By Dan Griliopoulos on February 12th, 2010 at 4:26 pm.
Friend of RPS and sometime games journo Dan Griliopoulos suffers from deuteranopia, a form of red-green colourblindness. He’s a lifelong gamer, yet the industry at large seems entirely ignorant of how difficult games that rely on red and green differentiation can be for his condition – one that’s shared by at least 6% of all males. So, pray allow the man to vent a little…
I’m Big Daddy Delta, terror of Rapture, splitter of splicers, defender of the weak, diving suit fetishist extraordinaire. I’m stuck on one side of a door, there’s a broken window and a yellow glowing switch a few feet away. I have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a certain colour. I shoot, I score… and get a mild electric shock. I repeat. Again and again. There’s an endless supply of darts so I keep shooting until I die of Electron Overdose and respawn, humiliated, at a Vitachamber. Yet again, someone on the art team has thoughtlessly swallowed the Manichean standard that red is bad and green is good, and decided he should use a primary palette to distinguish between these opposites -which means poor old colour-blind me gets killed.
For me, that hacking tool is the most lethal monstrosity in Bioshock 2. In the hacking minigame, red hurts you and wastes a rare and pricey hacking dart, green is success. Negativegamer have already broken this particular howler to the world, complete with [frankly startling to us non-colourblind types - RPS Hivemind] Photoshopped images demonstrating roughly what the hacking dial looks like to various different types of colourblindness. In my case, both red and green appear as a murky yellow. Or so I’m told – it’s not as though I’ve ever seen what green, red or yellow looks like to everyone else. Eventually, through trial and error, I worked out there are just-detectable contrast and location differences in the puzzle, and that if I focus really hard and fast, I can just work out which is which before the timer runs out. Bioshock 2 just got challenging.
Bioshock 2′s oversight has since been picked up by Kotaku, and hopefully that’ll be loud enough a protestation to entice a much-needed patch out of 2K – but what about the rest of the industry? It hasn’t paid much attention to it in the past. This screw-up is everywhere in games. My first experience was an old halflife mod called, I think, Frontline Force which, curiously, played and looked just like Modern Warfare 2 (multiplayer War FPSes don’t really change much do they?)
For some reason this, and MW2, differentiate enemies by red & green names (I’m told, never having been able to tell the difference) meaning all colour-blind gamers spend their time following other players trying to work out what team they’re on, then spraying bullets into them randomly anyway. Puzzle-Bobble is unplayable. I could only play Rockstar Table Tennis on the consoles by watching my opponents’ arm movement (praise be to the redundant beauty created by anal designers). Battleforge has problems. Darwinia and Quake just look like rubbish sepia nonsense; I imagine Space Giraffe looks even more of a mess for me than for you.
Now, I know, there’s a lot of whingeing constituencies in the endless depths of PC Gaming, endlessly grinding their particular axes about DRM, patching, netcode, whatever happened to The Monster That Ate Kieron’s Beard and so on. Clearly, they have good cause – but colour-blindness is a genuine disability. Yet it doesn’t enjoy anywhere near that degree of outraged campaigning. Without deliving through too many Wikipedia pages, I can’t think of a Western nation that doesn’t have disability legislation. This can be easily dealt with if the developer just thinks about it as part of a design doc, and is easily reparable afterwards. So why don’t they do it?
You see, designers, there are certain colours of Red and Green that aren’t problems. Traffic lights, for example, have carefully been designed (blue-green, not green!) so that there’s no problems, but pure colours are a no-no. You’ve also got to remember there are three strains of colour-blindness, two common (red-Green, 8% of males, one really rare (yellow-blue, 0.01% of people) to take account of. Here’s some tips for developers, and cross-stitchers.
So are there any developers worthy of praise? Valve, as always. The two TF2 teams are cleverly designed as no-one, except very rare monochromatics, have difficulties telling between red and blue, and Left4Dead has a range of colour-blind modes. Popcap are also heroes, with Peggle’s superb colour-blind mode being a thing of beauty, but most puzzle games are blasted nightmares.
The question is, if a little team like the Galcon developers can get it right, off the bat, first time [Galcon Fusion has an optional colourblind mode, supporting up to four players), how can a firm the size of Activision or EA consistently ignore what could be 8-12% of their paying customers? That could be a million of the people who bought MW2, for example.
There are upsides to this, of course; Colour-blind people typically have better pattern recognition, so can see through camouflage or spot objects more easily in complex scenes. We can also differentiate shades of khaki better, which means we’d make excellent military couturiers. Hidden object games, or games that use obfuscate through colour rather than pattern, we own. And, of course, I can’t tell pink from white, so women’s taste in clothing doesn’t sicken me, like it should.
The harder levels of hacking in Bioshock 2 add a bonus blue colour, which perversely makes it much easier for the colour-blind. Unless they’re yellow-blue, in which case it suddenly becomes even harder.
I must admit, this is something I was not aware of. Thank you RPS and Dan Griliopoulos for bringing it to our attention.
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Very interesting article, that. Seems like the bigger devs have just missed a trick – cant believe they’re cynical enough to say ‘don’t bother with colourblind support, we’ll make enough money anyway’.
Also, I thought the picture was Bomberman. Bit disappointed it wasn’t.
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Excellent piece, Dan.
It’s striking really, to see how much we’ve come to expect certain elements and visual cues in videogames, and how we don’t often realize how they need very little change to accomodate people in this situation.
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“can see through camouflage or spot objects more easily in complex scenes”
Haaax !!
Nice article by the way
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My best friend is similarly afflicted. Most of the time this translates in a truly horrendous team-kill figure for most of the multiplayer games he plays.
Occasionally it cripples his ability to play a game to a satisfactorily proficient level. Maps, mini-maps and radar screens are big bugbears, red and green used to discern friend and foe there, too. Sometimes rarely, but not dramatically so, it means he simply can’t progress past a certain point in a game.
Fun to watch him shoot his team mates on MAG, though.
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I feel your pain, seeing as how I have pretty much the same deal going.
And if another person holds up a black pen to me and says “Nah mate, it’s yellow” I’m going to kill them.
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I use red/green in various places in GSB. I had no idea this was such a big problem. I should definitely stick this on my things to do list.
Cheers!
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mad props.
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Good work sir! If you need a guinea pig, lemme know. ;)
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Using blue-green instead of green is a staple of accessibility. Seems like a few games designers could do with a short stint with the NHS – or any UK public body for that matter. /Anything/ intended for public use should go through some very simple, very basic accessibility decisions.
Thing is, you often find that making something more ‘accessible’ for those with various disabilities actually improves the ease of use and experience for everyone. It’s basic good practice. I mean, 2k, duh?
Anecdote time:
I have a deaf friend who plays a lot of TF2. I asked him (a while back) if he ever played much else multiplayer. He sat me down with CoD4, Quake Arena and TF2 and we played a few rounds on each with no sound.
All but TF2 were massively disorientating. And it wasn’t until I played TF2 muted that I realised there is a -vast- amount of visual information it provides you with that I was never fully aware of before, even if I was probably relying on it all the time.
