Colorblind gaming or: Table Tennis is impossibly hard!

95 Comments by Conrad Quilty-Harper Jul 30th 2006 1:00PM
Filed under: Culture, Features, Business

Around one in ten males and one in two hundred females are unable to discern the difference between some or all colors that other people can distinguish. Like most other people with the disability, I've been colorblind (or, to use the politically correct term, have had color sight deficiency) since birth. I find it hard, and sometimes impossible, to tell the difference between shades of red, green and brown, blue and purple and oranges and yellows. As my optician told me when I was young, this disability means that I can't work in a paint factory or be a pilot. What he didn't tell me was that I'd have trouble playing friggin' computer games!

As you probably know, the Xbox 360 features several colored buttons. Usually I can tell the difference between these buttons (the problem isn't so bad that I can't tell the difference between the equivalent of red and green at traffic lights). However, there's one game that has caused a problem: Rockstar's Table Tennis. A fundamental part of the gameplay is being able to respond to the opposing player's spin on the ball. This is represented by one of the colors which are also found on the gamepad. Blue for left spin, red for right spin, green for forward spin and yellow for back spin. Unfortunately, I can barely tell the difference between the red, green and yellow on a standard definition display. On a high definition screen the green and yellow are still nearly identical to my eyes.

This isn't usually much of a problem during normal play (besides, I can always just press the green button), but on the training levels where you are taught how to spin the ball, I found the task physically impossible. I literally had to guess which spin the computer was giving the ball! Table Tennis has the hardest training level of any game, at least for me. Since completing the training levels is an Xbox 360 achievement, it's also possibly the hardest achievement there is. It took me around 3-4 hours and dozens of reattempts to get the 5 points given to you after you complete training.

Color blindness certainly isn't the only or the most problematic disability preventing people from getting enjoyment out of games, although it is possibly the most widespread. Designers of print, web and image media already take color blindness into account, but I've never read or seen the issue being discussed in the context of games. Some questions for you:

Do you have a disability? How has your disability affected your ability to play games?
If you're a game developer, or involved in the development of games, have you ever considered disabilities like color sight deficiency when designing a game?

(Page 2) Reader Comments

Scott Rudinski: Jul 30th 2006; 7:47PM

Oh god, you hit the nail right on the head. I have atypical achromatopsia, for all you non-colorblind people, that means I see little to no color. ESPECIALLY reds and blues. I also happen to love FPS games. So one day playing Enemy Territory at a LAN party, little did I realize friendly fire was on. I got behind a mounted machine gun and proceeded to level my whole team without even realizing it. Being as it was first LAN party, I got right up and walked out.

Eric: Jul 30th 2006; 8:38PM

I have mild colorblindness, mostly with blue/purple and green/yellow. The only GAME I've had problems with is one of the minigames in NFS underground for DS. You have to touch the colored panels as they fly across the screen. Thats one game I will never beat...

P3tE: Jul 30th 2006; 9:02PM

the only game thats been hard for me to play b/c of my colorblindness was super puzzle fighter. other than that, being partially colorblind hasnt really been a problem with any other games.

Nick: Jul 30th 2006; 9:15PM

I'm lucky, my colorblindness is extremely insignificant (I can't distinguish between the bottom quarter of the blue spectrum and black) so I've never had any problems with games, but I have sympathy for ya nonetheless.

J_Dubb: Jul 30th 2006; 9:24PM

NO WAY!!
I never knew I was colorblind!
I always thought I was mildly colorblind, but I didn't realize how badly.
But when Ethan (#9) mentioned the 45 on the ball in the picture, I couldn't see it. I went to this site:
http://www.geocities.com/heartland/8833/coloreye.html
and realized I was colorblind!

I'm always complaining, especially when playing split-screen games, that it's really hard to tell what's going on. I thought it was because the players were so small, but it's really because I couldn't differentiate the colors very well!

Thanks Joystiq!

