October 2006 – Colblindor

A friend of mine stays at the moment in Perth, Western Australia, for his post doctoral studies. He maintains a little weblog about his impressions and some of the latest news from Downunder.

In a recent entry he reported from his trip to the Wildflower Festival. He was a little bit disappointed because there were not that many wildflowers as he thought of. But at least he did take some nice pictures of some of them which he posted on his blog.

Have a look at this nice flower on the left side. This is the Red and Green Kangaroo Paw which is by the way the floral emblem of Western Australia. Some kind of a special flower but any way a nice one. To me there is only the question left: Where is the red part of the flower?

If you can see it — lucky you. To me it’s all the same color. Maybe this is another nice example of how the world sometimes looks like to somebody suffering from color blindness. Sometimes it is just a bit more greyish.

It is quite a while ago I played my last computer game. But I also had times where I played together with my friends all night through. Back in those days it never came to my mind that my color blindness could be some kind of handicap while trying to beat my friends.

Colorblind Gaming - Rockstars Table Tennis — Colorblind Gaming with Rockstar’s Table Tennis

Conrad Quality-Harper a member of the Joystiq blog group describes in Colorblind gaming or: Table Tennis is impossibly hard! his experiences with gaming and color blindness. In this special case he has a closer look at Rockstar’s Table Tennis where the spin of the ball is reflected in its color. He describes how the training mode is almost impossible to master as being colorblind and therefore not able to distinguish the colors of the ball in the given time.

I think the gaming industry made a lot of improvements and learned how to achieve simple controlling in complex games. They often are working with pictograms adjoined to the colored information. Or with some other kind of visual effects witch are also closer to nature where things are often not color coded too.

Do you have any experiences with games and color blindness? Or do you know of a game which could be hard to play for somebody being colorblind? Let me know about it.