The Red Team Wins

Voltageaav writes "Recent studies indicate that in both First Person Shooters and even athletic competitions, wearing red gives you an advantage. It's speculated that this distracts the other team slightly due to the psychological aspect of people turning red when angry." Of course the Blue Team loses — as evidence I submit the history of the Detroit Lions.

TF2 Stats say...

[LastToKnow]

Especially if you're playing on Goldrush [steampowered.com] (last graph is wins per team per map

wow, old news

[Garble Snarky]

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18625005.300 [newscientist.com]

Re:I disagree.

[menace3society]

Yeah, the only case I can think of where the guy wearing red always wins in bullfighting, and that's kind of rigged.

As an aside, people also turn red when they are embarrassed or drunk, so wouldn't the psychological effect cancel itself out?

Eve Online

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in a corp in Eve Online, a heavy player v player orientated spaceship game.

With Eve, a hostile ship that is attacking you is displayed on screen, and also on the overview as a flashing red bar - the flashing red showing that the enemy ship has you targeted and is activating modules upon you with hostile intent.

One of the first things we do with newcomers to our corp/Eve is tell them to change the overview colour of a hostile ship from a flashing red to a solid green.

The change has had noticable effect. Before people would see the red and get an adrenaline boost, often resulting in them freezing for long enough to lose the battle. When seeing a solid green stating a metaphorical 'go go go!' as opposed to a red screaming 'Danger!' the newcomers perform better and freeze less often.

Re:TF2 Stats say...

[777a]

The fine article is a little light on details, only mentioning Unreal Tournament, but in Team Fortress 2 there is a good reason red win more (bottom chart in parents link).

In any of the Attack / Defend maps blue plays the attackers, and red plays the defenders.

To keep things fair the attackers respawn a lot quicker than the defenders (since the attacker has to respawn and run halfway across the map, while the defender usually respawns only a short walk from the final defence point).

Since waiting 10 to 20 seconds to respawn is pretty boring a lot of servers reduce the respawn rate, this gives a major advantage to the defenders (red).

So why do red have a slight advantage in other TF2 maps? After someone has played TF2 many hours, they'll realise that they generally win more as red, they may not analyse why they win more, but the end result is players with a lot of TF2 experience tend to join the red team without really thinking about it.

Personally I think Tribes 2 did it right, the enemy always is red.

Please wear red...

[Lonewolf666]

...if you are my opponent in Day Of Defeat (I'll keep the camo) ;-)

Re:I disagree.

[owlnation]

And in fact, the Phillies wear a color that's more or less red.

The Phillies are officially the losing-est team of any sport, anywhere. More than 10,000 loses.

Back to the lab folks, I think "D" isn't quite "Q.E." yet.

Re:I thought wearing red gets you killed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ninjas wore red. More so than the typical black outfit you see today. It wasn't a bright shiny red though, but rather a dark brownish kind.

Thing is, that red is the lowest frequency color which gives it some special properties in low light.
The brown red mentioned above looks almost blacker than black in the night, and the outlines blur.
The eye is simply not very responsive to it.

I don't think this is why red wins in FPS shooters though, but who knows.

The eye has other problems with *blue* though.

Reminds me...

[Some1too]

I can't remember there where and when but there is someone out there pushing to have emergency exits signs and lights changed from red color to a green color for this very same reason. When we see a red traffic light we stop. In North America (and I assume several other continents) stop signs are also red. In an emergency the few seconds of hesitation possibly generated by a red light instead of a green light might cost lives. It was an interesting subject matter and seems to make sense. Wonder if we'll even see green exit signs in our near future?

Re:Does Red Cost You More?

[strabes]

I think the idea is that red cars get in more accidents or something. It's either the personality of people who buy red cars or that red distracts other drivers and subconsciously causes them to hit red cars. I tend to think it's the latter because I've owned a red car (that I bought used for a great deal - color wasn't important to me) for close to four years now and I don't regularly have to swerve to avoid getting hit by people who are distracted by my fire engine red car.

a test of the theory

[Gearoid_Murphy]

They should try switching the perceived colours of multiplayer teams and observe the result. For example, some games always show the enemy as red and friendlies as blue. Reversing this might have a noticeable effect on the game play and consequently lead the way to isolating the effect of team colour on our behaviour.

Re:Does Red Cost You More?

[DavidD_CA]

I have heard from more than one patrol officer that they will likely see a speeding red car more often than a speeding car of any other color.

So while your insurance company won't fault you for getting red, your chances of getting a ticket increases. And, with more tickets, your insurance rate goes up.

There might be statistics out there to back me up, or not.

Re:Eve Online

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard a lecture once from a former designer of fighter aircraft HUDs. He said threats are never displayed in red because humans react much slower to it than other colors(green is the fastest). However there is a fairly common social aspect that red conveys danger, so threats were displayed as flashing between red and yellow.