What BioShock 2′s Hacking Looks Like if You’re Colour Blind
By John Kershaw on Thursday, February 11th 2010
Whilst reading the 2K Forums earlier today finding out about all the BioShock 2 bugs, I found a thread complaining that hacking was almost impossible for colour blind gamers.
Curious to see for myself (no pun intended) just how much impact being colour blind makes to the new hacking mechanic, I ran the above image (sorry for the low quality, it’s a photo of the 360 version) through a colour contrast analyser application I used when re-designing this very site (you can download it here).
When hacking, the needle moves across the dial. Pressing A on a green hacks, blue gives you a bonus (blue areas are not found on most hacking displays), white gives you an electric shock and red triggers the alarm.
For those 6% of male gamers (only 0.1% of female gamers) who suffer from deuteranopia (a form of red-green colour blindness) the image below shows what hacking looks like.
If you’re in the 1% of males (0.01% of females) with protanopia (another form of red-green colour blindness) this image shows you what you’re up against.
Finally, if you’re in the 0.01% of gamers (using averages this estimates to a few hundred BioShock 2 players) with tritanopia (blue-yellow colour blindness) this is your hacking.
Hopefully 2K take note and patch in some colour-changing options.
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It’s surprising how big name developers are still so far behind on this. Hell, I was playing Catan on XBLA last night, and it has colorblind options, but not Bioshock 2?
So you’re saying that people that aren’t born with this defect have an advantage in this game? I wonder what they would call something like that in the real world, where nature selects certain groups to survive…
I’m glad I has superior vision :D
(sorry for the low quality, it’s a photo of the 360 version)
Wardrox is a PS3 fanboy, CONFIRMED.
This is what the game looks like to blind people.
They have to patch that shit.
@Lauren: I wouldn’t really call it superior vision, it might do a slight hindering of survival but nothing overly dramatic. If tigers were green instead of orange they’d still be tigers and you’d run from them.
Also since I am lacking the ability of stereoscopic vision, I was never able to do those stupid magic eye pictures. I never got a version for my eyes.
I was ‘tweeting’ about this on Twitter (@hodsey77)… another big budget game which does not cater for people being colourblind.
I had started a petition against Infinity Ward for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to have a colourblind patch added: http://www.petol.org/hodsey77 and despite much public interest, Infinity Ward have done nothing.
I’m guessing it will be the same with this game. It really is ridiculous – all they need to do is allow you to choose the colours you would like, or use shading or symbols, etc.
There are more and more games coming out which have these problems – it seems around 8% of males and 1% of females being colourblind does not warrant the extra coding for accessibility options :(
In situations like this it does seem like a pretty trivial task to make this minigame accessible. I could understand a manufacturer of luxury products not making something accessible if it cost a vast amount of money or took a vast amount of effort. In this instance, it seems like such a simple thing to change that I can’t see any reason not to accommodate colourblind people.
How would color blind people deal with this problem in real life?
This reminds me that green traffic lights are slightly tinted blue for the colour blind.
Not all forms of color blindness have an issue with that SS. I am red-green and I can distinguish it fine.
You have the wrong number listed for males suffering from deuteranopia: it’s 1%, not 6%. As the page you link to states, the 6% figure includes those with deuteranomaly, a weaker form. Those with only deuteranomaly might be perfectly capable of telling the strong shades of red and green used in the minigame (or traffic lights) apart, they simply would have trouble with close shades like those on an Ishihara plate. The total of those who would see color-blind images to the extent of the ones you’ve produced is closer to 2%, not the 8% suggested by adding the inflated numbers you cite.
I knew someday someone would start bitching about game companies not catering to color-blind people’s needs. Just like how non-smokers started complaining about second hand smoke — just because they couldn’t enjoy it firsthand.
@Sidecarsally: Meh, ill give that troll attempt a 6/10. Had me convinced on the first read, but reading it again, I knew you weren’t serious.
6% is a very small amount for a company to have to cater for. Whilst making games colour blind friendly would be a nice thing to to, it doesn’t make business sense, and that’s where the problem lies. That aside, where should the line be drawn? I would estimate a higher percentage of gamers have learning difficulties to some degree than are colour blind, should games have to adapt to the needs of a dyslexic player? A game like Dragon Age: Origins would lose quite a bit of its fantasy feel if the places had simple, phonetic names.
Man people who are color blind should never get to review or talk about Textures in games since They look like total crap to them.
If I had to look at a game like that it would make me sick. the yellow is an ugly pink.