Mia: Jul 30th 2006; 9:33PM

I am slightly colorblind when it comes to distinguishing certain shades of red from brown. It has only affected me once. However the thing that has practically ruined my life is floaters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floaters

Everyone to some degree has them, but normally you aren't aware of it. I started noticing them after trying to look at those stupid Magic Eye pictures that when looked at just right will form a 3d image.
http://www.magiceye.com/

I had over 20 years of near perfect vision and then in an instant, floaters EVERYWHERE. Once you start seeing them, you probably will forever. Do yourself a favor and AVOID MAGIC EYE IMAGES or anything else that unnaturally alters the focus of your eyes!

J_Dubb: Jul 30th 2006; 9:35PM

THAT'S WHY I CAN'T PLAY SNAKE EATER!!
Oh man I have it and I love MGS but I couldn't figure out why I couldn't play it!

Sean McKinnon: Jul 30th 2006; 10:21PM

"Colour Blindness" is definitely a misnomer when describing this condition for people who only have a 'mild' condition. The condition that most people with this affliction have is better called "anomolous trichromatism", or just simply "trichromatism". Here is a good article on varying degrees of the problem including trichromatism:
http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/optics/colvisn.htm

The Wikipedia entry on 'color blindness' says that people like us may be better at picking out enemy soldiers wearing camoflage than people with standard colour vision! Just say that the next time someone hassles you about it.

Ironically enough, I have this condition AND I work at a paint factory! It was a bit of a prolem at first but I learned to work past it.

Rusty Bailey: Jul 30th 2006; 10:32PM

Finally, someone I can relate to! No one understands when I have problems discerning between red and green during certain microgames on WarioWare. That crap sucks!

Xeania: Jul 30th 2006; 10:42PM

I never thought about how color-blindness might affect gameplay - my lil bro's color blind, but it must be mild, because I've never heard him complain.

I, on the other hand, am hearing impaired, with spoken language comprehension difficulties. I literally can't play games that have no captioning. Not only can I not hear spoken instructions, I get nothing out of the game because I can't follow the storyline. For instance, I loved the gameplay in the Spyro series way back when, but I never played more than 15 minutes because I didn't know what I was doing and without understanding the storyline, there was really no point. Game developers have gotten better with making games more accessible to the hearing impaired, but I still sometimes encounter things that drive me insane because I miss voice-over commentary and directions. Imagine how it is for someone who can't hear at all. Imagine how you'll feel 20 years from now when you're trying to play a game but it makes next to no sense to you because you've gotten old and your hearing has deteriorated. (I don't want to think how it'll be for me when my hearing starts to deteriorate from old age, when I'm already operating below maximum. I'll become a grumpy old woman...)

Also, as an aspiring game developer myself (though I'm more of a writer/coder than an artist...) I'm glad I came across this. Something to consider.

RgnKjn68: Jul 30th 2006; 10:58PM

Any other colorblind people unable to get 100% Gang Territories in San Andreas because you can't see the difference between the yellow and the green colors used in the map to indicate the various territories? ARGH! Also in Godfather, I couldn't tell which Safehouses I had purchased in the Map view because the purchased and unpurchased icons were a light red and light green (I think). I don't expect the gaming industry to do anything earth shattering about it (and don't blame them) however bolder shades instead of light ones would help us CBs.

Ryan Rodriguez: Jul 30th 2006; 11:36PM

I agree that HEXIC is the WORST. I enjoy the game and was pleased to see that they gave you an option to put symbols on the pieces. Without the pieces there was no way I could play the game. I was just randomly moving the bits around until they scored. The problem is that as soon as the bombs come, I'm back to randomly moving pieces because there is no way for me to tell the colors apart. Sucks, because I really love the game and don't want to stop just because of that. UPDATE PLEASE?

