Colorblindness and Videogames

Destructoid has a good article up about the problems those of us who are colorblind or color-impaired (like me!) have with videogames. To discuss this a little further, approximately 10% of the male population suffers from some degree of color impairment. The article’s author seems to be significantly more colorblind than I am, as he can’t tell the difference between the red and green on Big Daddies in Bioshock. Neither of us, however, can see the boat in this picture (I’m told there’s a boat here).

I’ve never found my colorblindness to be so significant that it ever impaired my ability to play videogames, but I’m certainly on the less severe end of the scale.

There have been noises in the industry about taking accessibility into consideration when designing a game, which I think is terrific, although of course there are always trade-offs in doing so. In the realm of color-blindness however, the solution to this problem is nearly always to never use color as the sole indicator of anything in the game. This is not only often reasonably easy to do, it’s also sound design practice to aid those who are not color-impaired as well. It’s nice to see that Peggle has gone to the trouble to design an entire mode around the colorblind, but it would have been reasonably simple to simply add symbols into the design of the blocks in the first place.