PDF | On Apr 10, 2021, Katarina Polackova published Creation and optimization of a level for a colour-blind player | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
Hi! My Bachelor is over now and here you can freely read my preprint.
Abstract: Colour blindness is more common than one would believe. It affects approximately 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women. With possibly 126 million gamers worldwide there is a good chance 5% of these are colour blind. This should be big enough population to be of interest to game developers. However if one goes online and searches colour blindness and games, one will very quickly notice that this is a problematic topic as games still fail their colour blind players on a regular basis. If game developers think of implementing accessibility, they most often misunderstood or failed to identify what it actually is these players struggle with the most. That is why they fail to introduce efficient colour blind aids and modes. There are of course also success stories but they are in great minority compared to cases where these developers failed the colour blind demographic. In most cases game developers tend to go for colour blindness correcting filters. These usually fail to fulfil their purpose and sometimes make the colours look unnatural to the colour blind player. These filters can be useful, but mostly only if used as a support to really thought through colour blindness aid. Logical question here would be: What is it that these players struggle with? And this is a relevant question but it is very context dependent, therefore more universal way would be to first understand what colour blindness actually is and how these people see. Troubles with colour blindness begin already with its name. The term colour blindness itself is very misleading. Actual ‘colour blindness’ as in inability to see colour is very rare, it makes up less than 1% of all colour blind cases. Most colour blind individuals can see colours and can even name majority of them correctly. The difference between non-absolute colour blindness and a normal vision is that colour blind sight misses the ability to recognise correctly either one of the three colours of the spectrum, that being red, green or blue. This is why it is more correct to call this condition Colour Vision Deficiency or shortly CVD. There are different types, severities and causes for this vision impairment and so each combination of these is completely unique. If every colour blind player’s sight is completely different how can one then design for these players? While typically seeing population relies on colour information and in that even predominantly hue, these people give generally much higher importance to traits like lightness, saturation, texture, shape, symbols etc. These should be always paired up with colour, it is a good design practice that not only colour blind players would appreciate. Designing for accessibility shouldn’t be too complicated if the game is designed well. Many colour blind players don’t need much of adjustments for their gameplay to improve significantly. This I tried to demonstrate in the second half of this bachelor thesis. For these purposes I designed an interactive experiment. Play-testers were divided into two groups: colour blind group and a control group composed of typically seeing players. These players all got the same level to play twice and afterwards got their times compared. In the first round they don’t get to adjust settings, but they can surrender. In the second round players can adjust settings containing colour blindness aid. The hypothesis was that the typically seeing players will pass first round easily and the second round there would be improvement because of memory and learning. Meanwhile the players of colour blind group should struggle with the level in the first round, they should take significantly longer to pass the level than the control group players. But in second round after enabling the colour blindness aid their performance should improve to be a match to the typically seeing player. This level was a simple colour coded one, where players had to pass challenges to clear the level. This level went through quite few iterations till it was ready for the final play test. The colours have been carefully selected to trouble majority of colour blind players and to not cause any confusions or disturbances to typically seeing player. Final design was a linear level where players had to pass challenges in order to progress further. One type of challenge was the coloured targets challenge. Based on difficulty player would get either one or more targets and one reference. This reference had unique combination of colours and shapes on it and player had to find a target with matching attributes. These targets would be rotating and as player progressed the difficulty increased. If player shot the right target a new room would be open in front of him. This target challenge has been reiterated in the level multiple times. One time occurring challenge was a maze where in order to get out a player had to find a way out by following red flowers in green grass. The flowers were effectively almost invisible for colour blind player and contrasting to typically seeing player. Because all these were colour based challenges all that was really needed was to exchange the imperceivable colours for a colour that was well visible to typically seeing players. Players, even though they could adjust other attributes, most of the time stuck with this setting and passed the second round much faster without any issue. Their times were even comparable with the times of typically seeing players. This was just a small demonstration of how little uncomplicated changes make a big difference in a gameplay and experiences.