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Finally someone speaks out on this! Several games have been ruined for me (deuteranopia colour-blindness), mainly any rts that likes to use red and green on the mini-map (damn you total war). But its not always red-green that inhibits play, I have recently got into League of legends, a game that uses purple and blue to distinguish its two sides. I cant tell the difference! Looking at Metro 2033, in a trailer/interview they talked about a light on your wrist that changes colour depending on your level of stealth. I saw no change. Splinter cell double agent did something similar which did nothing to help me.
Many games do offer a colour-blind mode that helps quite alot and as a result I get alot more enjoyment out of them (<3 peggle). Multiplayer games using the red vs blue idea are perfect for gamers like myself. 2 distinct colours that are easily identified.
Type in 'games with colour-blind mode' in google and you will mostly find forums filled with people asking for such an addition. Its a problem that definitely needs addressing. :(
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@Saen:
>Finally someone speaks out on this!
If you’re affected by this, why didn’t YOU speak out about this? No one spoke out about this before because no one cared. Not even colourblind people, it seems.
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People did care though; he mentioned forums full of people speaking out about it. There’s a big difference between the average person ‘speaking out’ via the channels available to them, though, and someone with a public platform (say, a widely read blog) choosng to raise the issue.
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That’s a remarkably basic oversight. Colour blindness mitigation is one of the major bullet points in UI design for “regular” software (and web pages).
I’m also slightly surprised that the famously strict Microsoft QA requirements don’t include this kind of thing as it’s clearly present on the Xbox version too.
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Isn’t it possible to write a program that runs a filter over the graphical output of the game, replacing every green with, let’s say white?
Like the Steam-overlay, except all it does is replace the colour, and you can continue playing the game.
edit: I just realized that this might be very hard to do. After all the Steam overlay just draws over what the game outputs. That is probably very different from actually modifying the graphical output of the game.
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Actually, I think most video drivers these days have brightness/eq settings (just checked and my NVidia drivers do indeed have this), so you could do something similar – if you turn down the intensity of one of the trouble colours, then in theory the colour blind person would be able to tell it apart by its darker hue.
In theory… haven’t tested it yet but I will…
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Actually, a better place would be for it to be in the graphics drivers. It would be perfect because an individual could tweak their PCs colour interpretation and it would apply to all games.
Has anyone spoken to NVidia/ATI?
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@sagan/jonfitt
I noticed that the http://www.vischeck.com/ link some other have posted contains a discussion of ‘daltonization’ which helps improve images for distinguishing by colourblind people. I’m not sure how resource intensive the algorithm is, or whether its even possible to use without manual tweaking, but it would provide a starting point for any driver manufacturer.
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Intel patented it in 2005, http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6931151/claims.html
So surely the intend to implement it any day now….
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Yeah the driver manufacturers would probably be the right people to contact. Who knows, maybe it is really easy for them to do something like putting in a hotkey to change colours. So maybe RPS or Mr. Griliopoulos should write to them.
Also I just had another idea: Since the Steam overlay is transparent over the game, it would probably be really easy to make an overlay which is completely transparent for the red and blue channel, but only 50% transparent for the green channel. That would really set the colours apart. I have looked a little bit into tutorials for that stuff, and I have only figured out that I don’t have the necessary base knowledge to understand what I would have to do. (google for “directx overlay” if you want to try it)
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Fortunately the Daltonization page is dated March 2005, prior to the Intel patent, and already suggests that it could be applied to a graphics driver. While I’m sure that Intel have their own separate algorithm, which may well be more suited to graphics chipsets, there is a nice bit of prior-art that should stop them from over-flexing their patent muscle to cover any in rendering-pipeline solution.
Of course, perhaps I’m being unfair in my assumption that Intel wont be implementing this any time soon. Hell, I haven’t looked at any Intel graphic driver settings recently, so its possible they have already implemented it. On the flip side I’m pretty sure its not fear of patent infringement that has stopped nVidia and ATI producing their own solutions.
* Assuming of course there exists something more reliable than a ‘last updated’ flag.
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there are lots of programs that do this, unfortunately most of them will get you VAC banned as they flag up as cheats (due to the fact they are regularly used as such)
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I am similarly effected. There’s a really good example of “getting it right” from Microsoft (shock horror). In the Vista version of Majong, there are three dragon tiles, black, red and green. I cannot tell the difference between the red and the green ones, but in the Windows 7 version, Microsoft flipped the image of the dragon for one of the colours, so now I can play without frustration.
Games like bejewelled frustrate me no end because the red and green tiles are again so very similar. One is 5 sided and the other 6 so I can’t quickly rely on shape recognition (as the brain struggles ‘naturally’ count above 4). However, I have a clone on my phone where the green is similar to the blue-green in traffic lights and I freaking own that game!
When I found the colour-blind mode in peggle I was over the moon. L4D comes with a colourblind mode too, but I couldn’t spot any difference.
Colourblindness is so very under-represented in the industry. I’m surprised these problems weren’t picked up in testing. I’d be willing to offer my help.
A final point I’d like to make is that my colour blindness is affected by size/distance. If I’m sitting far away from the screen (playing ps3) I’m unlikely to notice the difference, and the same goes for colours which are separated by the width of the screen. When they’re closer together, I can begin to notice the subtleties in the shades.
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Now I think about it, audiosurf scores highly for me. I couldn’t tell the difference between some of the blocks, so I just tweaked the fuck out of all of them until I could. I went for massive extremes. Black, White, Red, Yellow and Blue. It was the only way I could play the game.
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I think the colour blind mode in L4D just switches around the colours used on glow effects to more CB friendly shades, though it may do more than that.
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Heh, I did exactly the same on Audiosurf after continually mistaking the grey blocks for light blue-green ones.
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I have a colorblind buddy as well. Whenever I find a game which supports colorblind mode, I tell him about it. Too bad there are not many of them around.
It’s really frustrating, especially because of the large percentage of people affected by this.
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And here I thought this was going to be a gag.
I am not a sensitive person.
Anyway, this was awesome. It makes me think there should be a mod community devoted solely to making popular games playable by the colourblind.
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Leeks!
The point is that the mod community should never have to get involved in this. Colour blind support should be built in out of the box. I might go a step further and say it shouldn’t be a feature you need to enable, it should just be so.
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Vischeck.com has a pretty neat online tool for simulating how a page would look with colourblindness. The RPS front page ends up like this: http://vischeck.homeip.net/uploads/126599386612525/
That Monaco game looks like it could use some colour tweaks.
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My wife has been complaining about this for years (She’s one of the very rare women with red-green colourblindness) and used to have real problems in EVE (her favourite game) telling when one of her modules was active (green) or in the process fo shutting down (red) until they fixed it.
She does have one advantage over us people with normal colour vision though. She can instantly spot when someone is wearing fake tan and derives much amusement from watching green people walk down the street. I’d love that. green people would be awesome.
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That reminds me, yesterday I saw someone with enough fake tan/makeup it made her face look yellow (to me anyway). Had I not noticed that her hands were still normal, I would have called the ambulance and had her checked out for liver failure!
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Excellent article. I can’t tell you how much this describes my problems with certain games’ design.
I’m also color blind. I’m having difficulties telling green from yellow, and also red-green-brown (ofcourse I’m talking about close enough shades of these colors, not any tone).
It’s especially frustrating when a game puzzle requires to put colored thingies in some order or pattern in order to progress into the game. This just kills me.
