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I didn't actually realize I was colorblind until high school, when we were studying genetics in molecular bio and I realized, hey, wait, I can't see the numbers in these dot pies!
![[image loading]](http://www.colblindor.com/wp-content/images/ishihara-transformation.jpg)
Except I can, barely, because I'm not fully red-green colorblind. I just have to concentrate really, really, really hard. My colorblindness is more gradient-based, as similar colors fade together. A lot of times this makes playing games irritating and borderline impossible. One example is Touhou, a bottom-up shooter (like those old classics) that's quite famous and popular in Japan (the link is to the TL discussion thread about them). As much as I'd love to play them, I run into a very fundamental problem. That is, I can't actually distinguish between all the crap that's on the screen. Actually, I once managed to make it to the final level, on easy mode, for one of the games, only to run into this BS:
![[image loading]](http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080827043329/touhou/images/d/d2/Th11sc149.jpg)
You see, according to my friend, whilst the massive amount of white is annoying, there are clear sets of red, pink, and white. The problem for me is that I can very obviously see the pink, red, white, and black on my screen. I cannot, however, make out the edges of these colors without intense concentration, which takes up exponentially more effort when having to make out the edges of fast-moving colors that are overlapping each other, whilst having to control my own miniscule blob of (usually) similar colors. It's not impossible, but it's extremely strenuous to do, and I find myself getting more and more stressed out as I play the game. Not because the game is difficult etc, but because my mind subconsciously gets irritated as I concentrate harder and harder on what should be a mundane task.
Some other real-life issues that occur because of this gradient issue is that I struggle to see streetlights (omg! I know, it's not a funny issue, but I've managed fine so far). Green lights are green. Clear, blue sky is blue. Green and blue do not mix well together. It's hard for me to see streetlights altogether, but thankfully I can usually see the red lights, so I won't be causing any issues. It blows when people drive gray cars, though, because if it's just rained or something, their cars blend into the street and I can only make out their car exists via their license plate (hopefully not dirty) or the black shadows from their bumper etc.
I usually manage fine, though. Miraculously, I never ran across these problems in Starcraft, possibly because all the units had a very nice black border around them. It is incredible how much thick black borders help, along with the utter lack of black units. Think about it: pretty much every unit and background in the game of Starcraft is pretty bright.
However I first started running into major problems while playing DotA. You see, Slardar and Vengeful Spirit are dark-toned and have no visible black border (owing in part to the fact that they're dark as hell), so I can't actually see them when they're standing on green, blue, or gray background. It's a good thing the DotA map has none of that. Oh wait. (Phantom Assassin doesn't count, everyone has trouble seeing her.)
Normally people don't notice me struggling with this. But then a couple nights ago I was playing League of Legends with some people, and to my horror, I found myself playing a little yellow cougar. This alone is not a problem, despite the brown ground prevalent on much of the map. It's nothing like having to distinguish an ice bird from the snowy background of the seasonal winter map (that was fuuuuuuuuun! not) or having to figure out where the faint, white cloud of smoke on the ground is from Cho'Gath. The problem was that we had two (one on each team) little assholes spamming this obnoxious spinning attack (like Juggernaut's bladestorm in DotA), except their spinning attack is not only obnoxious, but YELLOW. Yellow spin, brown ground, gray AoE from another hero (Nasus), yellow cougar, some random white lightning crap from a ninja hero, who himself was dark purple, etc. etc.. All the colors blurred together for me, and I kid you not, I couldn't see a thing. I couldn't see a single hero on my screen, and there were 10. You might think, but yellow, brown, gray, purple, white, light-blue etc. don't mix! Well they don't, but I'm color blind, and I can't see the edges of colors. When the ground turned gray, I couldn't even see the edges of the obnoxious yellow spinning, much less my own hero. I'd never been so flabbergasted in my life playing games.
I bring this up because I was playing Starcraft 2 the other day and I was getting completely screwed up as terran. You see, they theoretically made walling easier, in Starcraft 2. If buildings are next to each other, they block units! And if the buildings are next to the edge of cliffs, they block units! Fabulous! I was no longer going to lose games because I stupidly failed to properly memorize how to wall off a certain exit on a map I wasn't super familiar with!
