Colour Blind Play

Addressing color blindness in game design « Josh Talks Flash.

Ishihara – English version from Yoav Brill on Vimeo.

We stumbled on this amazing short film by the talented Yoav Brill for his graduation at Bezalel, the Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem.

The film animation tells a very personal story of colour blindess and touches on many of the subtle issues we face when trying to blend in.

This thread focuses on identifying games which colour blind players could benefit from having colour blind settings.

This thread focuses on identifying video games which have colour blind settings embedded within them.

Please list only games which have this setting available.

This morning conjured up something which impacted very personally on me. The subject of colour blindness, but not just any old subject, colour blindness in gamers.

This BBC article ‘Are colour blind gamers left out?’ posted today looked into how fellow gamers see things differently and how games such as Modern Warfare 2 has a dramatic impact on the levels of fairness and experiences in online play and how colour blind gamers are more likely to end up team killing due to red and green being colours assigned to teams.

Reading further on, I started to think about the lack of support by the games industry in helping those with disambiguation (a term I didn’t know until looking further into colour blindness) can be at a disadvantage to others in a highly competitive activity.

I suffer from red and green ‘mix ups’, however I have found that there are times when the blue spectrum is also very difficult to observe in the ways… ahem ‘normal’ people see these colours.

Years of frustration and vented angst at something as simple and as not being able to identify ranges of colours has been significantly increased through game play. The more games developers use colours that are within the spectrums that I and many other suffer from, the less enjoyable the experience has been, thus requiring an increased adaptive process (coping strategy) to bypass the inequalities.

There are methods which games developers can easily add in the option for those who suffer from colour blindness. Two examples which come to mind are Left 4 Dead 2 and the colour dominant Peggle, both provide a setting to activate the colour blind tweak.

To be honest, theres not much difference in L4D2, especially when faced with the zombie horde, adrenaline bypasses any limitations. Peggle on the other hand is highly colour dependent on knowing what colour to play for and to win needs a basic colour awareness. Popcap have been kind to the minority of people who suffer from something as simple as not being being able to identify specific colours. Thank you Popcap.

So to raise the awareness more about disambiguation (colour blindness) in people who play computer and video games, Colour Blind Play has been setup to get the message out there and to bring people together to discuss, support, learn and impact upon the design of games.

You can follow us on Twitter via @colourblindplay and contribute via this blog.