I don’t own Bioshock 2, yet, and didn’t know about this little game mechanic nightmare before now. So, now I’m certain I should wait for a patch.
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Very good article. I became more aware of this issue after reading the Kotaku article yesterday, and have been discussing it a lot around here.
The good news is that it’s really easy to check your concept art to see if it’ll work for people who are color blind. http://www.vischeck.com/ can simulate different colorblindness, and they also have a free Photoshop / ImageJ filter for download.
The big thing with design in general is that you always want to make sure your design holds up as black and white no matter what. We see value and shape first anyway, so if you can play your game in black and white (which is really easy to set up from your graphic card’s color settings), then you don’t have to worry about color blindness.
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I’m not sure about your figures, 8-12% seems a little incredible. It’s still an issue for people, of course, and one I hadn’t really considered before. Thanks for raising the awareness!
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Well the figures seem about right. Although the issue won’t necessarily effect them all, as it’s the figure for all colour blindness regardless of type, severity, or whatever. I’m still amazed it’s that high though. Given me a lot to think about.
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@Taillefer: 8%-12% is a little inflated (wikipedia says 7%-10%), but it’s going to be quite high because the definition of colourblind also seems to include those who are only colour “weak”. Sort of like if a count of the blind included anyone who uses glasses. Colour blindness is something that comes in degrees, like vision loss, but is only measured as any/none.
Wikipedia gives the prevalence as 7-10% (for men) for red-green deficiency, but only 2.4% (of men) are truly dichromatic (see things like the demonstration images in the Negativegamer article). For that other 5-8% of men, the amount of colour weakness varies from person to person, and I don’t think anyone knows how many are very nearly dichromatic, and how many instead only have trouble with a few closer shades of red and green to such a small extent that they’re not even aware of it without taking a test.
But even just 2.4% of men/0.03% of women/1.3% combined is still a significant number of people even before you add in however many of the folks with “anomalous” colourvision have it bad enough to have problems. I wonder if it’s higher than the number of gamers with deafness / substantial hearing loss (especially considering the age of most gamers).
For all you know, you might be “colourblind” too, though only in the sense of having anomalous trichromacy (weak colour vision). It might be very light and you’ve never really had to tell the difference between some similar reds and greens (seeing 74 means normal colour vision, 21 means dichromacy (colour blind) or anomalous trichromacy (colour weak)).
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Another colour-blind person here, I share your pain! Though luckily for me it’s very rarely an issue – it only crops up in games where you need use colour alone to distinguish things, and even then it’s only if the devs have used certain colours. Going off the screenshots in that Bioshock 2 article it looks like I’m not affected by that one.
(I’ve never gone and had a formal diagnosis so I still don’t know exactly what type of colour blindness I have, or to what extent I have it… though I suspect I’m at the minor end of the scale.)
The best workaround for this I ever saw was in the PC version of (I think!) Bust A Move 4, where each type of bubble animated in a different way – so people like me who had trouble with the colours could instead use the movement to tell them apart.
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Sounds like a case for Able Gamers, one of my favourite gamer type organizations.
I’m not disabled myself but I’m nuts about accessibility in my job (web development) and I love that there’s an organization advocating for accessibility in gaming — it’s easy to overlook that games might have issues. The Able Gamers reviews are especially interesting for anyone who cares about this kind of thing, particularly when their score, which naturally takes accessibility into account, differs greatly from the mainstream consensus (e.g. their Mass Effect 2 review).
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@Sagan: It sounds like the kind of thing a single pass with a pixel shader could do, but I don’t know if there’s any way to jimmy that on the end of an existing rendering pipeline.
The harder part is probably working out what to map things to, because that’s likely to be game, or ever situation, specific. You’ve got to pack the same amount of information into less visual space—you don’t want to make green text now invisible against a blue sky because you were trying to disambiguate it from red.
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On the flip side, when I’m looking into security systems for my evil lair, I now know of a way to keep 8-12% of the male population out!
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Eh? I know a way to keep 100% of males out, automated crotch targeting laser turrets.
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I’m not color blind, but as part-time web-designer and graphics designer I always check for readability of my creations with a little tool called “Color Oracle”. For those interested in how color blind people see their Computer-Screen, you can download the nifty little program here and have a look for yourself (it’s free and only 145kb):
http://colororacle.cartography.ch/
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Another colour-blind victim reporting in. Having said that, I certainly don’t suffer from it to the degree that most people on here a reporting. Outside of a few puzzle games that use lots of colours as the only distinction, I have only ever really had a problem distinguishing colours when an optician would show me numerous pictures of different coloured blobs and insisted there be numbers hidden within them some where, and quite often I can’t tell the difference between red and brown ball when watching snooker.
The only real mainstream game I can think of where I have actually had a problem is, in fact, Team Fortress 2. My problem seems to emerge when a player is doused in Jarate and I find it really hard distinguishing which team the player is on. I can just about tell, but I have to stare at them for a few seconds, which is usually a few seconds too long. I was disappointed to discover that the colour blind option just places a jar of Jarate above the head of anyone covered in the piss, without indicating which team they are on.
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I think I’ve been pretty lucky with it so far (I have protanopia, judging by the images in the negative gamer article), the only game it seemed like an issue was Peggle before I found the handy colourblind mode. Of course, I’m not much of a puzzle gamer so that helps too.
Wait, those are tags are supposed to be different colours?
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PopCat did a good job with the colourblind mode. It’s also found in Zuma (I lost at every game until I found it)
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I have immense problems with a few colours. There’s a shade of orange and a shade of green I confuse all the time (in medieval total war, I thought the turkish flag was simply plain green, it took over a year for me to spot an orange moon in there). I don’t suffer ‘bright red bright green’ colour blindness, as it’s limited to oranges, not reds. I can’t tell the difference between blue and purple though, which is occasionally problematic, and some yellows and greens are just the same ‘bright lime’ colour to me.
There was a game recently that was a lot more difficult because of my orange/green colourblindness though, I just can’t remember which. I know that it makes borders difficult to see in civ 4 though.
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@Serenegoose
Shee, I hadn’t thought of colour blindness in Civ 4 — I have enough problems with some factions’ borders looking too similar even without thinking about colour blindness messing with things further.
I’ve always found it weird there is no option anywhere to set up faction colours when you’re starting a new game, so you can ensure they’re all distinguishable from one another.
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I suffer color-blindness and I can tell this is absolutely true. The best thing developers could do is to not design in a color-basis but pattern basis.
Also I wanted to point out that TF2 Jarate really confuses me, I can never tell if it’s Blu team or Red team.
I’m glad you guys wrote about this!
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Bloody Jarate, I forgot about that one. At least the mini-crits give good feedback on whether the jaratee is friend or foe. The strange thing is I don’t recall having any problems before I upgraded and was running the game in DX8 to get a decent frame-rate.
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You upgraded to DX8..?
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Before I upgraded I had to use the DX8 shaders, yes. I don’t understand your confusion.
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Excellent article. Interesting to see so many people who’ve had similar problems as well actually. I am yet another one with colour-blindness, inherited from both my parents. Yay! Compared to several people who have posted, I don’t have it too bad. The one thing I remember always having difficulty with was the radar in CS:Source as well as finding it nearly impossible to get headshots on Ts using the “1337 Crew” skin, as when I trained my crosshair on them, it always seemed to disappear in to their greenyness.