And the other ones you cant see one of the best colors of man Kind green. this must suck for anybody that enjoy grass or trees. in that case you should avoid plants or trees and play something dark gray and depressing to look at since it would look better than the green tree to you.
Oh god and not being able to see the other all time great color that is red would drive me up the wall if it looked like that ass gray in that picture.
I don’t frequent these parts, but I did just want to drop a comment by. 6% can feel like a small number of people, but it really isn’t. Take-Two has estimated that BioShock 2 will sell 5 million copies. 6% of 5 mil is 300,000 gamers. Would you want to alienate 300,000 gamers with your game? Think of it this way; only 94% of male gamers can play this game to its full potential, if at all. We are talking about 1 in 20 who can’t play BS2. From a usability stand point, this is borderline unacceptable. My 2 cents. Cheers
@phantamines: Good point. Settings for those with color blindness take very little effort to implement. I think 300,000 customers are worth those settings.
@PepeSilvia: This.
Don’t think it would take huge difficulty from developers to include colorblind mode to games. They don’t really need to use different color palettes, different symbols are used by many programs and games which have color blind mode.
http://img134.imageshack.us/img134/9140/fixedforyou.jpg
Simple symbol for each color and its perfect for most color blinds. Color blinds don’t really need fully new game but rather the ability to distinguish right from wrong and good guy from baddie. Most of these can be fixed with offering separate texture to be used for color blinds.
first, to say 1% of people are colorblind and concluding that it must also be 1% out of the gaming group is a fallacy.
thats in the same vein of saying 30% of the people are blind, so 30% of all car drivers are blind.
what really grinds my gears is how all of a sudden the whole world needs to help people to do stuff they are inherently challenged to do. whats next? an adapter to use a wheelchair on the balance board?
It amazes me how many people with a defect think that the rest of the world should cater to them.
@NoZart: Actually it’s in the same vein as saying that 10% of all males in the US are color blind thus 10% of male US drivers are color blind.
The prevalence of red-green color blindness in the United States is 7-10% and with ~95mil registered male drivers, that should leave around 10mil color blind drivers. Right now that’s the current estimate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#Prevalence
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs00/dl22.htm
http://www.color-blindness.net/
Because it’s totally worthwhile to spend a lot of time to cater to an exceedingly small minority, right?
Get over it, I have a deformed right hand, I’m not asking developers to please not require the use of right-side shoulder buttons in their games. idiots.
@CtMythic:
Actually, 1-in-20 gamers is still a significant portion of your playerbase. That’s 5% extra profit for a minor adjustment of a static texture. Considering the amount of money a game like bioshock 2 rakes in.. that’s pretty significant for about ten minutes work!
There are limits to the amount of effort versus the gain, but in this case it seems to fit squarely in the ‘gain’-category.
You bear these people in mind, that’s all. If an effortless change stops you pissing off between 1 and 7% of your customers (depending on who you believe) then you’d have to be an unbusinesslike prick to not bear then in mind.
Not as big a prick as the self-consciously anti-PC internet troll, of course. But a big, damp prick nonetheless
@John America: It disgusts me when people who are fortunate enough to be born without any disabilities think they are somehow put out by this kind of thing.
@phantamines: You’re making a mistake in your understanding of the 7%-10% number. That’s people with any degree of color vision anomaly, even people who are going through life without realizing they have slightly greater difficulty than is average but for whom green and red are still distinct colors.
It means you’re counting anyone with below nominal color vision as having none at all. By the same logic, 25% of American’s have less than 20/20 vision but not enough to bother getting glasses, therefore 23 million drivers are blind.
The real number you should be looking at on your Wikipedia link is Dichromacy prevalence which is 1.3% (with Monochromacy too small to count) overall, or 2.4% in only men. The 7%-10% number you’re counting includes Anomalous Trichromacy which can be nearly nothing at all. If you scroll up to wikipedia’s description of Anomalous Trichromacy it says:
So 1.23 million drivers are colorblind, and 65,000-120,000 potential Bioshock 2 customers are colorblind (depending on the split in gender in Bioshock customers (with the top-end 120,000 figure requiring that no women buy the game), and also assuming gamers represent the population in general in colorblindness prevalence).
Deuteranopia could be hard, the red and green are close, Protanopia is no problem, light color = hack, dark = alarm and Tritanopia would be easy to hack but hard to get the hacking bonus.
