Black as color of magic
I am trying to create "black magic" with a visual black effect with lore backing (it is for PC game). How can I create this effect, either optically or neurologically? I am not talking about hue or light-absorbing material. Rather I am talking about a type of light we could perceive as black because our eyes and brain do not understand it. I would like to have something more "energy based", like other colors are with their wave length, instead of "we cannot understand therefore black - rule of cool victorious."
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It's not black at all, it's not even light (or maybe even any other wavelength of photons) at all, but something about the magic interferes with the ability of our rods and cones to interact with light. Spotblindness, as it were.
You haven't shared the rules of your magic system, but I assume that wouldn't stretch it beyond plausibility.
a type of light we could perceive as black because our eyes ... do not
That's anything in the EM spectrum other than visible light. So exclude roughly 400 to 750 nm wavelengths. Infrared and ultraviolet are obvious choices, being on either side of the visible spectrum.
eyes and brain ... do not understand it
It's not about the brain, and therefore "understanding". The limitation is the spectral sensitivity of the sensors in your retina, and also the filtering effect of the optical pathway (the sensors can detect some UV, but it is filtered by the eye before it gets to the sensors).
If you're looking for something you can "shine" somewhere to create a dark spot, that's not how the physics works1.
1 It is possible for one coherent light beam to appear to cancel another in a localized area, but that doesn't seem to be at all what you're after, and ambient light isn't going to be coherent in any kind of "normal" circumstance anyway.
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