Over the past few years, a new awareness for the difficulties of color blind gamers has emerged, taking into consideration the large percentage of the male population affected by this disability upon birth. Scientists estimate that around 7% of men are affected by some form of red-green colorblindness, rendering them unable to distinguish between the two colors in a normal setting. Unfortunately red and green also are a lynchpin of modern game design, most often serving as a symbol for health loss and regeneration. Brightly colored puzzle games can also pose a problem. With a rising number of gamers voicing their frustration with the oversight (Gearbox Software writer Anthony Burch, for instance, once wrote about his red-green colorblindness), more developers, such as PopCap and Valve, are making the effort to include new options to bridge the visual gap.
One such company is Maxis. The upcoming SimCity reboot, due this March, will include "around" 18 optic filters, three of which compensate for the three most common forms of color blindness. In an interview with Destructoid, SimCity creative director/art director Ocean Quigley spoke about his inspiration in tackling the problem, discussing how the studios lead QA tester is actually colorblind. He first made a filter to be able to see the game how the tester would. Given the SimCity UI and gameplay mechanics rely on use of bright colors (for instance the different building zones, an essential part of the game, are yellow, blue, and green), the difference, and thus what the player misses out on, was shocking.
Determined to take the guesswork out for colorblind gamers, he set up the filters to make up that visual difference, explaining:
"So I went home, and as I was driving home I'm like 'I bet you can do it like that,' and coming up with all these different techniques. Then I got home and I'm like 'You know, I'm just going to Google this. I bet this is a solved problem, and I'm trying to reinvent the wheel.' And it has, it is a solved problem. There's lots of people that have worked on techniques for transforming images to make them more contrast-y and visible to colorblind people. So I'm just applying those techniques."
"Depending upon your form of colorblindness, you have different transforms. If you are red-green colorblind, you don't have much sensitivity in the red-green range. So what I've had to do for that is to pull some of the stuff that would normally be merged together into the blue channel and to pop the contrast on red and green as much as possible so that people that have some limited sensitivity to red green can still see what's going on.
He adds,
"One of the things I'm trying to do with this game, at base, is make something delightful, something that people want to play, something that's wonderful. And if you have up to five or six percent of the population that would like to play the game and finds it a frustrating experience because we've done a bad job of differentiating things that they need to see, then they're not going to have a good time with it. It's something that I realized I could do something about, so I did."
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