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I wasn’t even aware of this problem till last year when one of the guys i worked with had red green colour blindness. it was pretty interesting hearing what he described seeing compared to non-colour blind folk. it’s defintely something devs should be aware of.
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My wife works in human factors, which is industrial interface design, where to to put the big red warning light, that sort of thing, and one of her mantras is ‘colour should NEVER be the only form of coding’
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That’s what I mean. Design can’t be based on colors only!
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Clarification: While that percentage may be partially colourblind (I am), most don’t find it a problem. Most are not even aware of it, they just occasionally argue with a friend about the shade of something. My purple is everyone else’s pink, apparently. Not sure how that happens.
Secondarily, realistic game design and less reliance upon HUDs fixes the issue.
If you play Stalker with a minimal HUD, you will suffer the realistic downsides of colourblindness in the world and environment. Perhaps you’ll suffer a statistically tiny disadvantage in making out camoflauged foes in foliage. And that’s just realism, that’s a valid side-effect. Maybe you’re unusually good at headshotting Snorks, everyone is quite unique.
All of this intended as a ramble of intention – this problem at the source is that games are too reliant upon simplistic colour coded indicators and lazily constructed interfaces.
Unnecessary interfaces.
Play Assassin’s Creed 2, you’ll notice the entire HUD can be disabled. This wasn’t very well thought out, it makes picking up money and tools from fallen foes very troublesome as you don’t know what you’ve picked up – a small oversight.
However you realise as your eyes open to the world that the game has been fully designed, other than that small flaw, to operate without a HUD. Who really pays attention to the circling eagles until they need them to identify a lookout spot. Who watches the sunset shadows to note there’s a guard on the roof, or carefully observes the bodylanguage of a patrolman to judge whether he finds you suspicious or not. Who listens to the audio cues of the crowd to know whether or not they’re in trouble, intuitively judging their state by the way the world reacts rather than by the garish and colourful series of icons and flashing lights painted onto their retinas.
HUDs are usually inapproppriate and often totally unnecessary. Without them we’re all on an equal footing as individuals with strengths and weaknesses of mind, of eye, and of dexterity.
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I have a friend who is colour blind.. He also can’t see Green or, to a lesser degree, Red.
We play a lot of games together, Left 4 Dead 2, Borderlands to name a few, with other people and it doesn’t really get i nthe way of our leisure time.
I kind of have a constant voice in the back of my mind telling me what he might have problems with. If he gets Boomered, I try and help him out as much as possible because he cannot see through it and is genuinely blinded for a good 5-8 seconds. It also means that certain campaigns have to be avoided like Swamp Fever when playing in serious game modes like Versus.
I kind of wish, just for a moment, I could see what he sees sometimes. To be able to see the problem for myself, I would understand what it feels like to be in such a situation where you can become at a disadvantage due to being colourblind.
I have asked him a few times.. “Whats it like?” and “What CAN you see? What colour can you see instead of Green?” and I can never really get a solid answer from him. He could see Grey or Yellow and then I think “well just substitute Yellow in place of Green, how hard is that?” but then I think thats stupid, it just can’t be as easy as that or he would’ve done it ages ago.
What I may see might not be necessarily what someone else sees.. I could pick up a green crayon and see my interpretation of green whilst someone else could look at the same crayon and see it as Blue.. but all their life they have recognized that colour as Green so they say its Green!
Its nice to see Valve (As usual) and a few other recognize this problem and are taking steps to fix it. Kudos to them and Hi to my friend who may read this :P
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I’m one of the lucky 8% who are only slightly colour blind. The situation I’ve noticed it most in is the colour blindness charts that doctors/opticians use to diagnose colour blindness (the ones with lots of coloured dots with a subtly different coloured number).
The best way to get an idea of what it’s like is in a very low light situation. When there’s barely enough light to see you might have noticed that you can’t really distinguish colours, because the cone cells in your eye that detect colours are not sensitive enough to work, but the (much more numerous) rod cells will be giving you an idea of intensity. Basically in low light you can only see in b&w.
If you reduce the light intensity you’ll gradually find that objects lose their colour, and while you can kinda tell that two things are different colours, they’re basically shades of grey.
For me, in less than good lighting, it’s red and green that become difficult to tell apart first. Also, at the intersection of a intense red and green areas, I find it hard to focus exactly on the boundary.
Fortunately none of this really affects me in games (although I might try some games in colourblind mode and see what difference it makes), I have more problems with the crap short term memory that’s part of my dyslexia. In Mass Effect, I ended up having to write down (or keep repeating to myself) the system/star/planet of the side missions, while I found them in the map, because for some annoying reason you couldn’t flick back and forth between the mission briefing and the map (or just select the destination direct when you select the mission). Yes, the delay between reading the mission and going into the map is long enough for me to forget the names :(
(another example of a UI change which would make life easier for every gamer)
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i also am color blind and wish that games would provider at least an option for color blindness.
it seems like the only game that seem to address it are the “distraction” games such as zuma (different colors have different designs) or a few other like that.
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*blushes*
Thanks, we try, Colorblind is one of the things that we look for. Even this morning we posted something about StarCraft II. Here is little tid-bit Chris Sigaty Lead producer of StarCraft II is colorblind. We ask him about it once…
“In the final few minutes of the interview, we put him on the spot and ask him, “Why, if you are a colorblind disabled gamer, are you not pushing for this game to be colorblind friendly?” Sigaty answered that Blizzard would love to put in every feature to the game as quickly as possible, and then almost nervously laughed that many many features are cut that should actually make it into the game sooner rather than later.”
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Maybe this can be fixed with a tiny script.. heee.r…. shader. I mean, maybe you can programatically replace colors, so you can automagically convert all games to “colorblind friendly”.
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Thanks for writing this.
I’m slightly colour blind and work as a usability consultant. Colour should NEVER be the only way to give information to your users, even in games.
I also agree with Jakkar, HUDs are useless and very annoying.
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http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Color45.jpg
People say theres a number in there somewhere… Lies I tell you LIES!
Being colorblind sucks sometimes.
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@FreakinSyco
I think I can see a 4 on the left, but fortunately for me these tests are the only time I notice my colour blindness
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I can see a Onyxia Wipe on that image, and I don’t even play WoW.
http://www.kontraband.com/videos/3713/Onyxia-Wipe/
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Soonn to come the color blind fix patch ^^
Why not !!!
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Great, informative, article.
Thanks.
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I’m curious as to why Puzzle Bobble keeps on getting dragged into this, especially as even the earliest arcade versions were designed with colour-blindness in mind by giving each type of bubble their own individual shape inside them. At first these were the familiar enemies trapped in bubbles, later versions included basic shapes such as triangles and stars.
I always thought this a good example of keeping colour-blindness in mind and designing around it.
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I had the a problem with the colours in Armageddon Empires. I emailed the always friendly Vic Davis, and a few days later I received a mod for the game, which solved the problem. Go indie developer
Wish that more games would think of us poor disabled persons.
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@per
Oh my — that is quite fabulous. It makes me smile.