Ethan: Jul 30th 2006; 11:51PM

CONRAD, how did you post the picture of the ping pong ball with the 45 on it in the article, if you are color blind? Did you even know what the picture meant when you posted it? Oh, and I also think I should get a star for being the person to explain the condition, and point out the 45 on the ball. please ;)

Judd: Jul 30th 2006; 11:58PM

I have a theory that there are many disabilities everyone at least partially suffers from. While this obviously doesn't apply to everything (not everyone has a mild form of cancer), I've always felt that everyone at some point in their lives is slightly dyslexic or has ADD. Maybe it's the same thing with colorblindness too. I was wondering why that picture for this article looked weird and then in these posts someone mentioned the 45 on the ping pong ball. I didn't see it all but now that I know it's their I can see it easily. But J_Dubbs didn't see the #45 and he didn't realize untilnow that he had bad vision, but maybe he doesn't, maybe just thathis ability to distinguish colors is slightly worse than the average
citizen. I don't mean to offend anyone that suffers badly from any of these things, I just feel like when it comes to having a disability things aren't always black and white.

Sorry bad joke.

Duscrom: Jul 31st 2006; 1:14AM

If you wanna talk about devs not careing about disabilities, Nintendo is about to release a console that could literally not let me play any of their games. I an very near sighted (Many of you who are claiming you are blind w/o glasses, you uncorrected vision is probabbly better then mine with glasses). So I have to be close to the TV to play, which will put me out of range or have my Wiimote not able to see the sensor bar.

Phoenix137: Jul 31st 2006; 2:57AM

Rockstar could release a patch where the colors are replaced by shapes. That would be my solution.

***

Here's a small test with absolutely no purpose. If you cannot see the 45 in the ping pong ball, look at this picture and tell me if it makes it easier:

http://cawalliance.org/images/rockstar.jpg

I can't see the 45 on the unedited ball, and this is one of the only settings where the 45 was visible, and it is still a little dull to me (the top of the 5 is partially indiscernible). People who can see the 45, tell me, on the original picture, is the 45 as obvious as the R? How would you rate the improvement I made to the picture, in terms of how obvious the 45 is now?

To clarify what I mean by "settings," if I moved any of the color sliders in either direction 5 points (on a -100 to +100 scale), the 45 would mostly disappear.

Thanks for participating in this little study.

Phoenix137: Jul 31st 2006; 3:25AM

In the Anomalous Colour Vision link, there is this phrase:

"In any case, it must be remembered that colour is a property of perception, not of an object, and exists only subjectively. It can be made apparently objective only because 95% of us make the same behavioural responses to it."

Which I think is pretty handy to remember. Think about this for a second. When people look at the color blue, some red cones are activated, meaning that the color that you see is not true blue (proof below). Now, since red-green color vision deficiency is caused by a lower number of red cones, color blind people see a truer blue than people that have 'normal' amounts of red cones!

Perhaps if the judge of color blindness had to do with the color blue, people with "normal" vision would be the ones with defective vision! It's all a matter of perspective. People with color vision deficiency only have trouble because the people who make stuff have different cone amounts than they do.

This first one is a graph showing how much the red cones are activated,
* http://www.skytopia.com/stuff/rgbcone.jpg

That comes from this page,
* http://skytopia.com/project/light/light.html#6

And this is more supporting info from the same site (read the Answer),
* http://skytopia.com/project/science/light.html#21

Conrad Quilty-Harper: Jul 31st 2006; 4:04AM

Ethan, I took the test from here: http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.html

I can see the color spots, I just can't see the 45. I knew there was a 45 there because I trusted that test.

Wes filtness: Jul 31st 2006; 7:48AM

OMG i thought it was just me with the table tennis!! I never struggled so hard as that bloody spin training level. i am from england and with SKY digital u get a game on there called beehive bedlam. It's a very popular game and is the same sort of game as puzzle bobble(where u shoot the colored balls to link with the same colors and thus removing them). I have trouble playing this, and my fiance takes the piss everytime she beats me and i say to her i honestly cant tell the oranges, greens and yellows apart!! I remember there was a prank on a website where u can test for colorblindness, where its the same as the 1s at the opticians with the nubers made up of colored dots. At the end of the test cos i'm concentrating on it so hard trying to see what the hell my missus is on about and how she can see the "hidden" number, and WHAM this scary picture jumps out and shits me right up!!! lol

i hope they can sort something out in games forus affected by color-blindness. And BTW, what 45 on the ping-pong ball? When its loading and the ball nbounces onto the screen for the rockstar logo??

