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PlayStation (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Console Games And Color Blindness 100

Posted by simoniker from the red-vs-blue-also-concerned dept.
Hinoki writes "Atlus' PlayStation 2 SRPG Disgaea seems to be taking off in the console gaming community. A friend of mine strongly recommended the game, so I decided to chase down a copy and bring it home, only to find that one of the key elements is color coded. Now, this is a problem for me, since I've got color-blindness, which means under the majority of circumstances.. I can't tell the difference between red and green. The geo-panels in Disgaea are more widely varied than simple red-green-yellow-blue.. there are subtle shades and different colors altogether. How big a problem is this for other gamers, and what, if anything can be done about it? Surely it can't be that hard to code in an option that changes a color to a given shape, for those of us that're color-impaired?"
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Console Games And Color Blindness More

Console Games And Color Blindness

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  • It'd be cake to juse use a different shading pattern. Diamonds and checkers or something.
  • Although I don't think I could specifically tell you of a certain game off the top of my head, I've found numerous times that this occurs. Doing a quick google search and destroy, I only found one game (Bubble Ice Age [freefunfiles.com]) which has a color blind mode. It inserts different geometric shapes into the circles.

    I think I should start up my own company were people can rent my time so I can check things out for the color blind... :)

    Is there any sort of color blind accessability documentation out there?
    • Alpha Centauri has a color blind mode as well, but given the normal color scheme, it's not surprising that the option is there.
      • That's what I get for struggling through on the regular mode, you have no idea how many of those worm nests I just missed. How do you enable it? I finally started playing as the eco types so they would at least join me when I let them attack.
        • you need to down load a patch from the Alpha Centari website. I also do not recommend this patch unless you are color blind becaue the colors they change to are not nice! You can not remove it with out a reinstall of the game. My friend who is completly red-green color blind loved the patch.

          http://www.firaxis.com/downloads/patch/smac_Colo r_ Blind_Palette.zip
          • You don't need to reinstall. The instructions for the color-blind patch reccommend making a back up of the original image files so you can just copy yhem back if you want.
    • Frozen Bubble [frozen-bubble.org] (a very similar game to Bubble Ice Age, but free) has a colorblind option, which puts shapes inside the bubbles for you, as well as coloring.

      Tetris Attack also used the shape-color system, presumably to help with colorblind. It pops up most frequently in games where color matters heavily, but still not nearly enough. The freely available CrackAttack (a GPL knockoff) plays much like Tetris Attack, but does not offer shapes in addition to colors on their pieces. It might be worthwhile to redo

    • Some examples of games that I've had trouble with (from being somewhat colour-blind):

      On multi-player EA Hockey, the colours of players 1 and 2 are red and green (IIRC). Fortunately on the GameCube there are 4 controller slots, so I can usually find a colour that I can identify quickly enough to be competitive with (or helpful to) friends.

      The Starcraft / Warcraft series uses the bright green and bright yellow on the mini map which has caused me to be taken completely off guard on occasions.

      Well, I'm glad
    • One game that does have a colorblind mode is Championship Manager. Not sure about CM4, but the later CM3's, you added "COLOURBLIND" to a config file and it remapped the colours. Very useful.

      I was supposed to be a tester for Stars! Supernova due to colorblindness problems I had with the original Stars! but sadly, it looks like that game is never going to make it now.
  • Have you tried wearing red-green analglyph 3-D glasses? The filters would make it so that one eye saw red as black, and the other saw green as black, even though you're colour blind. You'd then have a way to tell whether a given square is red: is it black in the left or right eye?

    I hardly suggest you keep closing one eye to check, but perhaps your brain would be able to integrate the information about on which side the image is black, after time, into an intuitive feel. The brain is remarkably programmabl

    • It'd be worth a try I guess. Only downside might be that you can only tell what the on screen colour is by knowing (and remembering) which way round the colours are on the glasses...
    • That's actually similar to the technique optometrists use to improve color-blindness. Usually all that's necessary is for the patient to wear a contact with a magenta dot over the pupil on the dominant eye. For more extreme cases they will put a contact with an aqua dot on the other eye. And the colored contacts are only perceptible to others if the contact shifts a bit.

