Amazon Game Room's Blog

I'm color blind too - and my big pet peeve is electronics that use little green LEDs to symbolize one thing, and a red LED to symbolize something else. My wireless router, for example. I've just learned to identify by position of the light instead of color - We all learn to adapt to our genetics.
But I still need my wife to choose my tie in the morning.

Considering how many of the (at least partially) colorblind are young males, you would think more games would take this into account.

I've noticed for a good decade how prevalent this stupid oversight is in games, especially when it's so easy to add shapes or some other indicator.

I'm not colorblind, but I remember being stymied by quests and puzzles that required me to distinguish between the colors of several (otherwise identical) switches in figuring out which one to pull...on my black & white TV set. This was back in the early nineties, when a sizable chunk of gamers still had black & white sets. Idiots.

EDIT: I found that Hexic option and thought the same thing. It hurts my eyes to play it with the shapes, but good on them.

Ah yes, the green/red light color. I completely forgot about that issue.

I don't know how many times I've lost progress on a DS game because I didn't realize the light had changed to red, and I needed to charge the battery. Thankfully the PSP doesn't lose data if its battery dies while playing.

When charging my DS I have to ask my wife occasionally: "Is it done charging? Is the light green?"

Another example of a game where color blindness got annoying: In Trauma Center, the form of GUILT that had the green, yellow, and blue one moving around. Then, once they started moving, they colors kind of faded making them even harder to see... that level took me forever to pass.

--Osver

I wonder if some sort of filter glasses may help the color blind- a filter wheel with clear, magenta, and cyan lenses alternating at about 5 Hz may enable a red-green CB person to distinguish red and green by the changes in their brightness. A few experiments with handheld filters may shed some light.

[Deleted by the author on April 9, 2008 12:54 PM PDT]

I'm glad you mentioned Puzzle Fighter. I had so many problems with this game, playing against my color-sighted friend. I would have to jump up and put my face 10 cm from the screen to see green versus yellow. We eventually switched to Magical Drop which has symbols on the items. The problem with PF is that each gem has to be able to combine into a large one, so putting a symbol on is difficult.

It's annoying with games and indicator lights, but I've found some traffic lights to be downright dangerous! It's gotten better over the years (I suspect highway standards are better enforced), but I use to hate coming to a flashing light at an intersection, is it flashing red? flashing amber? I would just stop at all of them unless I had someone in the car to tell me otherwise. I've noticed in the last few years though that the flashing lights have been supplemented with stop signs where appropriate and that helps a lot. And there are fewer cities with weird traffic light configurations (sideways or even upside down) that would make a normal traffic light a hazard as well.

It's crazy cause I could relate to this.

It's sad that certain games and appliances don't take it into account. I also face problems when I paint or drive (not often, but it's happened).

I usually will ask my girlfriend or someone around me if I am confused about colors. Generally in public I keep my mouth shut cause most the time people just don't get it and ask me what color things are and I just feel like...bleh.

A color blind lady here. I can understand your frustration. Living with having to try and deal with things like putting on make-up every day that I cannot even see, color coded weather maps, and those darn red/green lights on my router - the last thing I want to deal with at the end of my day is killing my team mates because I couldn't distinguish which team they were on. When I see things like that, I just want to shake the engineer that came up with the idea to be so dependent on color. Patterns are not used nearly enough in our world!

You probably already know this, but the Blue guys are on your team, the red are the enemy and the green guys are on your team also, but also part or your sqaud (a smaller unit, within which you can spawn upon your squad leader and communicate via headset). I know with the PC version you can opt not to be on any squad, thus eliminating any green players from your screen. Hopefully BF:BC will have this option when the full version is released.

Considering that it sounds like you're playing the beta, you're obligated to give this kind of feedback to DICE so they can improve the game.

I am giving my feedback to Electronic Arts, who I'm sure is filtering it back to DICE.

I just tried playing again, and didn't seen any option to turn off squads. I did a bit better this time, but I had to study the squad list and memorize those people each round, so when I saw their names I wouldn't shoot at them.

--Osver

Play Call of Duty 4 instead, on most multiplayer modes there is no friendly fire.

I can fully appreciate your difficulty Osver as I've been there myself many times. Interestingly, I'm almost positive that Battlefield 2: Modern Combat had a "color-blind" mode for the 360 that changed the colors from the default ones to some other more easily distinguishable combination (at least to my color-blind eyes). I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to find this setting on Battlefield 2 as it made a huge difference for me and I hadn't seen such an option in other games. Hopefully a similar option will be available in the final game.

There are plenty of things that game designers can follow to make sure they don't cut out the millions of users (or should I say customers) they have that are colorblind.

Here are some posts from my blog on colorblindness that can help:

http://colorvision.typepad.com/color_vision_store/accessibility/index.html