DrKickflip13: Jul 31st 2006; 10:24AM

The % of the population that is color blind and plays video games wouldn't make enough of an impact on the gaming industry to make them change their games. Also, he can easily have a friend come over and have him shout the color of the spin as it comes over. Like he said its only that one training level...and that takes all of 30 seconds if you can see the colors.

32_Footsteps: Jul 31st 2006; 10:33AM

I have a couple of minor problems that can be easily compensated for when gaming.

First, I'm developing arthritis in my hands. As long as I take regular breaks (more frequent with fighting games, less frequent with RPGs), I can prevent pain, but eventually I'm forced to put the controller down (I can only play Street Fighter 2 or Guilty Gear X2 about two hours at best).

I also have night blindness, so anytime something is exceptionally dark, I have problems discerning specific shapes. I thus always play games in a well-lit room (this actually gets frustrating when watching movies with others - most people like to watch movies in the dark, but I have a hard time focusing on the screen in a dark room).

My compensation is that I'm actually hyper-sensitive to color differentials - I can actually tell there's six different shades of color (3 each of green and red) in the 45 above. Now, if my vision was better than 20/750 (approximately), then maybe I'd be really set.

Though I do have one friend who is colorblind and a gamer. His major complaint is actually with portables - he can only tell the difference between the "plenty of power" light and the "low power" light in a very bright room or direct sunlight. This only affect him alot because his DS (and before that, his GBA) was attached to his hip.

DeKay: Jul 31st 2006; 10:47AM

Colorblindness runs in your family and is passed along by your mom to you, even though it is typically guys that are afflicted. I've known I've been colorblind since I was very young.

We play ETF at lunch and the red and green teams in four way matches look the same (I always pick blue for that reason). I just picked up Mario Kart DS and was frustrated to find out I can't tell the difference between the red and green shells. In the real world, playing pool, the blue ball and the purple ball look identical to me - I have to walk around and read the numbers.

Ethan: Dogs don't see in black and white. They have a version of red/green colorblindness. Their vision is not as sharp as ours (about 20/80) but they can pick up on motion better and can see in the dark much better. They can also see somewhat behind them because of the placement of their eyes on their skull.
http://www.uwsp.edu/psych/dog/LA/DrP4.htm

Methodic: Jul 31st 2006; 10:55AM

Dude, you have a big "color sight deficiency", because I also have this but I didn't have to much problem with the color, just a little.

And yeah, this game is difficult.. But not impossible.. My next achievement will be "The Savant
Beat the All-Star Circuit with every character." And is going pretty smooth, not that hard now that I'm playing better ;)

This game is not only about speed and reflexes, is about strategy also! Speed and reflexes are just the basics to apply an strategy.

Michael: Jul 31st 2006; 12:24PM

There was one comment from a guy on the first page that could only hear in one ear, and because of this he couldn't use headphones.

Radio shack sells a stereo to mono plug that will combine both channels into one channel. If you plug that into your source, and then plug your headphone into the plug you should be able to hear both left and right channels in one ear.

Michael

Matt: Jul 31st 2006; 12:50PM

you know what? this thread has really made me think. im going into games programming, so im gonna do all my games and stuff to be colour blind friendly. i hate things that rely on colour.

oh, and it also made me realise why i cant see the map properly on gta: vc on pc. not cos its tiny, but cos the colours are bad.

i wouldnt mind if the graphics weren't as good, just compensate for the fact that i cant see the colours.

come on 360 developers, hell even pc developers, release patches for us folk with colour-blindness.

Crushed: Jul 31st 2006; 12:53PM

Being one who suffers from red-green-yellow type colorblindness, this is a common problem for me. When some games ask me to use the "green" thing or the "yellow" thing and I have to differentiate, I often mess up on the first try.