Or so I thought. Unfortunately I'm bored at work at the moment so I can't take a screenshot, but if you've played or seen the game, you know what happened. Those sick bastards decided to make the building placement color like, super-duper light green. So light-green that I struggle to distinguish it from the ground, on jungle terrain. But that's not all. Because the surrounding area on the placement grid is freakin' light orange. Who came up with this? And if your building is hovering over an unbuildable place? Orange-red! Who came up with this BS?
But to date Blizz hasn't responded much beyond DB mentioning it (he's color-blind too...) in an interview some time ago. Two threads about color-blindness and the placement grids on bnet forums:
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23308411031&sid=5000
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=24401905321&sid=5000
In fairness, I don't really expect them to do anything about it. Most games don't really accommodate us suckers.
But it's interesting because I have a friend who's seriously R/G colorblind, but he has less game-color issues than me. His biggest problem is telling who's teammate and who's enemy in games like Starcraft, because colors using heavy tints of red and green look pretty much the same. But he's always able to see the shapes quite distinctly. Just hoping that colors don't screw me over more than building placement in Starcraft, even though things like this make me cry:
![[image loading]](http://images.lowyat.net/misc/starcraft-2.jpg)
(none of those units are very visible to me; in fact it was only as I copy-pasted this and pondered describing how the image looks to me that I realize there're missile turrets and a bunker at all)
Here's to other poor sods like me o/
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Hey, me too! I'm really pissed off when games forget about us.
I keep picking pink characters and don't even try to have me play Audiosurf or Bust-A-Move.
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That sounds worse than regular colorblindness. Have you had it professionally diagnosed?
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Don't forget minimaps, I can't tell the difference between certain colors on the minimap so I never know which dots are mine and which are the enemy ><
Also color maps suck, for instance when a textbook has a map of the US with a color overlay of population density or temperature.
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Hopefully there will be a color blind mode? I know some more recent games have a mode that change the shades/colors so it is easier to see for people with this condition.
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On May 01 2010 03:34 R1CH wrote:
That sounds worse than regular colorblindness. Have you had it professionally diagnosed?
Actually the most I got so far was red-green colorblindness during an eye exam two years ago. It's been a relatively recent realization that I was "probably strangely off" of normal R/G colorblindness... but as I'm working atm and not being a student (thus no health insurance yet) I haven't really had the chance to ask an optometrist about it.
I'm not sure if it's "worse" per se, as I see colors better than people with standard R/G (my friend's R/G end up being bleached, apparently), but it's a bit odd.
And yeah! I hope there's a colorblind mode, but Blizz hasn't really mentioned anything about it, so I'm not really getting my hopes up. I always use teal/red for the minimap though, so I can see friend/foe at least. Can't ever distinguish ally stuff this way though, in team games :D
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BTW, what's the number in the first picture? I'm R/G colorblind too and cannot see it at all, no matter how hard I concentrate. After photoshopping this picture I get either 3 or 8, depending on effects used.
Howewer, I can't understand your difficulties playing Touhou, I used to rush through EOSD-PCB-IN on hard without much effort, doesn't matter for me what color explosions are, they're basically some bright color on dark background anyway.
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I have pretty awful color blindness as well, but the only thing that really causes problems for me is the placement grid when you are about to create buildings.
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I think it's 3.
One of the examples I used explaining my problem to a friend was that, we picked out a picture of an appletree, with apples still hanging on the trees. Standard R/G colorblind people cannot tell there's red in the green; that's the concept of the dot test. I can tell there's red, but I can't tell you where in the picture the red is. What happens in Touhou is that, I can tell there're bullets on the screen, I can even tell you what color they are etc., but it becomes incredibly difficult for me to figure out WHERE the bullets are, on the screen. It's okay when, as you mentioned, there's light colors against a dark background, but the boss of TH11 I believe had instances where she'd send these giant pink/white balls flying at you, and further attacks of white and pink love, as in the picture I used. I just couldn't see anything at that point, hahah. And what made it worse was eventually it went into like an orange background, so I was trying to see white on an orange background through these two giant pink balls.
I just couldn't time any of the bullet-dodging stuff, because I was having to guess at where anything was. I know Touhou games are about patterns and such, but it was just too hard figuring stuff out without being able to really make out what was happening 
On May 01 2010 03:45 SoLaR[i.C] wrote:
I have pretty awful color blindness as well, but the only thing that really causes problems for me is the placement grid when you are about to create buildings.
