Colorblindness: a response to T-Ray's Massively interview

[blakmarkit]

Tramell (and PS2 dev team), I am strongly in like with you for bringing something I dreamed as doing myself in some form (if Sony or someone else wouldn't) to fruition. Thank you so much!

I just read your interview with Justin Olivetti on Massively. You touched on one of my biggest concerns with the first game, and moving forward into the second...colorblindness accessibility. I am a digital artist, but I'm also red/green colorblind.

I don't mean this accusatorially, but do you understand what being red/green colorblind means? It means that because the color purple is a mix of blue and red, and because red/green colorblindness causes an inability to see low saturations of the color red, blue and purple are functionally indistinguishable. I played the first game with my brother for several years total, first when it came out, then again more recently we dived back in to see how things had changed. We are both red/green colorblind, and because we were completely unable to tell difference between the blue of NC and the purple of VS on maps and in battle, we were forced to remain TR, the only color that was distinguishable from the others.

I imagine that you are too late in the dev cycle to really make such a drastic change as changing the colors of an empire, and I'm sure there would be massive backlash from the community, but I think that if you are moving forward as you are, you need to STRONGLY focus on word labels for factions on maps, differentiated shapes, and possibly make the yellow (an easier color to see for the red/green colorblind) of NC much more prominent in design, labeling and iconography. It's not an insignificant portion of the population that is colorblind. You said in the interview: “...the percentage of colorblind players who engage in MMOs is so small as not to be a huge concern, but for those who are, the shape language and player silhouettes should make up for the difficulty in identifying colors. Plus, with green out of the picture, the most common type of colorblindness (red/green) shouldn't present an issue.”

Statistics say that 7-10% of all males have some form of colorblindness (usually red/green), and I imagine that PS2's player-base skews strongly male. Statistically, 10% of your players might not even be able to tell the difference between two empires. This seems to me a major concern, and something that needs to be taken extremely seriously in a game that relies so heavily on color cues. Do you have any colorblind people testing things? I believe that this is something you should strongly consider.

I don't want to be so presumptuous as to believe that I have any power to change anything, but I am so excited to play this game, and I want it to be excellent.