Deep Listens is a gaming podcast series I'm recording with a few of my friends. Every two weeks we pick and play a new game and then discuss it from a literary, philosophical, and game design perspective. Its kind of like a book club for videogames. We try to dig as deep as we can on an individual game every episode so check it out!

In this episode of Deep Listens we take an email about Shadow of the Colossus before delving into Psychonauts discussion. We cover how Psychonauts uses Freudian and Jungian psychological terminology as world building tools. We discuss the various mental maladies that afflict the characters in Psychonauts and how those maladies shape the way we talk about the game. We also talk about how Psychonauts utilizes its summer camp locale to set its tone and aesthetic. We finish up by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Psychonauts' collectibles.

Apologies for some of the audio issue with this episode. We should have those issues hammered out soon.

And here is the the podcast rss feed and webpage: http://deeplistens.libsyn.com/podcast

Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Baby Deep Look! My usual Deep Look videos focus in on a cool gameplay mechanic or story element from a game I have played the heck out of, in the hopes that I can share what makes that mechanic so cool. This Baby Deep Look is just as deep as a normal video, but I focus on a mechanic or ability that is so small that the video is much shorter than usual. I aim to keep Baby Deep Looks around 5 minutes long. These videos should be small little observational nuggets that hopefully give you some useful insight into a game's design that you might not have noticed otherwise.

In this Baby Deep Look I break down the very end of Broken Age. I talk about the dual narrative structure of the game and how it creates a very interesting problem for the ending. I also explain how the ending functions as a sort of wrestling match for the role of the true protagonist. Come join me for the exciting ending of this gorgeous game.

Deep Listens is a gaming podcast series I'm recording with a few of my friends. Every two weeks we pick and play a new game and then discuss it from a literary, philosophical, and game design perspective. Its kind of like a book club for videogames. We try to dig as deep as we can on an individual game every episode so check it out!

In the flagship episode of Deep Listens a few friends and I discuss Shadow of the Colossus and some of the philosophical and literary questions it raises. We discuss mereological essentialism with respect to whether SotC fits all of the required criteria to be a game, and what criteria are needed to make a game. We discuss how the colossi designs blend organic and inorganic elements in order to create creatures that feel morally killable, but also make you feel remorseful when the killing is done. We also debate whether SotC is part of a post-modern movement within video games. Come check out a new podcast with some deep discussions about one of the greatest games ever made.

Edit: And here is the the podcast rss feed and webpage: http://deeplistens.libsyn.com/podcast

Up until this week I’d never played a game with a playable male and female lead where romance wasn’t involved. I’ve certainly played games where an intrepid hero has to go out and rescue his lady love. Or perhaps two star-crossed lovers come to find each other after hours of “will they or won’t they”. At the very least there is some amount of flirtation and sexual tension. And yet after hours of wondering two distinct and beautiful worlds with two separate characters in Broken Age, I never thought about how Shay and Vella were going to fall for each other in the end. It is kind of sad that this seemingly small storytelling decision feels revolutionary, but it did.

Rather than telling one unified story about a boy and a girl and their adventures, Broken Age stays true to its name and manages to tell two parallel stories that, although they intermingle, feel distinct and personal to each of its protagonists. Vella is a young girl from the town of Sugar Bunting who decides to violently reject her community’s customs of baking cakes and serving young maidens to giant monsters. She empathizes with her grandfather, a decorated soldier and one of the last remnants of Sugar Bunting’s militaristic past. Vella refuses to be a sacrificial appetizer to appease the cryptic monster Mog Chothra. As such Vella’s story is one of defiance, aggression, and overcoming the damaging societal norms that serve up and consume young women.

Alternatively, Shay is a young boy who lives in the spaceship Bossa Nostra, which is controlled by an overbearing maternal computer named Mom. Every one of Shay’s days are carefully planned and guided by Mom down to the minute. He wakes up. He eats Splorg (accept no substitutes!). He runs a few “critical missions” that include saving yarn people from an ice cream avalanche and ridding the Bossa Nostra’s hull of a piñata parasite. Then he goes to bed. It is the same routine all day every day. Shay’s central drive is to break free of the monotony and safety of his daily life. He wants to experience real adventure, not simulated adventure with life-like adrenalin substitutes.

