Colourblindness

Colourblindness is a weird disability to have. It's not very serious and it doesn't affect our lives very much. For a lot of people, it goes completely undiagnosed. It tends to come up in very specific circumstances: matching clothes, noticing lipstick and so forth. There are a few things that a colourblind person can't do, like be a police officer or a commercial pilot. However, by and large, being colourblind doesn't make you feel disabled. Most of the time you forget it's even there.

A lot of people don't understand how colourblindness works, so I'll explain here. It affects about four percent of men. The reason it affects mostly men is that it is a recessive gene on the x-chromosome. Since women have two x-chromosomes, unless both carry the gene, they won't manifest it. However, since men have only one, there is nothing to beat out the recessive defect.

When we see, we use two things, rods and cones. We use rods to tell how bright something is, its "value". We use cones to tell what colour something is, its "hue". There are three types of cones, red, green and blue. The vast majority of colourblind people (over 98%) have defective green cones. Such defective cones tend to perceive green as more red or grey. In order to correct for this, our brains kick in and "guess" what the actual colour of things are. As a result, we tend to mix up red, green and grey of the same value. We can even see red as green, because our brain believes our correct perception of red is incorrect and therefore "corrects" it for us. In general, this correction will either be to the colours around it (which is why it is hard to see red text on green background) or to what something normally is (which is why we see fall leaves as green).

The reason I bring all of this up in a Warcraft blog is because, like many games, World of Warcraft occasionally makes things unnecessarily difficult for colourblind players. Specifically, when something red, green or grey is put up against a red, green or grey background of the same value, it can be very hard to see or even completely invisible. The worst example, ever, was the Death and Decay put out by Rage Winterchill. It was completely invisible. If I was healing that fight, I would just run in a random direction until my DBM warning went away. If I was tanking, I would just stand in it. Either way, the faint red mist on the green grass background was completely invisible to me. I actually believed it was invisible at first, until my wife told me that it was red.

The current issue, though, for me is the rockets on Mimiron. A little red image appears on the grey background, and for the first second or two, they are of exactly the same value. The little symbol then pulses, at which point the value changed, and I can see it, although it is very difficult. However, I end up having about half the time to get out of the rocket fire as anyone else and only if I squint.

As someone who has played this game for years and is one of the core tanks for my guild, having these occasional fights where colourblindness is devastating is very frustrating. It's not hard to work around these from a design perspective. Designers just need to be careful not to put red, green or grey visual cues on red, green or grey backgrounds of the same value. It's something more and more designers are doing, since 4% of a male customer base is actually quite substantial. For example, given the number of men who play WoW, there is likely a colourblind person in every 25-man raid.

Ironically, in 3.1, the very patch in which a colourblind patch was put into place (which just puts text on things like epic/rare items), they also put in another fight where colourblindness is a real problem. Several other colourblind players have commented that they have needed to pull out of the fight because they just can't survive the rockets.

I don't think I'll need to go that far. For the next few days, I'm going to be looking for some software to change up the colours on my screen. Otherwise, I'll play in negative, just for Mimiron, or have my wife watch for the circles. However, it's very disappointing to see that, while Blizzard is obviously trying to accommodate colourblind players, they really don't know how. It's not text on epic items we need, but not to have fights that rely on red vs green vs grey cues of the same value. I honestly think they don't know this, but I can't figure out how to tell them.

I've put up a thread on the suggestions forum here. Please support the thread if you have the time.