If you are like me, you spend a lot of your free time playing video games. If you are like me, you also spend a lot of time wondering why you are so bad at video games, when you spend so much of your time playing them. Well, luckily for me I have an excuse, my colour blindness. Yes, conventional colour coding even extends to video games, but more and more video games are adding colour blind modes, so this blog will unpack that.
What is colour blind mode?
Colour blind mode is a simple concept. It doesn’t allow the player to see colours they can’t, it just simply changes some colours into colours that can be seen. Most times when you load up a game for the first time, you are met with the settings menu. In that menu you can select various things such as brightness, screen resolution, and of course, colour blind mode. Selecting this option will allow you to choose from the different types of colour blindness and change certain colours accordingly.
Most of the time this changes the colours of things like the health bar, hit markers, waypoints, and generally just applies a filter to the interface. The most recent example I think of is when I played Watch Dogs: Legion (good game by the way). When I first booted up the game it gave me the option to change all quest markers and damage markers yellow, compared to red, or as I saw it brown.
Is colour blind mode useful?
I would say that colour blind mode is useful and I am sure many colour blind people out there make good use of the feature. But I have a dark secret. I don’t use it. I know, I know, how wrong of me, but hear me out. I want to play the game the way it was designed to be played. Playing it with this bright yellow filter is distracting and obnoxious. Maybe that's the reason I am bad at video games. Sometimes I make adjustments to my setup to make things easier, like changing the colour of my sight in Rainbow Six Siege (although that doesn’t make me any better).
One game that I would prefer a colour blind mode to is Among Us. Sheesh. If you don’t know Among Us it's a sci-fi social deception game, where 8 crew mates have to find 2 imposters before they all get killed, by voting the imposters off the ship. On top of that crewmates have tasks to complete around the ship. This game is a struggle for me. All the little jellybean astronauts have assigned colours like lime and red and purple.
I remember playing once and all my friends were yelling that purple was the imposter. Little did I know, I was purple and I ended up giving reasons to be voted off thinking I was another colour.
Credit: u/PieCreeper
Whenever I have the task “wires”, I struggle. The aim is to match coloured wires up with each other, but I always get the colours wrong and it takes me way too long.
I still think however these features making an appearance in mainstream, AAA games is great for awareness, even if I don’t make much use out of it. Just seeing it as an option will make more people aware and educated about it, which I am all for. I hope to see lots more games in the future with this feature. I hope you guys all learnt something from this and apologies to my friends for sucking at video games. Thanks.
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