When is Red, Green?

The answer, as if you didn’t already know, is when you have Deuteranopia. That’s colour blindness to you and me, more specifically red-green colour blindness. And there was an article published yesterday at ars technia regarding how this affects gamers.

Now us gamers like to think we’re very special people because we know when a door is locked simply by looking at a little green or red light. We also know when someone is an enemy or a friend because when our aiming reticule passes over them it goes red, or it goes green. However, for those people who suffer from Deuteranopia the game becomes all that more difficult. However this article didn’t strike me just because it explains the problems that colour blind gamers face, it’s because it would appear game developers are either unaware of the problems they cause, or simply haven’t got the patience to make things slightly easier to distinguish.

One of my favourite games at the moment is Audiosurf. Now yes it’s true that you can play this game in ‘mono’ mode and not have to worry about the colour of the blocks, but should you wish to play the game with a slightly harder difficulty you need to collect blocks of a certain colour and form blocks to make them disappear and get points. Should you not be able to tell the difference between the red blocks and the green blocks then you are likely to have problems. But wait, what’s this, a special option? to change how the colour look. So there’s an independant developer doing things right. Peggle has a colour blind option as well… So myabe these independand developers are on to something.

I was quite interested about the comment of Mario and Luigi being hard to distinguish between, with Mario in his red suit, and Luigi in green. However I have never thought that Bob Hoskins looked a lot like John Leguizamo, but I could be wrong.

The main reason this interested me is not because I’m colour blind, but because I’m looking to get into the gaming industry. The fixes that are proposed do indeed seem very simple, use patterns to show enemies, not coloured uniforms, change the contrast, not just the colours, and others would all be possible to implement, however the designers don’t have this high on their list of priorities. OK so the 7-10% of males who have this (not all of whom will be gamers) is hardly a large group, but surely it is enough to warrant some form of compensation.

The changes that are suggested don’t in any way cause deterioration in the experience for those who aren’t colour blind, they make it better for those who are, so every side is a winner. Judging from the comments made by gamers on the forum thread regarding this article, the games may not be impossible, but they certainly lessen the enjoyment, especially in puzzle games, and it would also appear in CoD4, although praise is given for Halo.

It would be great to see improvements made by the industry to make games accessible for colour blind users. It’s entirely that as soon as one company actively seeks to do something, gains the support of those who suffer from colour blindness then others will follow. Well, if nothing else, this gives me something to think about when I start my game development course next year.