Color, as Universal Magical Primitives
When you’re finished here, make sure to check out the rest of the articles from: The Universal Asset Framework Series.
The problem
In a previous article we talked about an interoperable asset for magic called Universal Spells (our equivalent of Universal Assets (UAs), but for magic spells). Which consisted on a new type of Universal Primitive (UP), plus additional information such as 3D files or other standardized format for particle-effects we might have, encoding the aesthetics of the spell. Just as UAs are created with the Universal Asset Creator (UAC), our USs would be created in a similar fashion, with the same or a very similar tool.
Just as with Universal Assets (UAs), Universal Spells (USs) are interoperable assets we can carry to any virtual world with us. But instead of for example melee weapons (that when swung in short-range can cause damage) they represent ranged attacks. USs can be viewed as a generalization of ranged attacks, in the sense that they can encode more than mere magic spells. They can be used to construct in theory arbitrary offensive attacks in the form of powers/superpowers, or any projectile (bullets, arrows, knifes…). But for now we’ll only focus on how they might relate to magic.
USs are great, but we have a problem. These USs are quite generic. They’re based on some generic hitboxes in the form of projectiles or AoE attacks, generally. For melee weapons this is often good enough, since a melee weapon is meant to be a pointy or blunt object you knock someone with and lower their hp, and not much more. Magic spells of any kind however are much more diverse.
For example, they tend to belong to a “type” of magic. You have “fire” magic spells, “ice” magic spells, “electric” magic spells… None of this is captured by Universal Spells (USs). We can give our USs the appearance for a type of magic (flames, ice, electric arcs…) but the virtual worlds we use them in doesn’t care, aesthetics are for the sake of players only and have no additional gameplay effects. Also, there’s no way for virtual worlds to try and guess in advance what the magic type of a US might be, by simply looking at the underlying Universal Primitive (UP) of that spell.
We could however turn magic-types into a new kind of Universal Primitive (UP), and link it to our USs as an additional piece of information. But now we ask ourselves, what would such a UP even look like? And furthermore, how are we going to create a taxonomy for them, a taxonomy of magic types? UPs for things like melee weapons, armor, projectiles, or magic attacks, had the convenient advantage that we could use a geometric primitive (hitboxes in the shape of basic crude geometric shapes glued to one another) to classify them.
But a “magic-type is purely abstract”. And there can be hundreds, thousands of different magic-types and associated spells if we start being creative. It would be bad for interoperability if we didn’t find a way to group or classify these magic-types in some sort of hierarchy or taxonomy of sorts, yet no natural ordering exists, since well, magic can be almost anything. And people are highly likely to argue on what type of taxonomy is better. And it’s hard to imagine a classifying system that can accommodate all possible types of magic we might imagine and want to implement in our virtual worlds.
Color to the rescue
This is just a personal proposal of mine, but I think using the concept of “color” to create a classification of magic-types would be a very useful, interesting, and fun way of solving this problem. In essence, what we need to do — just as with our previous types of Universal Primitives — is create a series of boxes (not too few, not too many) where we can put in any magic-type we might imagine, today or in the future. In principle these boxes could be labelled as anything or represent any abstract concept we want, but I’m going to argue why I think color would be a great choice for this.
For starters, magic spells and magic-types in general tend to have an association with color, via their appearance/aesthetics. If you think about a fire spell, the colors orange and red probably come to mind, if it’s an electric spell, perhaps yellow or blue. Of course they are often multicolored, but also often have a predominant color.
Color throughout history has been associated to a lot of symbols and abstract concepts. Black reminds us of death, red of blood, pink of love, white of purity… These have become very intuitive and natural to humans. Color has always evoked stuff in us, even when presented without a context. We can use this to our advantage, we could try to define — more rigorously than it has been done historically — a symbology of color, as universal as possible. We can then associate magic and magic-types to color via this symbolism.
There are already very successful games that have done something like this. Two prominent cases come to mind, Magic the Gathering, and more recently Elden Ring. I’ve linked at the bottom of this article a video exploring the use of color in the videogame Elden Ring, as a basis for the magic and even physics of that world. In Elden Ring color is not purely a light phenomena, but an intricate part of how the world works. I believe this concept could be extended to the entire Metaverse, color and its usual symbolism is universally recognizable. And color is a part of any virtual world. Color as the basis for magic.
If you try and look back at the entire history of videogames and other visual art media, you’ll probably notice how often the same “magic-type” is depicted using the same color, if not always, most of the times. This has happened organically, without most people noticing it, but there are certain unspoken design rules. Of course one could make green flames or pink flames, and we might even want that, but if I asked you to pick one and only one color to represent fire, no one would pick pink or green. It would probably be red or orange.