  • GBA Zelda (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Samus ( 1382 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @01:10PM (#7221762) Journal
    In the Four Swords part of the GBA zelda game color is very important. All my brothers have some color deficiency but not me. Its nearly impossible to play that game with them because defeating the enemy bosses requires cooperation based on color. There are things like hit the red side of the monster if you are red or green side if you are green in order to damage it. This isn't too bad except that one of the monsters will only display a color of your partner and you have to tell him which of four to hit. The rest show up grey. Its bad enough that the color of the tunics is the only way to tell your character apart. Then they tie beating the game to something that 13% of males are handicapped in. One last color point to the game. You can play with up to three other people but can't pick which color you get. The first 2 colors used? Red and green.
    • And GameCube Metroid Prime... I had to have my daughter tell me the color that the final boss kept changing to, so I'd know what gun to shoot it with...
      • Hah. Dude, if you beat the final boss while being colorblind, then you're my hero. I still haven't beaten that damn game...been stuck at that boss for months now.
        • I'm only partially colorblind, and my daughter would yell the colors out until I switched to the correct gun, and it still took me 2 or 3 times. She actually had done it throughout the entire last level, as the Metroids also had the color coding issue.
      • This is something I've never really considered before, how color blindness would affect one's ability to play video games, it's pretty interesting. Of the comments, yours is one of the cooler ones, turning a single-player game into multi-player in a sense. :)

        I think the only game I've found that useful with was an old Atari game called the Eidolon. Again, the dragons were each different colors and required different colors of shots to defeat them. I'm not color blind, but I was pretty little and couldn't h
  • This site uses 1.6 million colors. Your current eyes only support 256 shades of gray. Please upgrade to a version 4 or greater eyeball before viewing this site.

    -Adam
  • I'm becoming more and more convinced that UI designers should be forced to work with black-and-white monitors/TVs on a regular basis, with inconvenient access (in a test lab or something) to color equipment.

    We see this crap all the time, and it doesn't just affect the color-blind. How often do you see web sites with dark green on black or white on light blue? How about WMs that use grey text on slightly lighter or darker background? Sure, you can read it if you try, but the designers should know better.
    • If 13% of my potential userbase were blind and it would take minor adjustments in interface colouration to fix the problem, yes.
      • If 13% of my potential userbase were blind and it would take minor adjustments in interface colouration to fix the problem, yes.

        No doubt!
      • 13%? You assume that 100% of your potential userbase is male. Lousy assumption. Let's run with it, though: Should they change the game to make it more color-blind friendly (increasing the userbase by 1/6) or change it to make it more female friendly (doubling the userbase)?

        I hate it when people lie with statistics to make their problem look bigger than it is. I don't care whether it's the RIAA lying about CD burners or color-blind gamers overstating their numbers.
        • No no you miss my point. Whatever the percentages, if it took a very simple adjustment to my design decisions (and no adjustment at all if I thought about it in advance) I'd go for it. If there was some super-easy way to appeal to female gamers (whatever that means) then sure make the change. The point is that it's stupid to reduce your consumer base needlessly.
    • Would you argue that changes are necessary to poker because blind people can't play?

      No, but I would argue that there's a market for braille playing cards [djmcadam.com]. (Bad example.)

      Companies aren't REQUIRED to accomodate anybody, but shutting out potential customers is not a good way to increase business. Accessibility arguments aside: Would adding a particular texture/shape/isobar format to replace subtle color differentiations cost more to implement than they would make back in increased sales to the colorblind
  • After watching my colorblind brother-in-law struggle through one of the Puzzle Bobble variants, (the bubbles were largely pastel red, green, and blue hues, and were often tricky to distinguish for non-color-blind players,) I decided to make the graphics for my game [jardinains.com] colorblind-friendly. Here are some suggestions for making a game colorblind-friendly:
    • Shape matters. If you have things like powerups, try to make their shapes distinct, sharply defined, and easy to identify. As a test, set your monitor to gra
  • You may be surprised that 1 in 76 Americans are fully colorblind. 1 in 20, or fully 13.6 million people, are estimated to have red-green colorblindness. About 10% of Males: it does not typically affect females, since the gene responsible is tied to the Y chromosome.

    That is a huge slice of the population, and I know there are some developers who don't pay attention, but a large number of them think about it at some point during product development, though it may not make as big a difference as it should

    • Color blindness is complex. Most (all?) are tied to the X (not Y) cromoson, it normally doesn't affact girls because so long as 1 gene is good you often are fine. (I think there are exceptions where genese express themselves in different areas, but I don't know enough about this to comment)

      Some people are red-green color blind because they can't see red, so everytihing looks green, others can't see green, so everything is red. More commonly they see both colors, but one (or both!) colors are shifted from

      • (My family that can't see blaze orange in the woods can clearly see most camo clothing!)