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Wow, that really is quite fantastic. :)
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In all honesty, I think I’d rather be just colourblind than with the malformed clusterfucks that are my eyes.
I mean, with correction, I can barely see detail well enough to drive, going by license-plate reading. Strictly speaking they’re not bad, but damn does it get annoying. I don’t think it’s awkward vision tests, but man. Being able to see clearly in limited shades seems much more appealing.
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Another example: I can only play Audiosurf on Easy, because I can’t tell the blue and the purple blocks apart, or the yellow and the green, fast enough.
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Good article. (Much more needs to be written about disability and gaming, as it’s often completely unconsidered)
I do also have a friend who managed to do an art history masters while being a monochromatic – I think that’s right, he can only see yellow. I suspect it gave him an excellent alternative take on a lot of the stuff he analysed.
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Note to self:
GriddleOctopus useless in a Martian invasion.
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and on that planet made entirely of lava.
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cliffski says: February 12, 2010 at 4:53 pmI use red/green in various places in GSB. I had no idea this was such a big problem. I should definitely stick this on my things to do list.
Cheers!
I’m red/green colourblind and I’ve been whingeing on about this for years. Actually, GSB isn’t too bad, but I did post a forum comment about it during the beta. Oh well, nice to know my words carry so much weight! :p
Dan’s comment about not knowing which team you’re on in FPS rings really true for me. For some reason, I have real trouble distinguishing between Red and Blu in TF2. I can see the colours if I think hard about it, but my brain just won’t make the connection. It takes a couple of minutes for me to train myself which team I’m on, and then I just stick with that side all night.
And Mutiwinia? Don’t get me started. A mass of similarly coloured stick men. I really, really wanted to like Mutiwinia, but I’m limited to simple me-versus the PC where I can choose the colours myself. The rest of the game is a total waste for me.
So thanks, Dan. Excellent article. It’s got me seething again, but I hate how I’m disadvantaged just because my eyes are a bit different. When it could be so easily fixed.
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btw, Quake actually IS rubbish sepia nonsense. They really did make it that brown.
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So, quick question for the colour blind, is there a certain standard type of pallet that works for you guys? or is it different for everyone?
What could be done is writing a driver for the GPU that will render a pixel to a certain value if it meets the requirements. I think it would be a much better idea to handle it all on the GPU to create a consistent experience then to do it on a game by game basis. It should also improve performance since it doesnt need to do a extra pass in the games own render engine.
Then again, I havent coded any drivers yet so i cant fairly comment on the situation. How big is the colour blindness problem in the mayor OS’ systems(Mac, Windows, Linux, etc).
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@ Jakkar:
“Perhaps you’ll suffer a statistically tiny disadvantage in making out camoflauged foes in foliage.”
Ironically it has been suggested that the selection pressure for colour blindness is that it enables better detection of camoflauged objects. It’s only really a vague hypothesis; you have something that is so prevalent in humanity there must be a decent selection pressure for it (like sickle cell aneamia correlating with malaria prevalence). Well that’s what I was told when I took part in a colour blindness study anyway.
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Reminds me of my flat feet making me technically a better runner/jumper, despite the archaic military recruitment issues with soldiers who lack arches..
Thanks for the data =]
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This article is full of factual inaccuracies. I have a few points I’d like to make, from the point of view of a hardcore gamer who also happens to be an optometrist.
1) Deuteranopia is the most severe form of “deutan” defects (reduced sensitivity to green). Deutan defects as a whole affect ~5-6% of the population, but this includes those with absolute minimal defects. The “deuteranopes” are a much smaller fraction of this wider deutan group. Similarly there also also protanopes and protanomals (reduced sensitivity to red), and tritanopes and trianomals (blue).
2) Only -opes and severe -anomals will share Dan’s complaint in games. I have a friend who is a hardcore gamer and is a moderate deuteranomal (I know this because I did a full work-up of his colour vision). He never has any issues with the colour palates in games (but sometimes with matching his socks :p).
3) Dan further inflated the statistic to 8-12%. 8% is the fraction of males suffering any form of colour vision deficiency. This includes everyone from –opes to mild –anomals. 8% of “paying customers” would certainly not have the same complaints that Dan does. The additional figure of 12% is just untrue, I’m not sure where that was obtained from.
4) Females gamers make up a sizeable portion of the gaming population. The prevalence of all colour vision deficiencies in females is ~0.5%. This further reduces the number of “paying customers” with such complaints.
5) Red vs green is a sensible colour pair to use because our colour vision is based on a red-green “opponent” mechanism, meaning that an object can not be perceived to be reddish-green; it is either red, or green. This makes the pair the best choice whenever visibility must be maximized. Traditionally this applies to signal lights at a distance (traffic lights, aircraft, trains, ships). This also applies to games in situations where the game world is dimly lit, or there is a lot of information to process at once, or very quickly.
6) Incidentally, traffic lights (and other signal lights) do not present “no problem” for colour defectives. Dan suffers from a deutan defect (insensitive to green). Those that suffer from protan defects (insensitive to red) have a much, much harder time with signal lights and are disqualified from many jobs that involve such colour discrimination.
7) Our colour vision is also based on a blue-yellow opponent system. This is often not appealing to use because we are very insensitive to blue (you have to pump a lot more voltage into a given blue pixel to make it look as bright as, say, a yellow pixel). Additionally yellow is an awful colour in well-lit situations because it is hard to distinguish from white.
8) As mentioned TF2 incorporates a red vs blue system. This would not work nearly as well in a dimly lit situation, or when there are a lot of players in one spot, or if the players were a lot smaller on the screen. Fortunately TF2 suffers from none of these drawbacks, and so red vs blue is a viable alternative in this instance. Side note: I hate TF2’s colour scheme, I would prefer to always appear to be on the blue team, and have the enemies always appear red (or vice versa). Switching team colors, as happens often in TF2, is bloody confusing no matter what sort of colour vision you have.
9) In response to pepper who posted above me, there is no simple pixel-by-pixel transformation that would solve things for colour vision deficients. This is because it depends on what colours are used purely in relation to the other colours present.
10) How is a gaming company going to know which colours in which combinations are going to cause problems? You really need artists or game designers on the team that suffer from such issues (rarely possible), or to design a different type of game in which no colour issues can really become a problem, a la TF2 (not always possible).
11) There are a lot of people with a range of disabilities. There are those with low vision, motor control difficulties, amputees, etc. Sometimes you just can’t design for everybody.
12) Perhaps for evolutionary reasons, we view red as being an angry, dangerous colour and green as being a happy, soothing colour. For whatever the reason, such colour schemes are universally known (among colour normals) and so have a lot of appeal for the useability of games. In the current gaming climate of verbose tutorials, tiny icons, clunky controls, Excel computations, forum delving, and meaty downloads, a little intuitiveness in game design becomes more and more precious.
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“12) Perhaps for evolutionary reasons, we view red as being an angry, dangerous colour and green as being a happy, soothing colour. For whatever the reason, such colour schemes are universally known (among colour normals) and so have a lot of appeal for the useability of games.”
That’s for cultural reasons, not evolutionary, and they’re only universal because western culture is practically universal. In China red is the color of joy, not danger or anger, or at least it did in ancient China. I couldn’t say how much western influence might have changed that now, as I’ve never been there.