The actual percentage of gamers with colourblindness is probably higher than in the general population, since it mostly afflicts males of northern European descent, which are more highly represented in gamer demographics.
I said this with the guy who sued EA because he’s blind: it is not the company’s job to make sure every disability is covered. I’m not being ignorant or anything, but it isn’t right to ask the company to try to make sure every group is happy. It just isn’t fiscally viable. It’s like a band trying to make themselves “deaf-friendly”, or me asking food companies to cause their food to change color when spoiled (I have no sense of smell, and therefore cannot tell when food has expired by scent, and have to rely on taste, something that isn’t very pleasant). I agree that everyone has the right to game. But honestly, you don’t have the right to demand anything just because you have a disability.
Man, this article was alright until joystiq people got in on this(and excuse my ignorance if you’re from some other site, joystiq is the only one I saw run an article about this).
Some of you compare making a game compatible for the colourblind with trying to make games compatible for the blind. There is a difference.
One is easily accomplished with minimal effort; the other is impossible.
Then you have to take into account the severity of the problem with relation to the game: this is a problem that makes the game unplayable to a point by a significant portion of players.
@joepenn18: Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a colourblind guest post that linked here as well.
Interesting. Ran across this on Reddit, and how timely, I was discussing this very issue in a game I’m designing. It’s just something that would have never crossed my mind before.
@CtMythic:
Dude that is called usability, even when you take classes of website creation you will learn that in order to create a good website (game in this case) you will need to make it accessable for everyone.
With the super large budget in Bioshock’s case this is a major fail on their part.
@Harry
2k games didn’t have to do crap to include accessability to colorblind people. It isn’t required in any way. Would it have been nice? Yeah, it would have. But you know, just looking at the things, I wouldn’t have a problem solving those problems if I was colorblind. By the way, if you’re going to make a comment about not providing accomodations to people in wheelchairs, don’t. There’s a big difference between being colorblind and being confined to a wheelchair.
Who said anything about wheelchairs?
But you said it well
Would it have been nice? Yes.
Would it be easy? Yes.
They dont have to do it, but theres so much money going around in these kind of games and they cant make a little checklist that includes: Important gameplay elements suitable for colorblind -
@Hawkeyed One
Did you seriously say you wouldn’t have any problem solving these? I know I shouldn’t blatantly tell people that they can or can’t do things, but I don’t care. That’s utter bullshit. There’s no chance in hell that you could manage to get these without actually seeing which color is which, not to mention how hard it is even knowing the colors. Utter fucking bullshit.
@joepen18
You can see which color is which. (Fuck you wardrox for making color look like it’s spelled wrong. There’s no ‘u’ in color.) It would just take you a little bit longer time to do so. Is it a pain in the ass? Yeah. But I’ve played plenty of games where the colors make no damn sense. And maybe on the last one it would be difficult to differentiate between “hack” and “40 buyout”. Secondly, you don’t necessarily need the colors. Traffic lights are specifically designed the same way in every country so that color blind people will be able to know when to go or stop.
@joepen18
You can see which color is which. (Fuck you wardrox for making color look like it’s spelled wrong. There’s no ‘u’ in color.) It would just take you a little bit longer time to do so. Is it a pain in the ass? Yeah. But I’ve played plenty of games where the colors make no damn sense. And maybe on the last one it would be difficult to differentiate between “hack” and “40 buyout”. But really, there isn’t a reason why I’d want to. Secondly, you don’t necessarily need the colors. Traffic lights are specifically designed the same way in every country so that color blind people will be able to know when to go or stop.
Hawkeyed One,
Colour is English, color is American. Both are right.
It’s a running gag Jay. See any of the old podcasts.
Ok, for one, I was a bit angry yesterday and I’d like to apologize for the hostility of my last post. However, have you even played the game? I don’t think you understand how the hacking works. “Hack” and “40 buyout” are not really corresponding buttons. I’m not sure how to explain this, but I think you’re just misunderstanding how it all works.
OK so, let’s look at some numbers here.
5 million copies of Bioshock 2 sold, correct? Right.
7-10% of males have some form of color blindness. However, those with severe color blindness is less. Let’s lowball it at 1%.
Let’s estimate (again, lowball number) that 60% of the people who bought Bioshock 2 are male.
So around 3 million guys bought Bioshock 2. Using our LOW estimate of 1% of males not being able to see this properly, our number (as someone above me earlier estimated) is about 30,000. Not a huge number when you started with 5 million.
