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Games are Color Blind Unfriendly

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Grandcheapskate

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Oct 9, 2014
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New Jersey, USA
Hi Guys,
This is kind of a rant. Being color blind, there are certain colors which give me trouble when I try to differentiate between them . One of the most common I seem to run into when playing a game based on color is yellow and green. It seems game programmers love to use yellow and a light green. If you are not color blind then you cannot understand just how difficult it becomes to tell certain colors apart - especially if they are not adjacent to each other.

Is it so hard for programmers to choose colors which are so different even a color blind person can tell the difference? If you have to use four colors, how about blue, red, yellow and black? Need more? It's not hard to tell a light blue from a dark blue. Dark green does not look anything like yellow. But it is sometimes hard to tell blue from purple (I have this problem playing a certain game on a laptop but not on a desktop).

A game I am currently playing to pass the time is Mysteries of Horus. It uses four colors. Two of which are yellow and light green - I can rarely tell them apart. The other two colors are dark blue and either pink or a light blue. The game would be a lot more fun for me if the light green were either dark green or red.

And then there are the games which present you with puzzles based on color. Many times I have to either use a walkthrough or skip the puzzle. Not because I cannot solve it, but because I cannot identify the colors.

Which brings me to a question...is there a way for me to reset colors in the control panel for Win XP?

Thanks...Joe
 
Joe, designing for colorblind persons is a problem everywhere, not just video games. Not everyone who is color blind has issues with the same colors you do. Some who are color blind are completely color blind, they see shades of gray.

Games are also design to be aesthetically pleasing. a gave using 4 colors of blue red yellow and black would be every bit as bad as the old cyan, pink white and black of CGA games!

You can only take so much into account when designing an interface. What about the blind? people who can't use a mouse, people who can't use a keyboard. what about a puzzla game based on sound?

I don't want to take away from your hardship, I just wanted to point out that colorblind affecting video games is a "first world problem".

I personally cannot tell many shades of blue green and brown apart, and most medium grays look green to me. Fortunately for me, those don't come up in video games often but it sure frustrated my wife when it came time to paint the living room as I grabbed the wrong can. Didn't find out about the color issues until well into my 30s.

As far as XP, you can reset the theme color but most software, especially games, won't use the theme for anything but basic windows.
 
I would recommend sticking with vintage games made for monochrome displays. The Adventure games work well. Things like Larn, or Hack/Nethack (text based) work really good.
The old BASIC games made for a teletype are also playable for the color blind.

You could invest in something like a Tandy 1100FD or 1400LT, which are CGA, but have monochrome displays. Arctic Adventure (an early Apogee game) works great on those.

The newer the technology you use, the more color-blind-unfriendly it will be.
 
TheDrip said:
Joe, designing for colorblind persons is a problem everywhere, not just video games. Not everyone who is color blind has issues with the same colors you do. Some who are color blind are completely color blind, they see shades of gray.
Click to expand...

This is true. I guess one solution would be allowing the player to choose which colors they would like to use in games where such a thing is possible. For example, in the game I mentioned it would be fairly easy for them to have an option screen which allowed you to pick the colors for the characters.

Luckily I am not completely color blind, probably more a case of being unable to differentiate colors when they get close. For example, when shopping for bananas I like to get them slightly green but never know if I got yellow or green until I get home and check with the family. Or when playing the old Intellivision football game I would have to be the red guy (the other guy was black) because I could barely see the red guy on the green background. But at least if I were the red guy, I knew where he was.

What is truly frustrating is taking a color blind test where you are asked to pick out the number or letter in a picture of colored dots. I never see anything and always wonder whether someone is playing a trick on me.

Joe
 
Sometimes they are as a control mechanism. Blank slides on a color test is very much a thing.
 
I spent most of my youth playing computer and arcade games on black and white TVs/monitors because that was all I could afford. I guess that's as close as I can get to being colorblind. Sadly I wonder if that might help since the way colors are generally weighted when translating to shades of gray the difference in the luminance values from two otherwise hard to distinguish colors might be more obvious.
 
First, as for your actual problem: every monitor that uses a microcontroller for digital picture control (i.e. all made in the past 25 years) allows changing RGB balance and tint. You can easily shift the colors in a way that makes them better distinguishable for you.

I can not, however, agree with your statement. "Mysteries of Horus" is some cheaply-made, free online game. Oh, and it's based on shapes, not colors. That's the only example you give and it does not stand for all developers of all other games in existence.
 
Grandcheapskate said:
This is true. I guess one solution would be allowing the player to choose which colors they would like to use in games where such a thing is possible. For example, in the game I mentioned it would be fairly easy for them to have an option screen which allowed you to pick the colors for the characters.
Click to expand...

But that's not "fairly easy" depending on how the game is done. Obviously it depends on the game, on the hardware, how the art was made etc. But many of the artifacts are simply "digital paintings" from a set palette. Switching the colors around on that palette isn't necessarily an easy thing to do. The games at the time were cutting edge and hard enough to write as it was. Adding in a dynamic coloring layer means more production costs, perhaps more memory or other resources on starved machines, etc. All of the issue with color blindness are similar to all of the other accessibility challenges developers faced and chose, either consciously, neglect, or simply ignorance, to not address.
 
People who are color blind have different deficiencies and severities, so I would not expect game developers to spend lots of time trying to get it right for everyone. I've played a number of newer AAA titles over the last 10 years that have options to compensate for color blindness and generally turn them off because it doesn't make much difference. I think it was The Division that went as far as having top line options for the major types of color deficiency and then sliders to tweak it.

I've also never seen a number in a color pattern test, must be nice. For video games, I find it sometimes affects things but 95% of the time I can compensate with additional clues. At least, I don't think I've ever gave up on a game because of missing something with colors. On reflection, it might contribute to why I never got excited by color based puzzle games like Dr. Mario and Columns even tho I loved Tetris.

As someone else mentioned, I spent a lot of time playing on monochrome screens (b&w tvs, green & amber monitors, monochrome laptop screens). I wonder if that's a contributing factor?

My bigger gripe (off-topic for this forum) is when people reply in-line and say "my comments in <color>". I used to try really hard to find their additions -- using search & replace based on formatting, using tools that read back color codes when you mouse-over, finding the differences between the reply and the original message. I am now at the point in life where if you can't be bothered to use in-line quotations that are respectful of my limitations, I can't be bothered to read your response.
 
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