Remember that what we’re looking for is a universal way to classify any type of potential magic-type, into just a few boxes (around a dozen or so). Too little boxes and we don’t have a lot of diversity, to many and we hurt interoperability, because worlds must in advance pre-program any gameplay mechanics associated to these boxes/magic-types, and if there’s too many to pick from, many games will choose different boxes to support and our spells won’t be interoperable at all!
If we decided to use color, we already have an inherent limitation. For starters, people should easily be able to tell apart one color from another without too much effort, visually, so even though we can have virtually millions of different shades of colors, we can only consistently and unequivocally distinguish between a few, probably somewhere between 6 or 12 without having to look carefully, or 20 or so if we can stop, look, compare… Very soon you find people arguing what’s the shade or tint of this color. That’s too much granularity. The number we’re looking for is probably somewhere in the 5–15 range.
A 10 color system?
Again, I’m going to throw in a personal proposal. I’ve always been fascinated by color and color symbolism and have already given this problem some thought. I think we should start with very basic colors and try to expand our palette, until we hit a wall of being too granular to the point where different people start giving different names to the same color. I believe an accurate range of how many colors we can easily distinguish collectively and effortlessly is in the range of 6–12. Let’s specify here hues, so we can get rid of variations in brightness and saturation. And since it can be argued I believe that hue is the most characteristic property of any color. So we say people can easily distinguish between 6–12 hues, with almost no one assigning two different names of color for the same hue being presented to them (for generality we’re going to assume here no one has vision problems, such as daltonism, etc.).
Most people are familiar with the 7 colors of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Light-blue, Dark-blue, Purple. These are a great start, in fact all of these correspond to certain wavelengths of visual light. Let’s just be a bit more precise and call “Purple” by its more formal name “Violet”. And let’s call Light-blue “Cyan”, and Dark-blue just Blue. This will make more sense in a bit when we look into the RGB or CMYK color systems, where B is just our Dark-blue, and there’s a Light-blue in CMYK already, Cyan. However, no color wheel is complete without “Pink” or more formally as we’ll be calling it “Magenta”, which again also appears in the CMYK system. Magenta is not a spectral color associated to a wavelength of light but is one of the most typical colors out there.
That gives us 8 hues of color in total which people are very unlikely to mistake with one another: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Violet, and Magenta. 8 hues is a good amount of hues, however, it seems odd to not include the colors white and black. After all, clearly two of the most popular magic-types of the Metaverse will most likely be Light-magic and Dark-magic (I’m purposefully avoiding the labels good and evil but that could work too), and I doubt few would argue a better natural choice for Light-magic than White, and Black for Dark-magic.
So that makes our total number of colors be 10. 8 hues, plus Black and White. I’m sure it could be argued why one or two colors more or less would also work just fine. This is just a personal choice and preference I’ve arrived after many, many, many… hours of thinking what would work best in terms of creativity, interoperability, etc. But in the end its the collective users of the Metaverse who will decide such a classification, this is merely a personal proposal/suggestion.
To try and give more of an objective argument/justification to what colors we could choose, I present the following image:
If we add up all the colors that appear in the above image in the two different systems (without repeating any), we get our 10 colors we’ve been talking about. The RGB color system is the most modern one, but in the simple Venn diagram we’ve shown above we don’t get all of our 10 colors, only 7. The additional Venn diagram depicting the RBY color system, although not as useful for digital displays today has high historical significance and gives us exactly the 3 colors we were missing. Okay great, now we have 10 colors, 10 buckets to pour are magic-types into, what next?
In another previous article we also talked about “canonical representations” in that case for materials. Well let’s leverage this same concept and propose the following, since we have 10 colors/buckets let’s make 10 magic-types to be the “canonical” magic-types of the Metaverse, and attach to each one a canonical representation in the form of one of our 10 colors. Remember how in previous articles we also talked about a periodic table of magical elements? Well lucky us, we could already fill a hypothetical periodic table of magical elements with 10 magic elements, corresponding to each of the 10 color/magic-type pairings.
We could build materials out of these elements, just as we did with the more traditional periodic table of chemical elements. And we already have a suggestion of what the canonical representations (aesthetics) for the 10 materials that represent the 10 magical elements in their 100% pure form should be… They should look mostly like their associated color!! Imagine 10 different ingots for the 10 canonical magic-types, with their predominant color being that of one of the 10 canonical colors. So if for example the “electric” magic-type is a canonical magic-type and its canonical color is yellow, an ingot of pure “Electronium”, would be a material that we could use to create a sword, and naturally that sword would be imbued with electric-magic and look gold or yellow. Or a staff could be created instead, allowing the caster to cast electric spells from it.