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To Melf Himself
I have a lot to agree with and a lot to discriminate with to you:
1: colorblindness comes in many forms, like mine in which I see almost all colors except certain dark shades of blue, but I can confuse red-black yellow-green and blue-pink-purple which makes all colors useless. The statistic for total number of colorblind males is about 1 in 10, in a classical sense of color perception problems of all kinds.
2: Mine Distrofy (conal) comes from a problem with a lack of cones in my eyes, the cells that percieve light in well lit situations, and I know quite a few people with even minor colorblindness that will agree with Dan on this.
3: see 1.
4: Yes, females certainly luck out on this, and would definitely reduce the percentage of paying customers, though even assuming they make up 50% of consumers that’s still 5% lost.
5: I agree entirely with the comments about signal lights, they are major problems to my relatives who share my unfortunately genetic problem. And yes red-green and blue-yellow are palette opposites and red-green is the most common colorblindness. It doesn’t make games unplayable necessarily except in certain situations, they just switch colors and looks ugly.
6: See 5.
7: Not much to say, just that blue is very distinct from red in most shades, and that yellow can be blended into red, even blue sometimes.
8: TF2′s colors swaps are very helpful usually, they are definitely different enough for me, but some classes, such as pyro, can be impossible to distinguish based on the way the color is applied. When colorblindness leads your brain to not follow pictures the way designers intend it to it can be hard to catch obvious details,
9: Ditto, though some filters could be applied in a blanket fashion to assist, these ruin the look of most games though.
10: Its true, those with visual impairments of all sorts are generally unwelcome on design based art projects, though abstract painters with problems are sometimes the best. And this problem could be solved with a simple grayscale mode, which wouldn’t be very pretty, but very classic looking.
11: This is true, I don’t think any disability should be favored whenever possible, but gaming is a VISUAL medium, not even as much aural to cause major problems for my deaf friends (though they may just be settling for the worse because they don’t know the better), Those with motor skill difficulties can’t play because of the input devices, not the developed games, Also he wrote this article for a purpose, to tackle all that’s wrong with game design would be a massive undertaking.
12: This seems to be a western ideal in some respects, like why we associate black with death and white with life, in China white is the color of death because of blood draining from the face causing paleness. Personally I think designers should go for more symbol based systems, though these would be hard to implement. I probably miss more than half of the intuitive hints based on color because I’ve taken to just glazing over individual color components and only look for them in groups or whole pictures.
Overall good critique mate.
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@Melf_Himself
Can you clarify what percentage of people *do* have problems with colours in games (in your “expert” opinion)?
I can’t recall anyone saying that red-green shouldn’t be used at all but I have seen several people suggesting how it can be “tweaked”. As I understand it traffic lights and other road signals/signs use other design features not just colour alone: eg to quote from wikipedia:
“Usually, the red light contains some orange in its hue, and the green light contains some blue, to provide some support for people with red-green color blindness. In the UK, traffic lights typically have a white reflective border, which enables color blind users, during the hours of darkness, to distinguish the lights from other similarly-colored street or automobile lights, and to allow them to distinguish the lights by vertical position” [they also use precise sequences and flashing etc].
You ask “How is a gaming company going to know which colours in which combinations are going to cause problems?” – There has been a lot of research done on this already. You don’t neccessarily need a colour-blind team member to be able to access this information nor are there any kinds of games which are impossible to improve in this respect. It is *always* possible to tweak features and have extra user options, if you want to make the effort.
You say that “There are a lot of people with a range of disabilities. There are those with low vision, motor control difficulties, amputees, etc. Sometimes you just can’t design for everybody” – Sure, *sometimes* you can’t design for *everybody*, but a lot of the time you can make a *bit* of effort designing things for a *lot* of people.
I’m sorry to say that any “authority” from your claimed real-life credentials is undermined for me by reading the rubbish you just posted and your snotty and unsympathetic comments. You don’t come across as being much of a scientist, much of a gamer (verbious tutorials are 90s!) , much of a care-provider nor someone who has much social awareness or ability to debate and communicate. You do however remind me of a fair number of medical students I have known.
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10) How is a gaming company going to know which colours in which combinations are going to cause problems? You really need artists or game designers on the team that suffer from such issues (rarely possible), or to design a different type of game in which no colour issues can really become a problem, a la TF2 (not always possible).
This is really the wrong attitude. As a game designer it’s your job to figure out this stuff. You don’t need necessarily to have a color-blind artist, it should suffice to have a little forethought and a color-blind playtester or two (or three).
Accessibility as a whole is just something that game designers have done a terrible job at in the past, but is now finally starting to change. So please don’t start excusing our poor design choices, now!
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What’s with the random shot at female dress sense at the end? Makes it hard to take the rest of the article seriously when abruptly you get “Oh and girls are stupid and like pink HA HA.”
Seriously. Poor form.
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DeepSleeper: A useful concept to bear in mind.
KG
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THANK YOU! This needs to be thoroughly discussed! While I have conal distofy, which I cant spell, and its not technically colorblindness it still changes colors for me. I agree that this is a major issue and really needs more attention. I’m also legally blind to the point where glasses cant fix my problem, and games like to ream us good and hard sometimes with tiny details we cant see, small text with no chance to enlarge, tiny huds, impossible radars (you know what I mean guys, where the motion sensor makes the blips tiny invisible dots you have no chance to register), and sometimes just plain evil puzzles.
Also the CAPTCHA can cause problems if the contrast between letter and background isnt high enough, FOR SHAME
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I took a colour blindness test once and the guy taking it said my results were very odd, I could see all the numbers (both the ones only colour blind people could see and the ones only people with normal vision could.)
One was supposed to be a 2 or a 5, I saw an 8 with a flat bottom.
He was quite confused.
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A quick look at my ATI graphics card options reveals SmartShaders that allow you to change the colors of everything the card renders.
Might these be of use to colorblind gamers? If so, or if ATI can add a few specific colorblind ones… problem solved.
Either way, a driver/system based solution seems the best idea.
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“And, of course, I can’t tell pink from white, so women’s taste in clothing doesn’t sicken me, like it should.”
*chuckle* Thanks Gril, sweet article!
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Hear hear, I have the exact same problem. It’s virtually impossible to tell lime-yellow and green as well as some shades of red and green apart, if it’s not for certain patterns ingame.
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Thanks very much for this, it’s about time someone pointed this out. I am two of my friends (all three of us gamers) are red-green colourblind. I haven’t personally encountered anything gamebreaking, but then again I haven’t played Bioshock 2 or MW2 yet. Minimaps in some RTSs and similar are indeed very annoying, especially those that have a brown background and I’m somehow expected to see the red enemy dots moving on top of it. Audiosurf’s colours can be adjusted, thanksfully.
Bulbs/LEDs and similar are the biggest problem for me, just as they are in real life (the type where you flick a switch and a green LED turns red to show you that your spaceship’s plasmatronic karaoke machine is now switched on), but in most games I can just about tell them apart because the “on” hue will also have greater luminance. I have to strain though!
Mount & Blade is a pain for me. I can’t tell the teams in tournaments apart for love or for money, and I really strain to tell the Vaegirs apart from the Nords (my friend tells me he’s gotten into loads of accidental fights that way, his green deficiency must be worse than mine).