Fortunately I noticed the same; most of my problems come with building placement, but sometimes (very rarely, though!) I don't notice units on the screen because they blend in. Stalkers on the blue map tileset and/or in shades are the biggest culprits; for some reason their glossiness makes them blend in. Takes me longer than usual to track them down.
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The number is an 8. The three is a pinkish color and the rest of the 8 is made up with a slightly different orange color.
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To me it looks like a pink 3 with brown dots closing it in a 8.
I hope for you (and every other R/G colorblind) that there will be a colorblind mode, being unable to play sc2 for this reason would really (REALLY) suck.
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Yeah, it's an 8. It's purposely made like that to test exactly what type of R/G colour-blindness the viewer has. I see it as a pink & purple 3 with the remaining spots filled it with orange & brown dots to change it into an 8.
I have a colour-blind friend whose trouble is distinguishing between dark tones like some dark blues, browns, dark reds and dark purples. They all seem pretty much brown to him. It doesn't impact his driving and such because the street light colours are very vibrant (and you can remember which light is top, middle and bottom too)... I felt bad for him during our User Interface class in uni though...
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On May 01 2010 03:52 Southlight wrote:
It's okay when, as you mentioned, there's light colors against a dark background, but the boss of TH11 I believe had instances where she'd send these giant pink/white balls flying at you, and further attacks of white and pink love, as in the picture I used. I just couldn't see anything at that point, hahah.
Oh yeah, finally got it, probably that's why I feel like that new Touhou games are much much harder than the old ones, because of brighter backgrounds and more gradients overall... most people tell me they're actually easier, but whatever.
... Whoa, just noticed that placement grid in SC2 can have both red and green sections in it! For me it has always been all-red or all-green lol.
Well, I feel sorry for you, it seems you have trouble to see when two colors blend, there are different kinds of color blindness after all. I remember when I was very very young, seeing some billboard with bright red and green almost made my eyes hurt as if someone splashed out a glass of acid in my face, now it's almost OK, just disturbing... I guess, brain has adapted a bit somehow. The only problems I encounter in gaming are usually on dark tileset maps (Metalopolis, night in WC3), but there's a lot of non-colorblind people that also have some trouble with them.
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I always wanted Blizzard to make simple changes for the colorblind. I can't play SC2 currently but in SC1 I felt sorry because it gave them a significant disadvantage, and shift+tab only worsened the problem.
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Oh man i feel so bad for you now=(
maybe we should open a threat about this in the betaForum.
I´m sure you have the support of most people (not only from the TL community wich im sure you have)
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9933 Posts
oh, izzy =]
don't go blind!
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I am completely colorblind; as in I see everything as a gradient between black and white. The most I can say regarding any color is if it is darker/lighter than something else in comparison. I also have difficulty differentiating colors that are very close.
This has always been a huge problem for me in gaming. For the original SC, I could never tell who was what player in a multiplayer game. Among friends, we had this agreement that we'd say our start positions after everyone had scouted so that I could tell who was who. On the minimap, I had a lot of difficulty pinpointing a disturbance. The situation was a bit better in WC3, but only because the players' names were listed directly on a unit upon highlighting it.
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United States22883 Posts
The SC2 minimaps bug me. Right now, I just leave the enemy colors default because the red/green doesn't help me at all. If I were to really concentrate on it, it'd probably be fine, but on the minimap and using my peripheral vision, it's almost impossible for me to tell.
I really don't understand why they don't use more distinguished colors for that stuff. WoW had that problem too with money, but at least there was a mod to fix it.
I used to play CS competitively and my weak peripheral vision + focusing problem was always a problem too. :/ Part of it was me being aloof, but it was also cause of my shitty eyes.
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On May 01 2010 04:46 intrigue wrote:
oh, izzy =]
don't go blind!
<3
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SUCK IT UP!!!
I can only imagine how much of a pain in the ass this shit must be, and you're only detailing your experiences with a hobby. At least it's not affecting you professionally or something. Good luck with it.
my uncle is color blind. my grandparents found this out in the 60s after all the race riots, when he kept asking why all the 'negroes' were green
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EPT