There is a striking dichotomy between the two kinds of defiance that are exhibited in Broken Age. While both Vella and Shay are by definition rebellious teens, the way the game portrays their respective revolutions paints quite the feminist picture. Shay starts the game with a talking spoon (if only it were silver) who sounds like an English butler (think C3PO) and measures his precise nutritional intake. When Vella finally stumbles upon a talking utensil of her own, she finds a knife named Dutch, who sounds and acts like an extra from Goodfellas. Both characters eventually come to own a remote control: Shay’s controls a robot that grabs and hugs, while Vella’s controls a hot death ray. Shay’s teen angst is undercut by his consistent position of privilege and security in the world. His largest concern is boredom and his overbearing mother. He is a suburban teen transplanted onto a spaceship without a Nirvana CD or a copy of Doom. Vella is living in a world that is content to sacrifice her to a monster in order to maintain a (relatively) bloodless status quo. Every village that Vella visits is complicit in propagating this terrible tradition and Vella’s violent rebellion against the Maiden’s Feast threatens all of their traditions, property, and ways of life. Vella is willing to break a few eggs to make a new cake that doesn’t contain young women as a key component.

It is no surprise that Vella wants to save her world and her fellow maidens from Mog Chothara, the locales in Broken Age are simultaneously gorgeous and lighthearted in a way that moved me to spontaneous giggles. The art style is sunny and happy with a painterly look that stands out amongst the countless “next-gen” 3D games that dominate triple A development and the retro pixel art styles that seem to dominate indie games. There is a cavalcade of adorable anthropomorphized robots and inanimate objects in the Bossa Nostra, from computer monitors that smile to doors that sleep when they’re closed. The organic and the inorganic elements of the ship blend thoroughly and give the seemingly stark rooms of the Bossa Nostra a digital life that reminds me of the gangs of humanized robot companions in Wall-E. Shay might not feel fulfilled, but the yarn golems and HEXI-PALs that wander the halls around him are loving life.

The towns in Vella’s world are much more diverse thematically than the Bossa Nostra, and it’s clear that the game’s lead artist, Nathan Stapley, and the rest of the Double Fine art team had a lot of fun designing each village. Sugar Bunting looks like a quiet, European coastal town, except all of the homes are built to look like sugar bowls. Meriloft is a town in the clouds that is full of giant birds and feather clad cultists that follow the teachings of Harm’ny Lightbeard, a crooked prophet voiced by Jack Black. The clouds in Meriloft benefit from the colorful palette and soft edges of Stapley’s art style and the result is a fluffy cloudscape that looks like a cross between cotton candy and peaches n’ cream. Meriloft is one of the rare video game towns that I wish was larger, just to see what other formations Double Fine’s artists could imagine. There are a few other locales and they also offer refreshing changes of style and imagination.

Heart softening earnestness also finds its way into the characters of Broken Age. True to Double Fine’s company ethos, all of the characters in Broken Age are imaginative and eccentric in ways that make them funny and lovable. Harm’ny Lightbeard is charmingly fraudulent, and his vacillations between thinly-veiled chicanery and hippy-isms make him the most huggable cult leader. There is a tree that loves tree humor and abhors the violence of humans. There is even a hipster lumberjack, voiced by Will Wheaton, who sounds like he belongs at a craft brewery/locally sourced paper mill. And somehow all of these disparate personalities fit together into a cohesive whole that feels tonally consistent. Like the best Double Fine casts, these goof balls wind up feeling like characters you might know from a Saturday morning cartoon transported into a new world that you can stay in as long as you want.

Unfortunately the puzzles in Broken Age are mired, by design, in decades old adventure game conventions. The game is reliant on players having a keen eye for potentially useful items and an open mind for their applications. By the second half of the game the puzzles in both halves begin to intertwine, as Vella comes to need information that only Shay has access to and vice versa. The early moments of Broken Age do not really prepare you for these later leaps of logic, as most of the early goings of each character’s story is truly independent. However, veterans of the genre should find these later puzzles to be more in line with the obscure puzzles of adventure games past. For everyone else there are already plenty of guides online to help.