Ironically, I’ve never had a problem in a flight sim game, even though I could never be licensed as a pilot in real life because of my colourblindness.
Oh, and, @Melf_Himself: I’ve never had a problem with traffic lights. Red and orange do look similar to me, but still different enough that I don’t get confused, although it might simply be because the orange is never on for long enough on its own to confuse me.
Thanks again Dan, and I hope someone listens to you sometime soon!
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As a non-games related aside, most forum captcha systems really are impossible for me! :) Not RPS’s though, so thanks for that guys!
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Alpha Centauri (or was it Alien Crossfire, I forget now) had a color-blind graphics pack. I imagine this was a godsend, since a bunch of green crap on all-red alien foliage was probably extraordinarily hard to see.
That was with sprites years ago–I would think compensating now would be easier by adding a vertex shader or something different lighting if you couldn’t be bothered to come up with different textures.
Crap, now I want to go find my Alien Crossfire disc again.
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I think was linked to on RPS recently, but anyway, it seems appropriate:
Valve To Add Sign Language To Episode 3?
The Escapist, 8 Aug 2009
“…In an effort to understand the needs of deaf gamers better, Gabe Newell invited a group of deaf gamers and asked them questions about what Valve could do to improve their games for them. He also speaks about adding deaf characters into their games, giving us an insight into story elements of the upcoming final episode of Half Life 2.
Newell’s idea is that Alyx had a crush on a hearing impaired person before she met Gordon, and taught Dog sign language so that she could practice; which sounds cool until he admits that he stole the idea from Four Weddings and a Funeral. What’s going to be interesting about that idea is how Dog will cope, as facial expressions play a big part in sign language, and as you may have spotted, Dog doesn’t actually have a face…”
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/93744-Valve-To-Add-Sign-Language-To-Episode-3
(It is interesting to watch some of the 25 minutes of YouTube footage of Gabe doing a question-and-answer session with the group in question. His attitude to the whiole process helps give a clue as to why Valve continue to make good games.)
also:
The Silent Majority
The Escapist, 11 Nov 2008
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_175/5468-The-Silent-Majority
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Question is who cares? Why not make all games blind accessible? Why not remake all traffic lights so yellow would be stop, blue would be go.
Red = bad, green = good the natures way! Get over it!
Nice green meadow = good, red flaming forest = bad.
So STFU and get over it already.
Stop trying to screw games for 95% majority!
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and the ‘First Asshole comment of the day’ award goes to….
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How is adding a colorblind mode or being mindful of colorblind people trying to screw games for 95% majority!
You should read the entirety of the article before you go on silly, hyperbolic, anti-PC rants. Like it or not, fine gents like yourself have to share the world with a multitude of people.
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You are not behaving like a kind person. Mild colour adjustment does not negatively impact a game for non-colourblind people in the slightest.
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Red flaming forest = Beautiful Autumn/Fall.
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You know, that *could* have been a valid point… If you hadn’t been so busy flaming and trying to offend.
It’s a perfectly valid question to ask “how far can game developers be expected to go?” Should they cater for just the most common forms of colour-blindness? The rare ones? What about blindness? Near-blindness? And so on. What about left-handed gamers? Half the games on Nintendo DS are unplayable to me because I’m left-handed. Holding the stylus in your left hand means you can’t use the d-pad at the same time and then you’re just screwed in a surprising amount of games.
What about hearing-impaired gamers? A friend of mine is a bit hard of hearing, and it drives him nuts when games don’t have subtitles.
There are a lot of considerations developers have to make if they want *everyone* to be able to play their games. How many of concessions can they reasonably be required to make? And which ones should they prioritize?
Of course, before anyone perceiving this as taking the the troll’s side, let me be clear here: I’m just posing the question because I think it’s interesting.
I’m definitely not saying games shouldn’t be colour-blind friendly. Another friend suffers from red-green colour blindness. I know what a pain that is for him. I used to tell him which colours to use when we were kids and he was painting or drawing.
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Oh jeez, let’s just pretend that post of mine wasn’t so chock-full of typos and forgotten words in the middle of otherwise meaningful sentences… I really should have logged in so I could edit it…
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@ cpy
“Why not remake all traffic lights”
They have been remade! Red light’s have some orange, green lights contain some blue, reflective borders and positioning are distinctive and they use precise sequences and flashing. All of these features have been deliberately designed to assist accessibility.
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@ jalf
I think it comes down to making a “reasonable” amount of effort – at least trying.
Obviously some developers have enough trouble finishing their games properly as it is.
However it should increasingly become a normal part of the initial design document for *everything*. This isn’t just a gaming or business issue, it’s a social/political issue. Some people will voluntarily pioneer certain design principles – eventually they will be so easy to include that everyone will be able to do so without major problems. We should encourage the pioneers and criticise the laggards. There isn’t a single ‘fixed point’ – as design and technology moves forward it will become easier to design for more and more people, and our expectations of what is ‘reasonable’ can follow.
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“Who cares?”
Oh, I don’t know, fucking colorblind people?
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In reply to those who replied to me:
@ Teejay:
No, I can’t provide statistics on the number of people that would have problems with games based on their colour vision. Those kinds of studies haven’t been done that I’m aware of, and I don’t make up unsubstantiated statistics. I am quite confident that the number is far less than 6%, as you’d be aware if you did some basic research.
If you can provide a link to this freely accessible information that allows game developers to figure out how to change the various colour maps in their games, I’d love to see it. I do not believe that such a resource exists; nor do I believe that one is possible, because so much depends upon the combinations of colours used together. Yes, it is true that various tweaks can be made to avoid some common problems, but not all teams have the resources to pursue this. We’re talking about something that might be a real problem for ~2% of gamers. That’s a potential 2% decrease in profits. If it extends development time by more than 2% to track down the necessary changes and for them to be implemented, it becomes unworthwhile from a business standpoint.
You seem to have made a blanket attack on my credibility, professionalism and “social awareness” without any basis. I choose not to respond, you can think what you wish. I’m only trying to present some facts to the general audience, that were mislead by the non-facts in this article. I don’t see how spreading a bunch of B.S. would make me a better person.
@ Shnyker: That’s a tough break on the cone dystrophy. Cone dystrophies are extremely rare, and the normal rules of what works in terms of catering to colour vision defectives usually do not apply. This is because usually it is not one particular cone type that is affected, but all three. I wonder if you gain much relief from the Colour Blind Mode in Valve games? I would have thought not. Anyway thanks for your perspective, it was interesting.
Overall I did not intend to say in my response that colour vision defectives should not be catered for. I wanted to point out that they are difficult to cater for, and because they ARE a small fraction of gamers, it is not within the budget of some teams. It would of course be a worthy investment for larger game studios since it is tech that they can carry forward to their subsequent games. But for the majority of studios who are often months behind on due dates and are not sure how many games they will ship in the future, etc, I can see why they leave that kind of support out.
Also, point taken on the western concept of red = danger, etc vs other cultures, to the people that pointed it out.
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How long would it have taken to change the colours in the Bioshock hacking? 2 minutes, max? One RGB value changed or shift the hue of the textures and throw it back to the team? Add some sort of glyph to the artwork?
