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#§ub
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.
I’m no fan of Myers-Briggs but at least that has some cultural cachet outside of extreme nerd circles. Or is MtG “mainstream”? Like, I’d say Star Wars fandom i mainstream in that they have been wildly succesful media franchises, and I’m kinda boggled the deckbuilder games like Slay The Spire have such huge player bases, but MtG seems to be its own little world.
I have not heard much of it since it ran though my school like lice in the 1990s (I am trying to find my old deck to sell), Zvi Mowshowitz made a living as a professional M:tG player but there are or were professional Starcraft players too. It birthed a family of collectible miniatures games and the whole CCG format.