Playing some games, I can't even tell the difference between green and yellow.

Ken C.: Jul 31st 2006; 2:44PM

Wow, it seems like many of us suffer from color blindness to a certain degree. I myself suffer from red-green color deficiency, so this game would be a no-no for me. I remember the first time I ran into this situation was with the Super NES and Super Metroid. I could never tell the difference between the missile doors and the "conflict" doors. I needed to play that game with a non-color blind buddy who would let me know what type of door it was.

It would definitely be great if developers kept these factors in mind.

dlf: Jul 31st 2006; 2:59PM

YAY! Someone else that's also color-blind. I am also color-blind to red-green, blue-purple (like you), I can't tell the colors of people's posts (in forums) sometimes, and have to ask for them to make like red [i]italiced[/i] (or bold) and the other [b]bold[/b].

gamingkrazy: Jul 31st 2006; 3:01PM

Yup, im colourblind and the green and yellow on table tennis is too fricken impossible!

Nick Fogelson: Jul 31st 2006; 3:14PM

colourblindness will not keep you from playing Rockstar TT. You can tell what spin they are putting on it by how they hit the ball. The animations are quite accurate and you can tell the spin quite wellt his way, and this is of course how actual top shelf table tennis players react to spin (real TT balls don't have little arrows spinning around them :)

Davidlow: Jul 31st 2006; 3:57PM

Years ago TVs had a knob to control the color tint of the whole screen. I'm wondering if that would've helped to resolve colors that look the same to certain forms of colorblindness.

Brad: Jul 31st 2006; 4:22PM

A friend of mine is profoundly deaf. He can't hear a thing, he doesn't even understand the concept of sound. He's also a big fan of the Zelda series. The two traits were never related, until about halfway through Wind Waker. In order to pick up the Triforce shards, one must pan the camera around the boat until they hear a loud hum, thats how you know where to drop the claw. However, he couldn't hear it, so he wasn't able to get the shards. He had to have someone else help him listen for it, or in some cases he'd just have to go by the faint point of light that disappears once you get closer to the spot. Since then I always thought games should say on the label 'hearing required' or 'hearing recommended', etc. Or have some kind of option in the menu that would put a handicap on those kinds of puzzles.

Andy Baio: Jul 31st 2006; 5:50PM

Funny, I was just talking to someone about this today. I've been playing "Trauma Center: Under the Knife" lately, and I hit a level last night that relies on telling the difference between (I think) an orange and green bacteria. Needless to say, I had to muddle my way through it until I got lucky.

This has been a problem for many games. Bust a Move is very difficult for people with red-green colorblindness, and I remember a classic puzzler named Zoop that was simply unplayable. I gave up after the very first level.

Adam Vavra: Jul 31st 2006; 6:32PM

Amen! Color blind people unite! I always wondered why I got my ass kicked in puzzle fighter.

Douglas Pace: Jul 31st 2006; 10:18PM

Just one more note of "thanks" for bringing this up. My red/green color-blindedness plaques me in most every puzzle game or any other game relying on differentiating between red and green. In real life, it gets me on such things as doors with access lights that change from red to green to let you know you can enter - I just have to keep pulling on the door like an idiot to see if I can pass. Fortunately, the red/green used in traffic lights is not even close to the same hue, saturation, & brightness - the green is almost white. Discerning the yellow from the red, however, is hard, even though - outside of traffic lights - yellow is fairly easy to tell.

Puzzle games are the worst. I can't tell you the number of times I've yelled an expletive during Zuma because I shot a red ball against what I thought were two other red balls (but were in fact green). Ugh!

I had heard once that the Xbox certification process involved guaranteeing playability for color-blindedness, but I don't think this is true.

Ted Brown: Jul 31st 2006; 11:37PM

I'm also a developer, and I try to bring up color blindness issues when I can. Our UI guys know what's up, but for artistic-deficient designers, different colors are usually the only way to quickly distinguish things before final art gets applied. If the colors are too deeply embedded in the design, then... well, it becomes a cost/value discussion, if we should change it or not. Having hard numbers on the number of people afflicted with color blindness will help.

