Mostly Game

There’s a petition up to add a color-blind option to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which is an awesome game. For those not familiar with it, it uses red and green name tags (and icons) when playing multiplayer matches online: red for enemies and green for friendlies. Needless to say, this can pose a problem for players with red/green colorblindness.

I was actually very surprised when I didn’t find a color-blind option in MW2, when CoD: World at War had such an option. In WaW, it made the name tags blue/red, or maybe it was orange? Whatever it was, they were very distinctive colors, heh. I understand the developers are different (Infinity Ward did the two Modern Warfare CoD games while Treyarch has done the WW2 CoD games), but c’mon, color-blind options should be as commonplace in games as Y-axis inversion (which is to say, ubiquitous — don’t get me started on games that don’t include inversion options).

An estimated 8-10% of the male population has some form of color-blindness, and red/green is the most common. I’ve seen on the MW2 leaderboards that there are already over 5 million people ranked online. This means that over 400,000 gamers (read: customers) are potentially negatively affected by this issue.

If you want more thoughts on color-blindness, feel free to read my previous post about it: Color Me Blind. Otherwise, please hit this petition and help us out. Thanks!

EDIT: some less generous members of the community have made the observation that it may require some cost to implement color-blind options, and that cost is then borne by the rest of the community; ten percent is a minority, after all. My response to this is (a) 10% is still quite significant — what business wouldn’t say yes to a 10% boost in sales, for example? and (b) what really bugs me is that the red/green palette was chosen in the first place. This is, frankly, an antiquate color scheme. Red/green traffic lights. Red/green status lights and LEDs. Is it simply because blue LEDs are more expensive to manufacture? Or just laziness and lack of forward thinking on the part of manufacturers?

The bottom line: why do game developers continue to choose red/green colors at all? Why couldn’t this (and many other games) use red/blue or blue/green right from the start, for everyone? The only place I would expect to use red/green is in games that require many colors; I even use them myself sometimes in my boardgame designs. In these cases, though, I take care to vary the brightness of the colors so that is an additional cue, and of course the use of symbols/shapes can be used as an alternate cue. The XBLA game “Hexic” adds icons to the pieces when the color-blind option is enabled; Bejeweled uses different shaped gems. It’s not rocket science, people.