But here’s the catch: Stop looking at it in numbers, look at it in PEOPLE. My high school had about 1000 students. That means there are 30 high schools worth of people who spent $60 on a game which they are struggling with. That is over a million dollars spent on products that are, in essence, broken.
How pissed off would you be if you knew that 1.8 million dollars were basically swindled off of people who bought a product they didn’t even know was going to have bits that were unplayable? Box is opened, item can’t be returned.
A patch for this game would be quick and easy, and wouldn’t even cost close to $2 million dollars to make.
@Nintendoll:
Again, the product isn’t “broken”. It’s just harder for colorblind people to use the game. Sure, it isn’t as easy for them to use the game, and that really sucks. But I don’t get to patch food because I have an orlfactory disorder (can’t smell), nor do deaf people get to patch music because they can’t hear. In the case of the colorblind, they can still enjoy the product, in the same way I enjoy food- it isn’t as a satisfying experience, but it’s an experience. And they could enjoy the product. It just has a harder learning curve. It’s a bit like dyslexic people reading. There are tricks that dyslexic people can use in order to figure out what words are on the page. Yes, it takes them longer to figure it out, but they can still do it.
Ive been reading the posts and, Hawkeyed are you sure youre not getting paid by 2k Games?
@Jay:
No, I’m not Jay. I’m just saying that 2k games doesn’t have to do anything, and honestly, don’t understand why everyone is making such a big deal about an oversight.
The bottom line is that the colorblind people should only be angry with THEMSELVES for having this condition. It’s not Bioware’s fault that your eyes are retarded, and they shouldn’t have to spend the extra money to fix it. If you can’t differentiate between colors enough to play a goddamn game, then don’t play it. You don’t hear deaf people bitching that music hasn’t been evolved to where they can enjoy it by smell or taste instead! Stop whining! This is natural selection at work here, people.
@Sidecarsally:
You see, the above comment is what I have been trying to avoid having others on this trhead/comment section think I am saying -.0
@Sidecarsally:
You will make a great marketeer!
Did u even think before posting that comment?
I have protanomolous color vision, and the image for “protanopia” looks identical to the orignal to me. I think that the filter used here for the first two actually represent anomalous vision and not the lack of such cones, which the third image represents. That’s the way the VisCheck.org photoshop filter works, which is credited in the wat-c webpage.
As such, the larger numbers of affected users is probably correct.
@ Chris
Just curiously, as personal opinion how difficult is it for you to differentiate between the four different colors in the picture?
@n3rv3:
Not to mention the fact that the topmost light means stop and the bottom light means go. You can kind of get by without seeing the colours.
I’m red-green color blind and I can hack just fine. I don’t understand what the hell is up with people wanting more color blind options. If the developers want to do it, then fine, if they don’t, more power to them. They’re certainly not obligated to. I also hate how people assume red-green color blind people see the colors red and green in the exact same way. I play the hacking minigame and I can distinguish them fine, because they’re very distinct shades of red and green. If they were closer on the spectrum, I may have trouble. I think developers are aware of this. So, quit your bitching when your not even colorblind yourself. If someone with color-blindeness comes out and says Bioshock 2 is unplayable to him/her, please patch it 2k, etc, etc, I’ll start listening. But until then, stop making such a big deal about this when it obviously isn’t.
i am red-green colour blind. but i can see green but i see red as brown. and when “brown” and green are mixed together i can’t see one of them. (depends on how big the 2 colours are) so this also makes the hacking for me harder and its so annoying… sometimes when i clock on a “green” spot it is really red…
How were these colorblind images created?
What is with all this talk of “catering to the colorblind”?
I’m really surprised at the number of hostile replies, but then I remember this is the internet. Reason fails, trolling reigns.
Guys, as someone who has worked on video games, I can tell you that switching those colors is as simple as clicking on a different color on a palette. “It would cost too much” is not a good excuse. It wouldn’t cost anything except the time it would take one employee to pick different colors. I’m guessing 15 minutes for the whole thing. Fuck, just get an intern to do it for free.
And honestly, they wouldn’t even HAVE to pick another color, they could just change the gray scale value slightly so the red and green aren’t sitting at almost the exact same value.
Additionally, I am color blind, and hacking is such a pain for me, I trigger alarms almost every time. I wish they would include some kind of fix in a future patch. After all, I spent $60 on this game, and it is a great game.
They’re not obligated to fix a problem for me, a paying customer?
Then I won’t be a paying customer. Piracy is too easy for companies to NOT follow the wishes of their paying customer.