a thematic ‘you can’t do everything in this game at once’ thing rather than being thought provoking. It makes sense that designers have learned that four is better for letting people play their games reasonably, but I think of this as one of those cases where I wish we weren’t following the incentive gradients as hard, because the relationships between five things are so much more interesting than the relationships between four things.
In terms of Magic’s mechanics, the color that is least essential is white. There were periods where one could speak of ‘the four colors of Magic’ in this sense, because white had only a handful of cards worth considering, so you’d play a tiny bit of white or none at all, and the only white cards you would play were cards that were ‘out of character’ for white otherwise, like Swords to Plowshares (kills a creature), Armageddon (kills lands) and Wrath of God (unique special card at the time that kills every creature). They had to reshuffle the color pie to give white more things to do, and also green.
There are seven clans in Rokugan, which means seven colors for L5R LCG—but as you say, they are factions in such a way that it wouldn’t be surprising that someday later we’ll see an eighth or ninth clan.
Which is exactly what ended up happening to L5R eventually. It now has nine (Crab, Crane, Dragon, Lion, Mantis, Phoenix, Scorpion, Unicorn, Spider) major clans plus a number of minor ones.
It also seemed clearly to be a major weakness of the game that it had too many clans. You would open a booster and most of the cards wouldn’t be relevant to your interests, and be forced to work with only a few cards each set since people had clan loyalties (and couldn’t mix multiple clans the way Magic players mix colors). I still have a big soft spot for L5R, though. Great fun.