Thanks for the article!

ranex: Aug 1st 2006; 1:04AM

good article
to bring up another problem in future gaming- im blind in one eye so i cant see 3d and ive been hearing about that with the 3d screens 3d gaming will be the trend but cyclopses like me are going to be left out

Greg: Aug 1st 2006; 7:21AM

I also had major problems with Table Tennis, and also had problems with Hexic. The way I got around the training in table tennis was to have someone sit next to me and tell me the colours! The sequence of the first five balls were always the same though, which helped. In game I guess it would help to know the colours, but I seem to do alright anyway... I haven't had any problems apart from that. Uno is tough with Red and Green but it automatically tells you which cards are playable which is nice. Come to think of it I did have a few probs with Halo 2 and Red/Green teams...especially when it came to team CTF :/

crimsonfire: Aug 1st 2006; 5:21PM

This was a great article. I'm affected by color deficiency, as well. I also have a red/green deficiency, which makes seeing red in other colors very difficult. This is why distinguishing between purple and blue is so hard. I also can't tell the difference between green and amber lights on computers. This makes being a computer tech a pain in the rear sometimes.

I gave up on Zuma and similar color specific games a long time ago! I do have problems with some FPS's, but I manage for the most part. I hope that game developers decide to do something about this, and the response from aspiring developers to this article is promising.

Ted Brown (#84) is looking for hard numbers of color deficient people. I doubt you will actually find a true number. I read that 10% of the male population and .4% of the female population are color deficient. However, keep in mind that color testing isn't a regular vision test. There are many people who don't even know that they're "color blind" because they can see colors and not in black & white, as the misconception goes. It took me many years to find out that I was color deficient.

Thanks to Conrad for writing this up. I never knew how many others shared my problem. I've always felt like a complete dumb*** because I've had to have my wife or friends point out color specific things in games before. Neighborhoods in GTA is a great example, whoever brought that up (too many posts to look through)! It's really nice to know I'm not alone.

X GATECRASHER X: Aug 1st 2006; 10:23PM

I'm colorblind, although not as severely as some it sounds. I have an impossible time with Table Tennis' spin indicators. I can see the blue one, but not any of the others really. Hexic HD was impossible until I found the colorblind setting. Props to the game producers that include fixes for colorblind people.

Dusty: Aug 2nd 2006; 3:16AM

Due to my colorblindness, I can't tell when my Nintendo DS battery is about to die. The little LED indicator changes colors when battery power is low but there's no difference to me.

leetdood: Aug 2nd 2006; 8:55PM

I'm deaf, and this does not interfere in my gameplay most times, except in extreme cases where the games don't have subtitles, or give you audio instructions. While deaf people adapt (My friend is a god on counter-strike, even if he can't hear) it's pretty annoying when a game you like (Killer 7/Resident Evil 4) doesn't have subtitles. HEAR THAT, CAPCOM? PUT SUBTITLES IN!

This doesn't really bug me most times, though. Most games do fine.

Dennis Pape: Aug 2nd 2006; 11:40PM

if you are colorblind please go to this web site
fox news. http://www.fox10tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5221856

Thank you

Dennis

Christopher Smart: Aug 23rd 2006; 7:36AM

While not game related, I am a colorblind artist (http://www.OnTheFlats.com). I have been dealing with the fact that I can't see red or certain shades of green all my life. Luckily, I paint underwater scenes and the first color to leave the specturm is red. So in effect, what I see, you see.

Richard: Sep 6th 2006; 6:18AM

Hi,

Thanks for this great article and all your comments. There are actually quite a few initiatives to try a break down the barriers of inaccessible gaming. Please see: http://www.game-accessibility.com and please help out by joining this community! We are anxious to hear more of your experiences.

Greets,

Richard

http://www.game-accessibility.com
http://www.audiogames.net

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