Regardless of your stance on adventure games, Broken Age is a game worth playing if you’re looking for a divergence from the art styles and stories of mainsteam gaming. Broken Age manages to have a look, tone, and plot that stand out from the crowd without being outspoken. It isn’t necessarily a watershed moment in gaming, but it is highlight worth seeing.

Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found particularly worthy of highlighting and exploring. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

In this Deep Look I examine the early moments of Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls II and suggest different ways that the games could be more accessible to new players. I discuss a few structural changes that the games could make to their character creation process to eliminate some of the early frustration that the Souls series can impose on new players. I then discuss how the Soul series could better implement tutorials to prepare players for the realities of playing one of the more unforgiving and distinct action RPGs in modern gaming. I then discuss a few places where the Souls games could better illustrate their mechanics by example, rather than by forcing new players to trial and error (or FAQ) their way to victory.

I’m smart, right? My parents and their friends keep telling me how handsome I am, they aren’t lying to me, right? I’m on the damn football and baseball teams, that should earn me some respect, right? Why the hell don’t I feel popular then? Why don’t I feel respected? What more do I have to do? What makes me different from the popular crowd? Could it be that I love video games and other nerdy stuff? Is that my problem?

I don’t know how many times I asked myself those questions while I was in high school, but damn it felt like everyday. Everyday there was some minor slight that made me feel excluded and outcast. Every day there was another person challenging my worth, my intelligence, and my masculinity. At least that’s how it felt. For years I thought that my love of games was a secret shame that needed to be buried in the service of acceptance and popularity. I bought into the narrative that I had witnessed in so many movies and TV shows, the narrative that nerds like games and are shunned for it, and that jocks play sports and are beloved for their athleticism. I believed that if I just hid my hobbies as best I could and offset them by busting my ass athletically, I could be popular. In my naiveté I thought that I had concocted a heretofore undiscovered recipe for acceptance and popularity. For four years I followed that recipe. For four years I was very wrong.

The cracks in my plan were readily apparent, if only I took the time to recognize and process what my other class members were actually doing, rather than what my preconceptions dictated they must be doing. While the stereotypical high school archetypes prepared me for rigid adherence to the nerd/jock dichotomy, I found that the lines blurred much more than I was prepared to accept. Oftentimes gaming was one of the fuzziest boundaries of all. While I expected a love of gaming to cleanly demark friend from foe, I found that most all of the members of my class played video games in some capacity. I was a three sport athlete and a pretty huge dork, so I floated around about every social group in my small private school long enough to realize that just about everyone had some experience with video games. Games were such a constant that most of the parties I attended during high school had some kind of console hooked up somewhere with people crowded around it. People even set up a SNES during our senior prank so that they could play Turtles in Time as we flooded hallways with balloons and walled off sections of the school with actual drywall (my grade’s senior prank was awesome). Of course mainstream games like Madden, Halo, Guitar Hero, and Gears of War were more played and talked about than some of the niche titles I enjoyed like Braid or Persona 4. However, it wasn’t particularly hard to find discussion of games that are near and dear to me like Final Fantasy and Rock Band.

Unfortunately, I bought into the false “hardcore”/”casual” dichotomy at the time, and as such I was always subconsciously attempting to prove my “hardcore gamer cred.” I was the dude who at the mention of a game like Halo would immediately bring up how people should be checking out Psychonauts or Lost Odyssey, as though those games are comparable or appeal to the same audiences. I felt at the time like I was performing some kind of secret gamer handshake (You say you like games huh? Well what is your favorite faction in Starcraft and what do you think the ending of Braid really means?). I thought that people who passed my test would be a true friend. That was what my exposure to gaming culture lead me to believe. It didn’t occur to me that sports game players and the console shooter enthusiasts often are as invested in their games of choice as I was mine. I used to mentally discount other people as not “real gamers” at the time (and thus inferior or false in some intangible way). I managed to concoct a worldview in which everyone played games, but only the games I liked counted and came with a social stigma as a result. Thus, I could justify my perceived outcast status as being a result of my liking “real” games, not my snobbishness and self-importance.

