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.

Yes, when I turned on my Xbox 360 on Wednesday night, I was greeted with no video and three flashing lights on the status ring – the dreaded Red Ring of Death. Fortunately, when I sent it in last time, they added on another year of coverage for the RROD, so it’s free to get repaired/refurbished/replaced again. On the plus side, it was very easy to go to the Xbox site, request a repair, and print off my own prepaid UPS shipping label. I still have lots of boxes and packing material from game trading and Ebay, so I dropped this thing off at the UPS Store yesterday. With any luck, I’ll have a functional box back again in 2-3 weeks (I’m not holding my breath to get it back in less than 10 days like my Dad did earlier this year).

I’m sure my CoD skills, such as they are, will atrophy completely by the time I get my box back. We also haven’t had a chance to play Nazi Zombies on the new map yet, either. Bummer.

I played Nazi Zombies on CoD: World at War with my Dad and Brian the other night; Essbase and Steve were over and I wanted to show them what it looked like. It was a lot of fun, though I don’t understand how Brian let zombies get through the doorway he was guarding while armed with the Ray Gun… but I digress.

Anyway, a couple nights later I had a weird zombie dream. I don’t generally dream about zombies, first off. In this one, it was the modern era and not the Forties. It seems like I had arrived at a facility where the last few dozen people (in the region? world?) had congregated. This guy was showing me around, telling me the plan. Everyone understood that the waves of zombies grew exponentially and basically, everyone accepted that they were going to die once a wave big enough came. It was weird, the whole tone of the dream wasn’t, “How are we going to survive the zombies?” but rather, “How can we kill as many zombies as possible on the wave when we die?” It was all very serious, too, not like just having a dream about playing the game.

The big finale were these short steel tunnels they had built into the side of a hill. They were hexagonal in cross section, maybe 8 to 10 feet in diameter (face to face), the steel itself like 6″ thick. They just went into the hill about 40 or 50 feet, just big enough for each to hold a dozen survivors and all their weapons, and by weapons, I mean ridiculously large-caliber automatic weapons, like on the battle suits deployed in defense of Zion in the Matrix movies. The plan was to just fall back into these dead-end tunnels and slaughter zombies coming into the tunnel until they ran out of ammo, then die, of course.

So anyway, I was like, alrighty, that’s a plan. Someone said it was time to get ready for the last wave (I assume someone had calculated when this last too-big-to-survive wave would arrive), so they tell me I’m in the last tunnel on the end. I go over there and it’s not a big steel tunnel with a killzone like the others. It’s like a wood-and-dirt bunker, like in the Pacific maps of CoD:WaW, approachable from every angle. I’m thinking, “What the hell is this?” I get in there and instead of a dozen of us, it’s me and three other guys, with just a WW2-era rifle each. And then I notice it’s not even a real bunker; the top is just a tarp, and the wind is blowing it around like it’s going to fly off at any moment.

So I’m sitting in this glorified foxhole, which zombies can attack from every direction, armed with a rifle and a little ammo, with three other stooges, right before the onslaught of the humanity-ending final round of zombies, and I’m all, “WTF? Why did I get stuck out here and not in one of those kick-ass steel tunnels with a billion rounds of 50-cal ammo?”

Then I woke up, and was in a foul mood.

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.

Why, nazi zombies, of course!

The guys and I have been playing the Call of Duty: World at War bonus mission “Nacht der Untoten” lately, aka Nazi Zombie mode. You can play it solo or up to 4p coop; the former is kinda boring, the latter is made of pure Awesome. We’ve even hooked up with Adrian and my Dad.

Here are some screenshots I found online somewhere. The zombies start slow and relatively weak, going down after one or two shots from a rifle. As the rounds progress, they start moving faster, taking more damage before going down, and start coming in big bunches. It goes from “under control” to “we’re frakked” pretty fast, hehe.