        My stepfather says that he tells green and red lights (on traffic signals) apart based on their position (red on top, green on bottom), to give some idea of what his colourblindness is. On the other hand, when we go fishing he has a much easier time seeing a fish in the river than I do (or anyone else I know), and he has the same ability to see camo clothing quite clearly. His father was in the army (in a primarily no

        • My dad tells stop lights apart the same way, which worked great until he drove though some town out west and realized there was a light with one end lit up (doesn't matter if it was left or right), and no cars except a cop on the side of the road. Fortunatly the cop wasn't watching because he has no idea if he did the right thing.

          I'm color blind, but I can see red just fine, and the "green" light is normally light blue. (this is intentional, most stoplights switched to a bluegreen a few years back to giv

          • My dad tells stop lights apart the same way, which worked great until he drove though some town out west and realized there was a light with one end lit up (doesn't matter if it was left or right), and no cars except a cop on the side of the road. Fortunatly the cop wasn't watching because he has no idea if he did the right thing.

            I'm pretty sure the left-hand light is red in these cases, but it's been a very long time since I've been through a town that has these lights, so I couldn't be sure.

            I'm color
    • The gene for colorblindness is tied [wikipedia.org] to the X [aol.com] chromosome [hhmi.org] and is recessive. The reason that more males have colorblindness is that the Y chromosome is treated as having the gene.

      On topic; Color difficulties usually come into play with puzzle games. I wish that Capcom would release a playable version of Super Puzzle Fighter II X someday. I've been able to play Puzzle Bobble and Columns by using shapes and got pretty good with Klax by using sound as an assistance, but SPFIIX is completely unplayable. For a

  • Civ 3 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 )
    Civilization 3 I know has a color-blind help option. It's a really great game, but definitely not in the same vein.

    Also if you're color-blindness is red-green and you're looking for a tactical RPG, I'd highly recommend Final Fantasy Tactics as well (not the sequel, which is entirely too easy and plotless). All the text contrasts in the game are black against something else, which makes it easier (though damage is red so might be hard to read at some points).
    • The released a colourblindness patch for Alpha Centauri. It was sorely needed, what with the world being a wash of red and green.
  • I for one gave up on a game due to my colorblindness. I played alot of planetsite and posted many times on there forums about the problem with the flags being a blue and puruple mixture. I really made it hard for me to figure out which base I should be attacking. My posts on the forums never attrached a developer just a bunch of flames about it. I dont know if I am the only one that had this problem but I saw a few other posts on there forum related to this. I gave up months ago so I am not sure if this is
  • Often, in an adventure game, the first part of a puzzle is realizing that there is a puzzle. Colors can be hidden in scenery in a much less contrived way than, e.g., geometric shapes, and I can't even think of a way to warn color-blind players about such a puzzle without spoiling it for everyone else.

    Maybe the solution is to avoid relying on color altogether, but that would be a shame. Some of the more satisfying puzzles I've met have been color-based.

  • Get yourself a real console, kid. You know, one with a color/B&W switch.

  • The arcade game Klax [klov.com] is pretty much unplayable for me, as is the Palm game Dinomite [astraware.com]. In both cases the programmer assumed various shades of yellow and green are more distinguishable than I find them to be. (I'm red-green colorblind).

    The Palm Game Bounce Out [astraware.com]" solved the problem by having multiple color/pattern schemes as a preference item; selecting the "sports ball" option makes every item especially unique by pattern.

  • If Charles Darwin were alive today, he'd be rather pissed at all the holes the [insert cause here] bleeding hearts are putting in his whole Natural Selection thing.

    Let's make games easy on the colorblind.

    And when we're done that, let's make games easy on the really blind.

    The quadraplegic.

    The epileptic.

    The incontinent.

    The brain dead.

    The stupid.

    The blonde.

    The redundant.

    Death row inmates.

    MBA's.

    Lesbians.

    Twins.

    Exhibitionists.

    Lesbian Twin Exhibitionists. (Please email me. Please?)

    Immigrants.

    Ant
    • The point isn't "catering to every PC special interest group", it's opening up your product to 10% of your potential audience. If minor changes would make your product more desirable to 10% more people, then companies making games should consider it.