On top of my ignorant distinction between “casual” and “hardcore” games and the people who play them, I found that game appreciation didn’t really say anything about my classmates. Other people playing games didn’t mean that they appreciated the games I liked. It didn’t mean that they thought about games in the same way as I do. It certainly didn’t mean that we shared similar values or worldviews. All it meant was that they were middle to upper class teenagers in the 2000s. I learned that my main hobby did almost nothing on its own to distinguish me, save whatever cultural baggage I brought to the equation.

Appreciation for particular genres and games also did little to separate people into nice, neat friendship categories. One of my fellow athletes shared my appreciation for Final Fantasy VIII and yet we did not get along at all. On the other hand, my best friends played far more FPSs and RTSs than I did and none of them played JRPGs, my favorite genre. It took a while, but I came to understand that games were no different than any other form of popular media. Enjoying Final Fantasy did not put me in some secret club full of similar people, just like enjoying Anchorman did not unite all moviegoers in some cinematic cabal. Like all popular culture I found games to be a great jumping off point for discussions, but they were never meaningful unto themselves. The games that I shared with other people worked great as a common cultural touchstone or language upon which to build greater understanding, but poorly as a signifier of inherent likeness. Learning that games were not a unique or special hobby did more to alleviate my social clashes than my years of pushups and situps ever could.

With all of that in mind, I hope that gaming and game coverage continues to splinter into more niches and fandoms. I hope that someday I can find a community that actually shares the appreciations and perspectives that drew me to games, rather than many communities that share a surface level appreciation for the same hobby. I both know now that game playing has changed my life and the way I appreciate the world around me, and that my love of games did not make me set me apart. I felt like an outcast for a lot of reasons in high school, mostly due to the normal ego clashes and personality differences that occur when a bunch of different people are forced together before they really know who they are, but playing games really shouldn’t have been one of them.

With that in mind, did any of you have a similar high school experience? Was my experience a relatively new one, or has the game player/nerd connection been fraudulent for even longer? Or, was my experience unique?

Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found particularly worthy of highlighting and exploring. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

This is my last FFIX speed run tip video in conjunction with the Giantbomb Community Endurance Run and I'm happy to say that we raised over $3000 for Pencils of Promise this year! Thanks to all of the people who helped with the fundraiser and to all of the people who donated. We are going to be able to send 12 kids to school on scholarship this year and that is just incredible. I hope next year can be even bigger!

In this video I show off how to prepare fore and beat all of the Chaos Guardians in Memoria (or the Four Fiends if you played FFI). Extinguish Marilith without breaking a sweat! Beat Tiamat without getting blown away! Sink Kraken without washing out! Crack Litch without dying! Also take a look at Excalibur II!

I'm not going to cover the last boss rush because my speed run prep is over and I want to move on to other games, but if you want to see how to beat Deathguise, Kuja, and Necron, then check out AGDQ's speed run of FFIX.

Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found particularly worthy of highlighting and exploring. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

In this Deep Look I continue my preparations for my Final Fantasy IX speed run in the Giantbomb Community Endurance Run. The GB Community Endurance Run is going to be raising money for Pencils of Promise, a charity that builds schools, trains teachers, and puts kids through school in developing nations, from April 10th through 12th. You can even name FFIX characters if you include the character and the name you would like with your donation!

In this video I start off by showing how to clear Mount Gulug of its dragon and jester infestation. I then show how to kill off Taharka in Ipsen's Castle without too much trouble. Next I show how to get Zidane and Quina to work together to kill the Earth Guardian. I then show off how to safely guide Zidane through his short bout of self-doubt in the Not Alone battles. I finish up by outlining how to defeat the Silver Dragon, Garland, and Kuja. Only a few battles left people!

Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Deep Look! Deep Looks are largely gameplay and commentary like a Giantbomb quicklook; however, I try to cover games that have been out for a while and I intend to use the videos to highlight moments and mechanics that I found particularly worthy of highlighting and exploring. Also I aim to keep the videos under 20 minutes.

In this Deep Look I continue my preparations for my Final Fantasy IX speed run in the Giantbomb Community Endurance Run. The GB Community Endurance Run is going to be raising money for Pencils of Promise, a charity that builds schools, trains teachers, and puts kids through school in developing nations, from April 10th through 12th. You can even name FFIX characters if you include the character and the name you would like with your donation!

In this video I show how to get the defense of Alexandria as quickly and profitably as possible. I then show why eating whale zombies is good for your health. Next up is some tips on how to crash Ark without losing your head. I close up by showing how to defeat the boss of the Desert Palace in two rounds of combat. Tune in then donate!

During my last written blog post I discussed how MTG builds characters and settings through card art, mechanics, and flavor text. I tried to break down how MTG tells its stories through subtle shifts in mechanics, names, and art over time. However, in that post I largely avoided one of the most fundamental tools that MTG uses to construct its characters and its worlds: color. The cards of MTG are divided into 5 colors: White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. Each of these colors has different mechanics and play styles that fall within their portion of MTG’s “color pie;” for example, blue creatures tend to have higher toughness than power and green creatures tend to be larger than creatures of equal cost in other colors. The different play styles of MTG’s colors happen to flow naturally from the different philosophies and worldviews of each color. If you aren’t too familiar with MTG you might be surprised to hear that each of the game’s colors has a worldview associated with it. Luckily the lead designer of MTG, Mark Rosewater, wrote a bunch of columns about the philosophies of each color, so let me get you up to speed.

White-

“what does white value most? Harmony. White wants a world where everyone gets along. White enjoys community. White wants what is best for the whole. White looks out for everyone. White would be happiest in a utopian society where everyone shares and cooperates with one another. White’s ultimate goal is peace.”

Blue-

“Blue looks out and sees opportunity. To blue, the world is a collection of resources that allow an individual the ability to transform himself into whatever he wishes. Each person is born as a blank slate. The purpose of life is to learn what you want to be and how to achieve that goal.

To accomplish this, the blue mage learns to value the most important resource in the world: information. In order to find one’s place in the world, a wizard must collect as much knowledge as he can. With this tool at his disposal, he will find the answer to any and every problem. Thus, blue’s end goal is omniscience. Blue wants to know everything. For he who knows all has no weakness.”

Black-

“Black’s view of the world is quite self-centered. In essence, black defines the world by how it affects him or her. Thus, to black, each individual has their own purpose in life: making their life as good as it can be. And this is fair as far as black is concerned, as everyone has someone looking out for their own best interest (themselves). Now, this way of life has many victims (after all someone has to lose for others to gain), but black feels this is simply the world’s way to weed out the weak.

To accomplish its goals, black seeks power. Why? Because unlike all the other colors, black doesn’t feel a need to restrict what it’s allowed to do. To black, an individual is allowed to use any means necessary to get what it wants. Thus, the true measure of success to black is the ability to do whatever you wish. If someone else is keeping you from your wants and desires, then you aren’t properly meeting your number one goal.”

Red-

“To red, life is the ultimate adventure. Red feels that living life to its fullest means taking advantage of every opportunity. And what better means to drive this goal than one's own emotions? Red acts on its gut and follows its heart. If red is happy, it celebrates. If red is sad, it cries. If red is angry, it smashes things. Life is very simple for red. It does what it feels.

To accomplish its goal, red uses action. If something is preventing you from doing what you want, knock it out of the way. If it comes back? Eh, blow it up. Red is a big proponent of force. If you want something to change, make it happen. Not later, now!

In the end, red's ultimate goal is freedom. Red wants everyone free to act however they wish. And red is more than willing to take action to ensure that this happens.”

Green-

“What does green value most? Nature. The way green sees it, the world has gotten it right. There is no force more powerful, more peaceful, or more elegant than nature. Its end goal is simply to let the natural way evolve. Green, in its heart, wants nothing more than to sit back and watch life unfurl around it. Thus, green's ultimate goal is growth. Green would be happiest in a world where nature has been allowed to run rampant.”

The different combinations of all of these five basic colors results in all sorts of personality types and MTG uses this colorful psychological shorthand to define its characters through something as fundamental their mana cost. To illustrate how these colors can be used to define characters I’m going to do a little exercise. I’m going to use the GB staff as an example and I’m going to define each of the core members of the staff based on which color or colors I feel best describes them. But first a small disclaimer: all human beings are all five colors. We all have moments where we align more strongly with one or two colors, but each of the colors captures some fundamental part of the human experience that we all share. So while I am going to reduce the staff as part of this exercise, I want to make it clear that a reduction is happening. I consider myself largely Blue/Red (passionate to learn about the world and driven to share that knowledge however I can) in my thinking, but that doesn’t mean that my actions and worldviews are solely contained by those two colors.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the fun part!