A little consideration often takes a little time. Most of the solutions are elementary stuff. The problem isn’t that games studios can’t/don’t have the time/budget to implement these things, it’s that they don’t consider it *full stop*. And that needs to change.
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A week or so, probably. They’d have to:
1: Find a way to change it that still looks nice
2: Verify that it is actually acceptable to colour-blind users
3: Verify that it doesn’t look bad for non-colour-blind users
3: Test it thoroughly to make sure it didn’t break anything
Of course, in reality, it’d take far longer, because if they were going to consider colour-blindness in the first place, they’d have to do this for the entire game. The fact that it is only really an issue in the minigame is only obvious after the fact. For them to catch it during development, they’d have to go through this process for the entire game, so that they could actually spot which parts of it cause problems for colour-blind users. It is a fairly small change yes, if you already have all the answers. If you already know which parts of the game need to be changed, and you know how they can be changed to fix the problem without causing new ones for other players. Developers have to do it the hard way during development, first finding the problem, then fixing it, and then testing the fixed version of the game, for both colour-blind and “normal” users.
Of course, this isn’t to say they shouldn’t do it. Just that it’s a far bigger change than “a few minutes”.
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“The fact that it is only really an issue in the minigame is only obvious after the fact.”
It absolutely should have come up in the design stage not after the fact. And if no-one pointed it out at any point during the however long length of time the game was in development then they definitely need to get their act together and work with folks like Able Gamers and other accessibility outlets so that these are lessons learned and not repeated next time.
As I implied, this is symptomatic of an industry that doesn’t consider accessibility as important for the most part. If they did take it seriously at 2KMarin, this problem wouldn’t be there and the game wouldn’t have gotten that far into development never mind out the door with this issue hanging around.
Aaaand as for having the answers, it took me around 10 minutes to find enough information to build a colour blind edition of one of my games. Colour choices, clarity requirements, the whole kit and kaboodle from a quick google. I’m sure the devs have access to Google, same as me.
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Has anyone linked that renowned online colour test? Where you place several lines of colour blocks in order of hue? It’s surprising how many men struggle with that test, even those who haven’t been diagnosed as colour blind.
People should start taking a leaf out of Valves book and at the very least offer basic colour blind-friendly facilities such as in L4D2.
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Dude, come on! You can’t tell about stuff like that and not provide a link.
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I think I found it.
http://www.colblindor.com/color-arrangement-test/
It was pretty easy, but I know I haven’t got any problems with colours. There should be an advanced one, so I can compare the awesomeness of my eyes with the awesomeness of womens eyes.
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Interesting read, but I don’t see 2k patching in colourblind options if they can’t even get widescreen right (again).
thinking about it, I used to play all my Spectrum games as a nipper on a black and white telly and perhaps it was just the nature of the system (lots of use of black and white for shading and outlines anyway) but not having colour was rarely a problem. The odd game (Matchday) I would concede needed colour, but by far not the majority. I remember playing Qbert-style and light cycle games in glorious B+W anyway.
I guess the transition from sprite based engines to 3d and improved colour depths and resolutions brought a lot of new puzzles for devs, some of which (like this) I hadn’t considered.
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As a side note I noticed that that was mentioned here also has a coourblind option. As a protanotope I appreciate it myself.
It’s good that someone is addressing this. I have trouble at times, but I can only imagine how it’s for people who have a more limiting colorblindness.
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you may be colour blind but your character you’re roleplaying isn’t deal with it!
no seriously this is just part of the growing pains of the industry, much like the epilepsy issues of a few years back, i’m sure it will become standard procedure to test for this kind of thing later on.
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my old flat made always had to ask when his xbox controller had finished charging. also had a bit of trouble with uno.
most of the time, it didnt prove to be much of a problem, and if it ever was, he’d ask me to point out particular things for him.
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We had a couple of color-blind persons playing the Void with no trouble whatsoever. The only place where they had trouble is when you had to battle the Brothers, and look at the Color wheel to hit their weak sports. It’s also a matter of contrast, that defines whether a person would tell the difference between Colors or not.
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There’s been visual display equipment designed for people with colour blindness for a while. Eizo released a 24″ monitor a couple of years ago:
http://gizmodo.com/326224/flexscan-lcd-monitor-for-the-color+blind-is-24-inches
Presumably, the added advantage of having it on the VDU is you could also wire it up to a TV or DVD player and still get the benefit.
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Arf, just noticed Dan mentioned what I said in his report. I must have missed out the end paragraph, and so I feel silly now.
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What has this to do with Irony? So the comment was intended to actually make the statement that girls have actually great tastes in color and clothing? It was a bad joke, and a rather crudely worded one at that. Irony fits it as well as it does the Alanis Morisette song.
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And again the Reply button fails. Comment above was meant to go in the “bad form at the end by ranting about girls” part.
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Kanil: Christ, man, I’m not going to walk you through this one.
KG
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It’s alright Kieron, I’ll explain it.
Kanil, to get the comments system to work all you have to do is add the following to the end of your post.
KG
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Lilliput King: Brilliant.
KG
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I have some sort of colour-blindness that I have never gotten diagnosed. I have trouble telling the difference between orange, pink and purple.
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Just to share some of my experiences:
Traffic lights look orange, orange, blue to me.
It is impossible for me to tell which team that harrier or heli raining death and destruction on the battlefield belongs to in MW2. Likewise, I can’t tell which team players belong to based on the colour of the text which appears over their heads.
Bejewelled and similar colour-matching puzzles are very frustrating to play.
In Heroes of Newerth It’s exceptionally hard to tell what’s going on in a fight, which often makes me unpopular due to the game being very cruel to the whole team whenever someone makes even the slightest mistake.
However, I hardly have any trouble with TF2 and games which indicate alignments with shapes rather than colours (for example icons appearing over the heads of allies and the silhouettes of races in WoW).
Something I find interesting is that back in my Quake days, when playing CTF mode, I could usually tell which team a player belonged to based on the direction they ran in (towards or away from our base) and other behaviour tendencies. These “instincts” have actually helped me catch a lot of spies in TF2.
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The Fact that you can see both “options” might actually indicate that you are a Tetrachromate (4 base colors) instead of trichromate that most people are, or you might just have a genetic disposition for it.
IF you have those genes, feel lucky, its VERY rare. many guys who are “coclorblind” are children of women with the genetic disposition, and they dont have it in dominant form. so congratulations, you might just be able to see a bit into the UV spectrum.
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btw, my reply vas to Rhys Aronson’s post.
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As a game designer, colour blindness is the bane of my existence. Thanks for the link to those quick tips, they are now bookmarked.
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While you are at it, feel free to bookmark this site as well:
http://wearecolorblind.com/
It’s intended more towards designers with things to keep in mind when designing for colourblind users.
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Thanks for the links, I really do not know enough about all this.
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Oh no, you’ve been deceived. It’s in his kiss. (That’s where it is.)
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I’m sorry to state the obvious observation here, but in a sense you’re just a statistic on the other side of a spectrum. Simply put those 94% are more than enough.
This sounds perhaps very disrespectful, but it’s really merely an observation on my side than anything else…
But the perhaps somewhat rhetorical question remains though, should developers really take things like these into account when making their games??
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