  • Geo Panel stats (Score:2, Informative)

    by {8_8} ( 31689 )
    For a Disgaea specific solution, look at the effects in play by pressing the triangle button. Figure out which triangle on the board corresponds to which effect, then play the game accordingly. Yeah it's kludgy, but it's probably the best workaround for this particular game.
    • I was going to suggest this myself, but you beat me to the punch.

      It should be possible to get through some of what I call the story "puzzle" stages by using this solution -- the ones where you have to destroy geostones/panels in certain order, or navigate around difficult ones.

      However, the poster will have some trouble with the randomly generated "item world" levels. Some of these stages can have up to six different colors of panels, and not all of them are associated with specific effects -- if yo
  • One solution I came up with for a few games that had a menu I couldn't read easily was to take the red lense from a pair of cardboard 3D glasses and use it as a monocle. That let me differentiate the colors enough to play the game. It isn't an ideal solution, but it is a simple one.

  • Just to get an idea of what Red-Green colorblind people might see, take a look at the Color Deficient Vision page at Visibone: http://www.visibone.com/colorblind/ [visibone.com]. Compare the colorblind version of the web color chart to the regular vision version.

    As a UI Designer, I always tell my developers that they need to use color + something else (shape, line weight, pattern, style) rather than color alone to distinguish things.

    • "As a UI Designer, I always tell my developers that they need to use color + something else (shape, line weight, pattern, style) rather than color alone to distinguish things."

      Luminosity and 'blinkies' are always good, too. We're dealing with that where I work. We're making a surveillance system. We've resisted relying on color because we need to be sure that the customers can use the system if they're color blind.

    • There's a similar colour chart here [www.pixy.cz] which lets you try out different schemes and emulates the following types of vision:
      • Normal vision (cca 85,5 % of population)
      • Protanopy (1 % of men)
      • Deuteranopy (1 % of men)
      • Tritanopy (cca 0,003 % of population)
      • Protanomaly (1 % of men)
      • Deuteranomaly (5 % men, 0.4 % women)
      • Tritanomaly (as good as 0 %)
      • Full colorbindness (0,005% of population)
      • Atypical monochromatism
  • This is definately a problem in some games. Thankfully, most companies are pretty good at choosing easily distinguishable color combinations, as well as providing other visual cues such as different shapes and textures.

    Where I've more frequently encountered problems is in homebrew games. I'd sent off a number of bug reports to notify them of the problem. Usually, they simply hadn't considered it and are happy to make some changes.

    For example, I'm a big fan of Puzzle Bobble, a puzzle game where you have
  • This might not actually work, but why don't you try writing a nice letter/email/petition to the people who make the Action Replay [codejunkies.com] (it's kind of like Game Genie for PS2) and ask them to write some codes for Disagea and some other games to aid color-blind players? Changing color palettes seems like the kind of thing the Action Replay could be made to do with ease.

    It is worth a shot, at least, perhaps, and it would be interesting to see their response..
  • And I'm not afraid to say it! lol. Seriously though, I'm colour blind also and had a heck of a time with games like Bubble Puzzle and the like. The way I got around it, without using a colour blind mode, was to ask my wife to help me. It made the game a social event, not always convienient mind you but more fun in the end.
    • That does sound like an interesting way of playing games like that. And it soudns like it adds a fun dimension to otherwise-solo games.

      But I suppose it could still get irritating if you want to kill time with a solo game of something.

      Although with modern games it's nice that they can use subtle colour differences to add more of a challenge, it would probably be best if game designers put in an option to allow alternative colour differentiation. (Even if not default, but make sure it's flagged in the manua
  • This is a good reason why everyone involved with designing software should have extensive training in UI design, and accessability. Sure you may say (heck the developer may even say it) that why should they care about altering thier design for a small percentage of the market, and maybe designers shouldn't have to.

    But I find that interfaces designed for easy access to all are much better to the "non-disabled" users as well. How hard is it to say "hey maybe we should make it easier to diferentiate widget
  • I too am Red-Green colorblind. For those of you that don't have colorblindness, let me explain something to you before you all go to the shades of grey argument. I see *most* colors fine. Red and Green tend to blur to a shade of brown. If you want to make me screen, do a red background with green letters or vice versa.

    One thing that I accidently stumbled upon to fix my problem is Polarized Sunglasses. I bought a pair as my old pair lost a side of the frame. They are basically blue blockers, which enh
  • Got screenshots?

