Colour Blindness and Computer Gaming

Shiminay

I've just been talking with a couple of friends on Twitter about not being able to change the red = enemy / green = friend setting in HUDs in games and the point was made that this can really shaft someone with Colour Blindness. Now in all my years of playing games, I've never had that point raised to me nor amongst groups I was talking with either online or at LANs etc (at least not that I can remember).

So I was just wondering if there are many Colour Blindness suffers playing games here and what sort of negative effects you notice when playing and how you compensate for it?

Overheal

I've heard of it from time to time. Some Games Development courses mention it briefly as a consideration in HCI.

For some people it can be annoying or make the game unplayable. The support for color blind mode is very limited. Other games, like TF2, use other art direction methods to ensure color isn't the only indicator. Each class has a unique Silhouette for instance, and Red and Blu team bases use contrasting architecture (BLU bases are industrial whereas RED bases look more like converted barn spaces) and still other games do what they can to avoid color blindness issues. I remember in the pre-beta of Stargate Worlds there was a little discussion going on because their door-hack minigame was unwinnable by colorblind testers; it involved cutting different colors of wire.

rizzla

There's a colour blind mode in Peggle. I know there's a reviewer who works for ign that is colour blind, he reviewed Bio-Shock IIRC and brought up the point the mini game in it is unplayable to colour blind players.

I'm sure it's not that big of a deal otherwise that guy probably would have brought up the issue alot more.

Edit: Actually I don't think it was the guy who reviewed Bioshock but I do remember hearing one of their editors say they were colour blind on a podcast. It was also Bioshock 2 that had the unplayable, if colour blind, minigame.

humanji

Never thought about this. It must be crazy playing something with a radar where you can never tell who is who. Maybe it adds to the challenge.

Brought this t-shirt to mind, actually:

Retr0gamer

I'm slightly colour blind but can easily distinguish between red and green it's just shades of red and green that are tough for me to distinguish. The majority of sufferers are like this and it's only a small percentage that suffer total red green colour blindness. It's still a stupid decision and I'm sure a better colour scheme should be used.

The one game that did give me trouble however was Lumines. Some of the schemes in that game really made it difficult for me because it took me a lot longer to make out patterns and made some of the schemes almost impossible which is a real shame because I love Lumines.

rizzla

Ignore what I said about the ign colour blind guy. It was a joystiq guy, here's what the Bioshock 2 minigame looks like if your colour blind.

http://i.joystiq.com/2010/02/12/bioshock-2-hacking-minigame-could-cause-issues-for-colorblind-ga/

Red vs Blue is fine, it's the greens that mess them up.

In Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the xbox 360, there's an option for changing to colourblind mode.

the_syco

Deleted User wrote: »

In Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the xbox 360, there's an option for changing to colourblind mode.

Likewise for the PC version, me thinks.

Krieg

BFBC2 also had to release a patch to include game alterations for colourblind players, cant remember what was changed exactly

Retr0gamer

It's probably colour contrast between red and greens. Really good of them to do that.