What should the 10 canonical magic types of the Metaverse be?
Now, the idea so far is that we have 10 buckets, our canonical colors (each of these 10 colors could now be represented by a Universal Primitive, color as Universal Magical Primitives, as foreshadowed in the title of this article). But how do we choose the 10 canonical magic-types to be associated to each color? I’m again going to make some suggestions. In my experience the 3 most common types of magic in media and videogames are usually those of the “elementary” (as in elements of nature) type, specifically: Fire, Ice, and Electric. Along with the two obvious ones, Light and Dark magic. This gives us 5 candidates already, some of the most popularly used as magic-types. Let’s now give each one a canonical color, Fire is orange (No, not red!), Ice is cyan, Electric is yellow, Light is white, Dark is black.
These choices are not random, I’ve probably dedicated too much time thinking about this problem and what color better matches a given magic-type, based on historical accounts and the relation between the concepts associated to any given magic-type, and the symbology or concepts historically or naturally associated to any given color. There is no perfect fit-all solution. Most people might assign the same concept to 3 different colors, we don’t have a universally agreed upon language for color symbology. I’ve tried my best to find a rigorous way to classify concepts in a non-overlapping way. I’ll probably share more information about this in future articles.
We still have 5 choices remaining, these are more debatable and opinionated, but I suggest these 5 additional magic-types to complete our system of 10 canonical magic types: Forest or Life magic-type as green, Psychic magic-type as magenta, Spirit magic-type as violet, Blood magic-type as red, and Cosmic magic-type as blue. Okay, now let’s talk about implementation.
Color as Universal Magic Primitives
Virtual worlds that want to support interoperable magic-types, are now encouraged to design worlds using these 10 colors as the foundation for their magic systems. Of course, worlds are always free to only choose a subset, add more, or do things differently. But we’re trying to achieve some sort of Metaverse consensus that states, these 10 colors and their associated magic-types (specially the canonical magic-types) are the ones most likely to be interoperable between any two given worlds. Ideally worlds would choose to implement all of the 10 canonical magic-types, but each color is actually a “bucket” that could contain many more magic-types.
We associate 1 of the 10 canonical colors to any potential magic-type, so that we can give all the magic-types that in principle might not be supported in any given actual world, a color. So if the world has pre-programmed some magic system based on color, and not just a concrete magic-type, like “electric”, any Universal Spell that we’ve associated to a given color can inherit additional in-game mechanics, when we import our Universal Spells (USs) from other worlds.
This isn’t as good as every magic-type being supported in every virtual world but that wouldn’t be realistic. Saying we have a multitude of worlds were the basis of magic — is — color on the other hand, is very conducive to interoperability, which is the whole point of the entire framework we’ve been discussing in these articles. Each canonical color could now potentially be viewed as a sort of “tree” or hierarchy, where the canonical magic-type for a given color is one of the first nodes/descendants, and other magic-types could be placed here, with magic subtypes below these (imagine a sort of family tree but for magic-types).
This is meant to allow stuff such as making “Magma-magic” be a subtype of “Fire-magic”, assuming Fire-magic is one of our canonical magic-types. Let’s assume we’ve created a new “Magma-type spell” and given it the same color as Fire-magic, orange, that we want to import into a new virtual world. If you’re lucky and they happen to support Magma-type spells, great! it will be given some gameplay mechanics usually associated to such type of magic.
But even if the world doesn’t strictly support Magma-type spells, it can see that Magma is a subtype of Fire-magic or Orange-magic and give it instead the mechanics of those. A Magma spell behaving like Fire-magic or Orange-magic is not as good as having bespoke mechanics for Magma spells (as one might have in virtual worlds supporting both Magma-type spells and Fire/Orange-type spells), but Fire-magic is good enough, and better than the virtual world given no additional mechanics or generic magic mechanics to our spell, or not supporting that particular spell at all.
Our clever color classification scheme allowed us to preserve some sort of interoperability. All interoperable assets with a given magic-type under the canonical color orange for example, will at worst inherit mechanics for generic Orange-magic, in any world that supports Orange-magic, instead of that particular kind of magic subtype if it’s not supported. This information about magic types could be encoded in the metadata of a Universal Asset or Universal Spell. For example like this:
Magma<Volcanic<Fire<Orange<Colorless
The virtual world would then read from left to right and check if it has preprogrammed mechanics and behavior for such magic-type, if not it reads the next type on the right and repeats the same process until it finds a magic-type the world is compatible with and gives it those. Worst-case scenario it gives it mechanics encoded for Orange-magic, or if it doesn’t even have those it can give some generic “colorless” magic-mechanics to it. This is what we mean by partial interoperability.
