{"id":640,"date":"2010-02-19T22:41:16","date_gmt":"2010-02-20T04:41:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/handyvandal.com\/?p=640"},"modified":"2010-09-10T23:14:48","modified_gmt":"2010-09-11T05:14:48","slug":"colourblind-gaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/2010\/02\/colourblind-gaming\/","title":{"rendered":"Colourblind Gaming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dan Griliopoulos, a lifelong gamer who suffers from deuteranopia<\/a>, a form of red-green colourblindness, has written a very interesting essay about colour and game design. In this excerpt he’s playing Bioshock 2<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"Bioshock<\/p>\n

\nI have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a certain colour. I shoot, I score \u2026 and get a mild electric shock. I repeat. Again and again. There\u2019s an endless supply of darts so I keep shooting until I die of Electron Overdose and respawn, humiliated, at a Vitachamber. Yet again, someone on the art team has thoughtlessly swallowed the Manichean<\/a> standard that red is bad and green is good, and decided he should use a primary palette to distinguish between these opposites — which means poor old colour-blind me gets killed.<\/p>\n

In my case, both red and green appear as a murky yellow. Or so I\u2019m told -\u2013 it\u2019s not as though I\u2019ve ever seen what green, red or yellow looks like to everyone else. Eventually, through trial and error, I worked out there are just-detectable contrast and location differences in the puzzle, and that if I focus really hard and fast, I can just work out which is which before the timer runs out. Bioshock 2<\/em> just got challenging.<\/p>\n

… Here\u2019s some tips for developers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

… How can a firm the size of Activision or EA consistently ignore what could be 8-12% of their paying customers? That could be a million of the people who bought Modern Warfare 2<\/em>, for example.<\/p>\n

~ Dan Griliopoulos @ Rock Paper Shotgun<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Photoshopped image below demonstrates roughly what the Bioshock 2<\/em> hacking dial looks like to someone with deuteranopia — you don’t see red, and you don’t see green, both look like dull gold:<\/p>\n

\"Bioshock<\/p>\n

Image borrowed from What BioShock 2\u2019s Hacking Looks Like if You\u2019re Colour Blind<\/a> at Negative Gamer<\/em>, which has more images simulating other types of color blindness.<\/p>\n

The subject of color blindness and information systems is of interest to me professionally: I’ve recently done some research into web site accessibility, such as Section 508 requirements<\/a> and the target.com lawsuit<\/a>. <\/p>\n

If you are doing business with the federal government, this is a big legal deal. <\/p>\n

And in any case, we should be designing information systems (and everything else) to work as well as possible for as many different people as possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Griliopoulos, a lifelong gamer who suffers from deuteranopia, a form of red-green colourblindness, has written a very interesting essay about colour and game design. In this excerpt he’s playing Bioshock 2: I have a clever hacking dart gun, which requires my simply pressing a button when a needle on its meter passes through a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,110,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accessibility","category-color","category-game-design"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1398,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions\/1398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/handyvandal.com\/wphv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}