Tekken 8's 'Colorblind' Mode Is Causing Migraines, Vertigo, and Debate

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6 has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further. Tekken 8, due later this month, seems to aim even higher, offering a number of color vision options in its settings. This includes an unofficially monikered "colorblind mode," with black-and-white and detail-diminished backgrounds and characters' flattened shapes filled in with either horizontal or vertical striped lines. But what started out as excitement in the fighting game and accessibility communities about this offering has shifted into warnings about the potential for migraines, vertigo, or even seizures.

You can see the mode in action in the Windows demo or in a YouTube video shared by Gatterall -- which, of course, you should not view if you believe yourself susceptible to issues with strobing images. Gatterall's enthusiasm for Tekken 8's take on colorblind accessibility ("Literally no game has done this") drew comment from Katsuhiro Harada, head of the Tekken games for developer and publisher Bandai Namco, on X (formerly Twitter). Harada stated that he had developed and tested "an accessibility version" of Tekken 7, which was never shipped or sold. Harada states that those "studies" made it into Tekken 8.

Not everybody in game accessibility circles was excited to see the new offerings, especially when it was shared directly with them by excited followers. Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at Electronic Arts, asked followers to "Please stop tagging me in the Tekken 8 'colorblind' stripe filters." The scenes had "already induced an aura migraine," Baker wrote, and she could not "afford to get another one right now." Accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton reposted a number of people citing migraines, nausea, or seizure concerns while also decrying the general nature of colorblind "filters" as an engineering-based approach to a broader design challenge. He added in the thread that shipping a game that contained a potentially seizure-inducing mode could result in people inadvertently discovering their susceptibility, similar to an infamous 1997 episode of the Pokemon TV series. Baker and Hamilton also noted problems with such videos automatically playing on sites like X/Twitter. "Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe," explained James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios. "Human meat-motors aren't big fans of that." People typically start to notice "flicker fusion frequency" at around 40 frames per second, notes Ars.

Tekken's Harada responded by saying a "very few" number of people misunderstood what his team was trying to do with this mode. There are multiple options, not just one colorblind mode, Harada wrote, along with brightness adjustments for effects and other elements.

"These color vision options are a rare part of the fighting game genre, but they are still being researched and we intend to expand on them in the future," Harada wrote. Developers "have been working with several research institutes and communities to develop this option," even before the unsold "accessibility version of Tekken 7," added Harada.

I'm color blind and I'd appreciate

[rsilvergun]

More color blind modes in games. I don't play fighting games at a high enough level that I think it would really matter but it does make shoot them up tough. Raiden I wanna II are basically unplayable to me without cheating my balls off. These days I use rewind and emulators so that when I pick up the wrong power up because I can't see the item color (purple versus blue) I can roll back to you before I picked up the wrong item.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

What does the colour-blind mode of Tekken look like to you? As a non-colour-blind person it looks truly ghastly, wouldn't just B&W be better? Or user-selectable options for at least the more common types of colour-blindness that swap problem colours for usable ones?

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Unfortunately these features get abused. Sometimes just to defeat grinding, sometimes to cheat against other players.

For example, in Forza there is an auto-steer option for people who can't operate a wheel or joystick. The player only controls the car's speed. People use it to grind in-game currency by using a rubber band to hold down the accelerator and complete long races.

I use auto-fire because mashing hurts. It's banned in a lot of speed running.

Re:

[thegarbz]

But do you appreciate this specific example? Watch the video. I suspect it will make you wish you were fully blind. It is truly horrible and not even slightly "accessible".

Atari 2600 had B/W mode

[davidwr]

Yes, the TV game console from 1977.

Many people still had black-and-white-only TVs.

This makes no sense as a "colorblind mode"

[Qwertie]

Color blindness doesn't mean you can't see color. Even if it did, the game would still be playable in black & white.

Rather, people with color-blindness only perceive two primary colors rather than three. Typically red and green look the same, so we may say they have yellow and blue as their primary colors, and only two "main" hues in total, in contrast to the 6 "main" hues that most people see, namely red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta.

This doesn't even make sense as a mode for people who h

Re:This makes no sense as a "colorblind mode"

[Gibgezr]

Colourblindness is even more nuanced tan your explanation: we have an imbalance in rods/cones, and that usually winds up with us either confusing SOME shades of red and green for each other, or SOME shades of blue and yellow (red/green is the most common form). It's usually broken down into three degrees: low, medium, and severe. I'm *medium* red-green colourblind, and can differentiate between red and green shades about 50% of the time.
None of the things they did for this mode for the fighting game make any real sense as an accommodation, they all seem over-the-top and crazy.

Re:

[bickerdyke]

Exatcly. The question is, are there people who profit from that mode? If so, that's a good thing. To the others: Don't use those modes. But be fair and put a LOT of warnings with the options.

Re:

[sound+vision]

To me it sounded like

(1) There is nothing called "colorblind mode" actually in the game
(2) What people are calling "colorblind mode" is a set of visual options they enable simultaneously
(3) The reason this is notable because someone posted about it on Xitter

I have to wonder if "engagement on the socials" is really doing as much good for these companies as they think it is. If I ran a company, the social media accounts would all be blank except for contact information and a link to my own website.

Re:

[thegarbz]

If I ran a company, the social media accounts would all be blank except for contact information and a link to my own website.

So if you ran a company you'd leave out one of the most accessible forms of marketing on the planet? I think your fictional employees are happy you're not running the company. There's almost no such thing as bad marketing. Tekken is in the news again because of this. People have been directed to the Steam store page as a result of this story.

There's a very good reason successful companies pay a significant amount of money to have actual marketing staff on twitter.

Amateurs at work

[gweihir]

Another bunch of idiots that tried to make ergonomic design without actually having a competent expert in the team. That is bound to fail.

Now, even when you know nothing, you should know to never, ever flash the player unless they explicitly request it and then it should come with a strong warning. Saw that effect after a change in the SWTOR interface and it could not be turned off. Such extreme incompetence is really staggering. That was about the time I stopped playing, because it was so extremely uncomfo

Made for raptors?

[Waccoon]

This is a botched attempt at high-contrast mode, made by a nerd playing around with shaders. Or, more likely, a stupid publicity stunt.

Honestly, "silhouette mode" might be pretty cool for those with vision problems, but with the stripes... it feels more like we're being trolled.

Tekken 8's "fix it yourself" mode

[mrfaithful]

From the earliest trailers to the latest build I've wondered what they are doing wrong at Tekken HQ. Unreal in all its incarnations can be bad for noisy, low contrast images, I assume because the defaults are not great and nobody has consistent information on what you "should" set them to. But T8 is especially bad for poor contrast, poor distinction between back and fore-ground and horrendously noisy rendering that fuzzes up an already fuzzy image that is shockingly bad in motion. Unreal games have been rel

Photosensitive epilepsy...

[CrappySnackPlane]

...is the 21st century Dancing Plague. Well, almost. Unlike Dancing Plague, it's a real thing, a handful of people in the world do have it, but I'd say it's a minority of those who are diagnosed with it. In its 21st century context, it's more often than not a psychosomatic stress response, and occasionally (probably a minority of overall cases, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was still larger than the percentage of genuine photosensitive epilepsy) attention-seeking behavior.

It all begins in the 90s, when