Color as the source of magic
One of the shifts of turning color into magic is that color becomes the more general aspect of magic, color is shapeless it can take many forms, concrete spells and magic-types are specific forms a magical color might take, the canonical magic-type associated to a canonical color is but the “default” form magical color usually takes. If we think about progression/leveling systems inside a virtual world, it would be natural to divide magic into a general progression/leveling system for each supported magical color, meaning it has perks, stats, modifiers, etc. that affect equally all spells of the same canonical color. And a separate progression/leveling system for specific spell primitives or magic-types.
So for example, we can take a color and its canonical magic-type, let’s say cyan and Ice-magic. A virtual world would then have a leveling system for Cyan-magic, affecting all Cyan spells equally, this means the concrete perks and stats would also be generic, such as: Cyan spells do 15% more damage, or cost 10% less mana… And then separately have a leveling system for either concrete Ice spells, or all Ice spells, but now these can be more specific, such as: causes frostbite. Not all Cyan-type spells might be Ice-magic, so this separation is helpful. Also, it is simpler for players to focus on specializing on magical colors instead of magic-types. For example, in our previous article where we talked about the Universal Attribute Matrix (UAM) we mentioned this could be applied also to magic.
Indeed, we could use our 10 canonical magical colors (or more likely the 10 canonical magic-types) as the 10 attributes for our UAM. The matrix now representing our inherent natural talent/potential in each of the 10 flavors of color-magic or 10 magic-types. By default virtual worlds could define systems for color-magic or canonical magic-types in order to preserve interoperability, and later on can add on top bespoke magic-types, sub-types, spells, etc. that make that particular world unique. This way, any Universal Spell (US) can be given one of the 10 canonical colors or magic-types upon creation, and when importing it into a virtual world, even if the specific magic-type of that spell is not supported it can be given the properties, progression system, etc. for its underlying magical color.
Metaverse characters/players now specializing in 10 flavors of “magical color” or “magic-types” instead of hundreds of different potential magic-types those flavors might take, is also much simpler and isn’t tied to the particular aspects of any given world. Different magic-types are supported on a world by world basis, but the 10 flavors of color magic should be supported by the majority of worlds. We can expand over time as much as we want what falls under the umbrella of each particular canonical color.
In other words, magic-types are a subset of magical color. For example, Water-magic and Ice-magic are different magic-types, some worlds might only support Ice-magic spells, others Ice-magic and Water-magic spells separately; but both Ice and Water magic are forms of Cyan-magic, so our Water spells are still useable in the world that only supports Ice-magic, its just that those Water spells look now as generic Cyan spells and might not have any perks specific to Water-type spells in this world. But when imported into a different world that does support Water-type spells, these might gain unique perks.
Final remarks
This article is just a teaser, there are many ways to interweave color and magic. For starters color acts as a natural style-guide and suggestion for what aesthetics, mechanics, symbols etc. world-builders could leverage or use as a starting point for inspiration. Also, everyone is familiarized with color. There’s an enormous amount of symbology and concepts associated to any given color we can draw from. We can also go beyond the 10 colors discussed here, it’s just implied those other colors are less likely to be supported on other worlds when associated to interoperable assets. The Metaverse will eventually home thousands of different virtual worlds, yet if a subset or majority of magical worlds use our suggested 10 color system for how magic works, we can give a color to any interoperable magical asset, and we will more or less know what type of gameplay mechanics our spells and magical objects might inherit when entering a never seen before world.
This unifying 10 color scheme also doesn’t need to be limited to only magic, with help of color symbology we can link each color to other mechanics, like the 10 attributes/stats described in our Universal Attribute Matrix article:
In fact we could make as suggested in that article another Universal Attribute Matrix but for magic, where the 10 attributes are our 10 canonical colors, potentially representing the 10 canonical magic-types:
Remember that color now potentially becomes an integral part of the physics and lore of our virtual world, so we can link color to many different things. Schools of magic might form around specific types of magic/color, races might worship this or that type of color/magic-type. Color cash become a unifying thread for both aesthetics and mechanics.
Finally, here’s the link to the fantastic video of Hawkshaw, discussing the importance of color in the game Elden Ring. Take a look at the video, and then imagine the same depth, lore and creativity, we could achieve, but now at the scale of the Metaverse, across many, many different virtual worlds. All sharing common laws of magic, in the form of color.
The color theory of Elden Ring:
