When asked to create a Buzzfeed-style quiz about leadership and games, I knew exactly what I’d want to choose: the colors of Magic: the Gathering. Magic’s colors are not only made for gameplay, they also each have a philosophy behind them. A white-aligned character values community and collaboration, a blue-aligned character values knowledge and the pursuit of perfection, a black-aligned character values personal motivation and ambition, a red-aligned character values creativity and impulsiveness, and a green-aligned character values tradition and discipline. These five colors can be mapped onto people and the way they think rather well, and it’s a common exercise among Magic players to think what colors they would be (as I can tell, since at least one other person had the same idea for this assignment.)
When it came to writing the questions, I specifically wrote them to be like questions you’d ask someone at a job interview for a leadership positions. Questions in that format, asking what they’d do in a given situation, I think can give great insight into how people think and solve problems. Every answer gives you points for one or more colors, and every question has an answer that will push you towards any given color. The answers generally wrote themselves, honestly. I thought of what the reasonable responses to that situation would be, and they generally all had obvious colors that mapped onto them. I think that really goes to show how well thought out the color system is. I also gave every question a Magic-themed splash image, just to add some extra fun and flavor to taking the quiz, and to show off more of the art of Magic, which is one of my favorite parts of the game.
My responses were interesting: Out of my sample size of 11, nobody had a result of Black or Red. I think in hindsight this was an error in the way I wrote the answers, Red is the color of creativity, and considering most of the people I interviewed were in the College of Creative Arts I think I must’ve made an error for none of them to have Red as their final result. In one of their words, “we’re creative but we don’t wanna get fired lol.” I think I may have made the “creative” responses seem to rebellious or unappealing from that perspective. The same goes for black, I think looking back that I might not have done a good job making black’s answers not feel selfish. I was specifically trying to avoid that, but it’s a difficult needle to thread just by the nature of the color’s philosophy and the fact that this is specifically a quiz about leadership.
Despite this, I’m still happy with the quiz. I think the questions all read well and other than the lack of Red in the results I think they generally map well onto the people who I know well and their personality/leadership styles. One last thing I’d like to comment on is the site I used for this, uQuiz. Compared to Buzzfeed, this site has a much more user-friendly UI both for creating and playing quizzes, and has a number of helpful features on the backend once your quiz is published. For instance, it lets you know the names and answers of everyone who takes the quiz, and gives you stats about the number of people who got each result. It was very helpful when creating this quiz and I highly recommend it to anyone else attempting this assignment.
Results:
Aaron: Blue
Josef: Blue
Mel: White
Micah: White
Elizabeth: White
Shea: Green
Ash: White
Chase: Blue
Sam: Green
Malakai: Blue