    Run 'em through Vischeck [vischeck.com], a colorblindness simulator. It shows you a simulation of what a colorblind individual sees for three different types of colorblindness. Vischeck also works on webpages.

  • I am color blind, and I have had a lot of problems in several games, such as WarCraft III. Also, whenever I played laser tag, there would be three teams, red, yellow, and green. I would always have to be red or else I would end up shooting my own teammates constantly. I am suprised more games don't have color-blindness options, considering most video game players are boys.
  • Doesn't matter to me. I have monochromatic vision so I only see black, white and shades of gray. Makes it hard to play any game but especially if the clues are color coded (like blue keys in Doom).

  • The great adventure game Sam & Max Hit the Road has a 'film noir' (black and white) mode that can be toggled off. Nice gimmick-- but it quickly becomes useless because, argh!, one of the puzzles requires discerning colours (for those who've played the game, I'm referring to the puzzle with the coloured doors and underground magnets). Sure, it could be solved by trial and error, but there's already an element of trial-and-error tedium in pretty much having to try every door in turn.

    Of course, one could

  • The original poster writes: "Surely it can't be that hard to code in an option that changes a color to a given shape, for those of us that're color-impaired?"

    It may not be hard, but it could potentially add more time to the production of the game. Keep in mind that many games are already released without proper play-testing or bug-fixes; adding another feature which will go unnoticed and unappreciated by many users may not fit with many game companies' bottom lines.

    I'm not condoning the game companie
    • A few months ago, someone suggested in a "wishlist" thread on the Planetside message board that the developers should include options for customizing the HUD colors in order to better accomodate the color-blind.

      It was both fascinating and scary how rabidly the author was attacked. Tons of l33t H4x0rs ranted about not screwing up their game with funky colors just to cater to one guy's disability. This despite the fact that the author clearly wanted only the ability to set the colors on his own display,
  • I know it's not a perfect solution, but have you tried just sending the colors on your TV out of whack until you can tell the difference. If the game isn't completely color depended you could just do it when you need to.

    I guess it could push other colors into the red or green range but it might just be a little tweak.
  • than video games are board games. Imagine playing risk with someone who can't tell red from green. Or even something like El Grande [boardgamegeek.com]. They can't tell the difference between who's pieces are whos and it messes up everything.

    Yes, I'm talking about you Colin.
  • I threw together some sites I use at work when developing websites for clients.

    Visibone [visibone.com] has some extremely useful color palettes and educational links.

    Vischeck [vischeck.com] can convert individual images or entire websites to simulate one of three forms of color blindness.

    I was going to throw in some more educational sites about color blindness, but I think you all can search Google [google.com] yourselves.
  • As several percent of the population are color-blind, it is very bad business to design a game so that color-blind people have difficulty playing them. If it really is so important to the visual designer to make the game look just such-and-such, at least they should make an option that allows one to change the colors so that they can be viewed by anybody. Maybe the designer should be educated about this ? At least the marketing _should_ care.
    • At a glance, it is easy to peg this as bad design. And based on the university courses on GUI design, I've had drilled into my head, I'm led to believe that this is the case.

      However, we know that this is something very very easy to overlook. How many developers are going to be playing in monochrome realistically? And just how feasible is it? That said, what is wrong with making a game reliant on color differentiation in order to beat it? I don't think I've seen Tetris in monochrome.... original Gameboy
  • I've heard that developers try to always make sure to use subtitles for the hearing impaired and make sure that all important text is read aloud for the (believe it or not) visually impaired.
  • In the 70's and 80's I was a lightman for various rock bands. Some musicians have perfect pitch, I have absolute hue. It's a gift.
  • I played videogames as far as I can remember, and from the atari to the gamecube (nes, genesis and playstation also, and lotsa computer games). I remember having a problem only once, on a playstation, in the game Alundra.

    I get to this cave, in which a door stopped me. There were a lot of green tiles on the floor, I stepped on them and they maked a -click-. No color change. I was there for an hour, and then called my sister; she told me that the tiles changed from green to orange when you walked over them,
  • Battle Isle [mobygames.com], the first game to make console-style hex-based strategy games popular on the Amiga and PC already had options for color blind people. The default colors for the units were red and green, I believe. You could switch them to yellow and blue in the options menu, and it was even explained as a feature specifically for color blind people in the manual.

    Makes you wonder why a very small and at the time not very well known company could afford to spend some resources on this while today's million-d

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