Duncan Sabien likes at least two games: punch bug (as long as he is the one doing the punching) and Magic: the Gathering. He has a whole theory of personality types based on colours of magic in M:tG (red, green, white, blue, and black) and got his partner the therapist into it. The four humours are old and unscientific see:
Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.
Backlinks show a number of rationalists and one TTRPG designer being excited about it.
Sneerers are having fun riffing on this theory, so lets create a thread for that. https://homosabiens.substack.com/p/the-mtg-color-wheel?open=false#%C2%A7ub
I will begin with the fact that he posted it on Medium in twenty-frigging-eighteen and was offended that they eventually moved it to their "paying members only" section. Who in 2018 could have expected that a 'free' service would shut down or make the experience worse when it ran out of other people's money?
He also makes sure you know that the game designer, who also designed RoboRally, has a PhD. Try to explain Hume to them and they stone you, but invent a CCG which lets a corporation take all your lunch and newspaper-route money and they respect credentials.
My God, it's like if Mark Rosewater was also a Nazi.
Cards on the table, I love M:tG as a game design nerd, and the color pie is a really well-done tool for keeping the game interesting and fun over it's very long history and even longer list of expansions and extensions. From a mechanical perspective, it strikes a beautiful balance between allowing the player to do exactly what they want and preventing the player from just doing everything. Without the color pie, it's easy to see deck building descend into an attempt to assemble the strongest individual cards. It's telling that basically every other CCG has some kind of mechanism to solve the same problem, but I don't think any of them have done it as cleanly or in a way that so smoothly enables players to combine mechanics and elements from different colors.
From a narrative perspective it's a great story engine that allows for all the disparate settings, characters, even genres that the game has explored over its life to still have a cohesive identity - to rhyme. I would argue that part of why the world's beyond sets have seemed wrong is because the settings weren't designed from the ground up to align with that narrative tool, and no matter how good the actual card designers at WotC are it just isn't going to rhyme properly, like trying to translate poetry to a different language family. But that's beside the point.
As a psychological model of the world? I mean I guess it's a tool for categorizing and narrowing down the ways that different people interact with each other or the world or whatever. But that's fundamentally not what it's for! Even as bad as the science behind the MBTI or whatever might be, at least they were designed from looking at actual people and intended to categorize them and understand them. This is the equivalent of trying to do therapy based on people's fucking Hogwarts house. Hell, even that was actually intended to fucking categorize people. Like, even without getting into all the ways that he's extending and distorting the actual color pie as used in Magic to match his own fixations, the whole project is so blindingly wrong-headed from the start that it ought to be an old BuzzFeed listicle and not something that people actually use in any clinical setting, even if it is just his wacko girlfriend.
[To save space, the following several paragraphs of increasingly incoherent ranting and raving are to be filled in by your own imagination. If you do not have an imagination you can consider using an LLM of your choice before going off to fuck yourself]