Mostly Game

In the fourth grade, I was diagnosed with “red/green color deficiency” by an Ishihara test. They said, “Don’t be an electrician,” heh. As a kid, I really don’t recall incidents of not being able to differentiate shades of red and green. It first became more obvious to me all the way in college, in electrical engineering course labs, working with resistors.

Resistors, due to their small size, use a set of color stripes to indicate their resistance, rather than using printed numerals. “Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly,” is the non-PC version of the mnemonic device to remember the colors. Going from memory, I’m guessing thats:

• 0 = black
• 1 = brown
• 2 = red
• 3 = orange
• 4 = yellow
• 5 = green
• 6 = blue
• 7 = violet (purple)
• 8 = gray
• 9 = white

Now that I’ve typed that, let me go check my answers. /me surfs over to an electronics site. I was right, go me. Resistors are color coded with three stripes, indicating digit/digit/multiply-by-10s (add zeroes). For example, red/green/red corresponds to 2/5/2, so it has a resistance of 2500 ohms (2 + 5 + two 0s). But the problem wasn’t remembering which colors meant which numbers, it was telling the numbers apart. Misreading red/green/red as red/red/green, for example, means the difference between 2500 ohms and 2200000 ohms.

After those classes, though, I didn’t really notice it much again in everyday life for quite a while. Nowadays, I generally encounter the issue in two areas: LEDs and games. I think my color perception has a lot to do with brightness (or some other color jargon I’m not familiar with), so some red/green colors are very easy for me and others are quite difficult. LEDs give me a hard time, almost without exception.

• Tech Support: Look at the back of the switch. There should be a status light.
• Me: I see it.
• Tech Support: Is it green, yellow or red?
• Me: Um… yes?

There are a lot of LEDs on computer and networking equipment. I can’t even tell for sure if my Xbox battery packs are fully charged, so I just leave them on the charger overnight so I know they are full up in the morning.

Video games, particularly team shooters like Tribes and Call of Duty, can be a little tough: friends have green names and enemies have red names. Tribes has friendly fire, and Hardcore mode in CoD has friendly fire, so those were/are sometimes a little more complicated to play. In a game that measures fractions of a second between life and death, the time it takes me to decide, “Okay, that guy’s name is red,” often puts me at the losing end of that process. In CoD4, Marines vs OpFor maps are easier than SAS vs Spetsnaz because of the uniform differences; in CoD:WaW, Russians vs Germans is much easier than Marines vs Japanese. I have a terrible time identifying snipers at range because both sides camoflage their uniforms so heavily; I go from feeling really good that I spot a sniper across the map and line up a shot, to feeling really bad when I see, “You killed *teammate* JoeSniper.” I did recently discover, quite by accident, that CoD:WaW has an alternate color option, so now friendlies have blue names and enemies are red — hallelujah!

The gang tried out Warhammer Online when it came out. Great game, but their server status page uses red and green icons to indicate up or down. Even worse, they don’t even have a frakking tooltip on the image — that’s just poor web design, IMO.

In boardgames, every other game (at least) uses both red and green for player colors; the most common palette is probably red, green, blue and yellow. Almost none use black and white — I can only assume that people (or at least publishers) prefer the aesthetic appeal of primary colors over the utilitarian (and easily differentiable) black and white. But it’s not always red and green that give me grief.

• El Grande – the red and green are fine. I have a hard time telling the green and brown apart without bright lighting. I ended up spray-painting all the brown cubes to white.
• Tongiaki – no idea where they got this color palette: orange and yellow, blue and purple. I have to really look to tell each of those pairs apart, in this particular game.
• Caylus – the pink food cubes and the gray stone cubes are a little difficult for me. They both look sorta washed out without bright lighting. When I keep my cubes in front of me, I always keep them in the same order so the pink and gray aren’t next to each other.
• Gemblo – the red and green transparent acrylic pieces are a little hard. Interestingly, my Dad sometimes confuses the blue and purple, in this game only.
• Manila – the brown and green dice are a little hard to tell apart. As a result, whenever I win harbor master, I very rarely choose both brown and green (nutmeg and jade) for the boats at the same time, which of course affects my strategy every game. I suppose I shouldn’t since everyone is plenty eager to move up the punts after each roll, heh.
• Race for the Galaxy – I have a hard time telling apart green worlds from brown worlds (Genes and Rare Earth or whatever they call them).

Those are just some examples. There are a lot of games where the red and green are easy to tell, or the green and brown. I really appreciate, though, games that include either a color-friendly palette (like Pandemic’s red, yellow, blue and black cubes) or include pattern/symbol cues along with color (like Supernova’s use of icons on each player’s colored tiles, as well as shapes on the different suits of cards). It is something I am very aware of when designing prototypes for my own games.

Otherwise, my color blindness doesn’t generally rear itself in day to day life. There is the occassional embarrassing mistake…

• Me: Wow, the owner of that van must be a big OSU fan [Oklahoma State's color is orange].
• Them: Um… that van is neon green.
• Me: … nevermind.

In my defense, it was an overcast day…

D used to tease me about it sometimes, but now I’ve turned the tables on it…

• D: Hey, can you bring my green sweater from the closet?
• Me: Sorry, can’t tell which is which. You have to get it yourself.

You gotta work with what you have.