Dan – Red – Dan is just about the most mono-red person I’ve ever seen and his philosophies align with Red’s so strongly that I feel like I barely need to explain it. He is a man of action first, second, and third and only contemplates his actions long after they are done (you can hear some of this post-processing on Danswers). He is great at seizing opportunities and creating them where none exist as evidenced by his ability to turn a GameStop ad shoot (that he talked his way into) at the Game Informer offices into a job at Game Informer. He is also prone to being myopic and shortsighted, often denying the possibility of liking things outside of his comfort zone until he is wrenched out of it. His passionate pursuit of personal goals results in high highs (hello self-help book and game industry job) and self-damaging lows (hello permanently ruined vision and burnt pants).

Jeff- Black/Green – Jeff is Black/Green because he is a master of the cycle of life and death in the game industry. He has survived the burst of the .com bubble, site closures, and even a firing relatively unscathed. He is one of the longest tenured videogame critics and he has maintained his position by rooting his critique in the product reviewer’s mindset of game criticism’s old guard, while selectively tossing off things that don’t work anymore. His perspective has largely stayed the same, but his delivery method is constantly shifting. To Jeff, the internet is the internet and the game industry is the game industry and all of the goods and ills that come from each are just part of their natural cycles (the internet is just being the internet when people get outraged online). Jeff knows the rules of the current system and he is using them well, warts and all. As other sites fall by the wayside, GB soldiers on due to Jeff’s knowing guidance and cynical perspective. It is that cynicism that moves Jeff from mono-Green into Black/Green.

Brad- Blue/White/Green- The White/Blue element of Brad is most obvious in his role as the podcast host. As the host of the Bombcast, Brad is constantly trying to bring order to the chaos that is a 3 hour podcast about gaming and Dominos Pizza franchises. Brad tries his best to keep the show on topic and on schedule. Brad also tends to be the opposing voice when Dan starts speaking in absolutes (providing a nice example of Red and its two enemy colors clashing). Brad often asks a ton of informational questions when sitting in on a Quick Look and he guides Deep Looks in a more factual direction (which leads to him losing focus on the action and dying as a result). Brad’s Green element comes from his hippy-dippy bent, what with his organic food preferences and his audible displeasure at Dan’s fast food habits. Brad is the most likely person to talk about a new scientific discovery or some deadly spider, sounds Green/Blue to me.

Drew- Green/Red/Blue- Drew is the most outdoorsy and open minded of the bomb crew and he tends to take an enthusiastic, but logical approach to most gaming topics. Drew will give games a chance that no one else will even look at, such as flight sims and mobile games. He somehow simultaneously finds true joy in creating pdf manuals for digital airplanes, hiking, and going to North Korea. Drew blends a love of history, thrill seeking, and book learning to form a Red, Green, and Blue persona. While Brad tries to reinforce order and control during the bombcast (white), Drew is off in his own corner having a good time (red).

Rorie- White/Blue - As the community manager of Giantbomb, Rorie is the voice of the law and he strives to keep the site as open and friendly to as many people as possible. Rorie is literally the face of the forum rules and he often acts as a moderator on the most hot-button of forum posts. Using rules to restrict problematic behavior is an entirely Blue/White concept and Rorie makes great use of this tool. Rorie’s time as the GM of GB Unplugged also shows his Blue/White alignment; he is in full control of the situation and has all available knowledge, but his goal is to use that knowledge to make sure everyone has a good time.

Jason – Colorless- I have no idea where Jason fits on the color pie. I don’t know him well enough and as of now I can’t even venture a guess. Maybe one day we’ll know.

I hope you found this little breakdown of how the colors of MTG can be used to define characters. It is amazing how much information you can communicate with something as simple as color if you establish a cohesive symbolic language.

Also if you like MTG, sign up for the Giantbomb Community Endurance Run FNM and Royal Rumble! There is a fatpack and a championship belt on the line!