The overuse of Red in Team based games.
polycounter lvl 18
So, someone was mentioning that Red isn't as well perceived for movement in our eyes. After a little digging of my own, rods, which do the majority of the grunt work for night, peripheral, and motion, can't see the red spectrum.
So, why do so many team based games use red and blue as colors? Shouldn't it be like blue and green?
(Also if you are in such a game, make sure you're on the red side)
So, why do so many team based games use red and blue as colors? Shouldn't it be like blue and green?
(Also if you are in such a game, make sure you're on the red side)
Replies
Red and Blue are also more contrasty than Blue and Green and will merge into each other easier.
Blue and Red teams are almost as old as competitive sports themselves. Studies have shown that red teams have a slight advantage over blue just because of the psychological connotations the color holds with humans. Red=blood=danger
Is that the hypothesis they decided upon after seeing the advantage? Couldn't it simply be as noted, red isn't seen as well movement wise?
What about Blue and Yellow?
Blue and Yellow don't "sit" as well into an environment as yellow is limited to bright ranges while blue and red have a higher range of dark/middle ground colors that balance out well with eachother.
I believe yellow pretty commonly winds up looking white in color blind folk, regardless of what type of color blind they are. So while still distinguishable from one another, you wind up having a color and "white/gray" as opposed to two different colors. Red & blue generally are just the most universally standoutish.
Pretty sure green and purple would work. Edit: Though Autocon brings up a good point about environments playing their role in the decision.
Color blind or color disorder? I have the latter, and have no issues with yellow and blue distinction. (Grey and Blue though)....
Why not make the environment have more redish and dark hues as it is supposed to be static. So the players stand out then being the bright colors.
I realize this wont work in every situation, but sounds like we are coming into a conflict of gameplay versus aesthetics.
Additionally, they are colors people have come to expect. I can start up any multiplayer game and if I see red on my radar/hud/etc. then I'm going to automatically assume it's something I should shoot at or be cautious of. If devs came and randomly changed the color of an enemy from red to green, or even a different color like orange, then chances are it would confuse me and detract from my experience simply because I was not knowledgeable about it the first time around.
I believe it was Lee Perry from Epic Games who said it, but if the average gamer can't get 10 kills within an hour of playing a competitive multiplayer game, then they will likely quit the game and not come back. As a result of this, I'd imagine it makes sense to give the average person basic information such as who is a friend and who is an enemy.
It's not like every game exclusively uses red and blue though, some games actually avoid bright colors as it adds more to the experience. In Counter-Strike for example, you have to react quickly to small movements of enemy heads across a map and as a result of this, it becomes increasingly important to communicate with your team as a lack of communication will lead to a player accidentally shooting or killing a teammate at long distance.
Additionally there are three types of cones which perceive blue, green, and yellows and reds. The levels are usually gray, brown and green with yellow highlights from the sun (as is the world), and the red and blue colors pop out quite well. So the red/blue team split is actually right in line with biology and game design.
There is nothing I posted about us not seing red. Quite the oposite in fact. I simply am saying we dont preceive red motion as well because rods cannot detect that spectrum.
Science bitch indeed.
Rods are in the periphery, and have a slower response time (refresh rate, if you will). Their function is to detect peripheral motion and detail at low resolution and tell your brain to center the fovea on the moving object to get a proper look at it with the cones. I'm not sure where you go the idea that rods are the primary motion trackers, but it's wrong. They are excellent at detecting motion, but that doesn't mean they are the ones doing the real work. They are primarily for low light and peripheral vision. Everything important has to pass through your central vision and the cone receptors. Don't believe me?
1) This is why Macular degeneration leads to loss of ability to read and do other fine visual work, because it destroys the foveal and parafoveal area, and leaves only low resolution peripheral vision intact.
2) Try playing catch with your peripheral vision only, looking 20 degrees or more away from the other player. You will get beaned.
Your original question about colors assumes that the peripheral vision is the site where primary motion and color recognition occurs in an FPS game, but that isn't the case. You see motion and center it to really interpret what you're seeing with the fovea. And the "peripheral" vision in FPS gaming is in reality concentrated within 20 degrees from your foveas to either side, which puts it right in the zone with cones where you have both color, motion tracking, and higher visual acuity.
My information WAS from a doctor Earthquake, a psychiatrist at that....
And NO I did not assume color is in the peripheral. I assume you have a larger area of motion detection with the peripheral combined.
Anyhow. Since my word is not enough and I must be a dumbfuck troller.
http://www.apa.org/research/action/lime.aspx
So the re-re-bitching.
Martin is a doctor as well (technically a 7th or 8th year medical student, but who's counting =P), if you didn't catch it from the sarcasm.
Interesting, but I'm not sure how it is relevant here. Extreme peripherally vision is important for say, spotting an oncoming firetruck out of the corner of your eye, sure. Computer monitors on the other hand do not tend to get up and move around while you're playing a game though, your vision will generally be focused directly on the computer monitor, unless you have a crazy 3 monitor setup or are playing games in a VR cave.
This is not relevant to computer gaming, and especially not FPS games where you rarely have persistent lowlight conditions.
You do, but it's monochrome (one wavelenth peak, rather than the three of cones), so it's a moot point. You kept talking about rods, and as I've said, that's not what you should be focusing on. Even the article you linked to talks about cones. And when we talk about cones then yes, flourescent yellow/green is much more in your face, but nobody uses fluorescent colors in games for the most part because it makes everything look tacky. Regular yellows and greens are part of the world, so a yellow player could be lost in the distance if they're standing in the sun. Except not cause every game is gray and brown now. :P
As for why they're chosen: red is a rather unnatural color for an environment in calm state (a puddle of blood makes it tense), and there are many more variants of green in foliage etc than there are variations of blue (just the sky, which is generally not at eye level) so blue characters are less likely to be perceived as level props.
As for the fire truck, that doesn't say anything about red being badly visible. It says something about how much lime sticks out against other vehicles and about the combined brightness of it (which targets both the red and green channels). Also, without the context of knowing how visible a blue fire truck is, knowing that a red one isn't that great isn't very useful to considering the balance between those colors.
Nor, for that matter, does knowing how well a monochromatic sensor responds to a particular color give a complete image of the situation. Because it just means that on a grayscale, it is darker than the blue team. Which might be a benefit, or a detriment, or it might be very contextual; perhaps red should camp in shadows while blue stands in the open.
You seem to be drawing pretty strong conclusions based on just one factoid without context. It would be more efficient to test this with a simple experiment of having players play bot matches in two groups. One group first plays against red and then against blue bots, second group first plays against blue and then against red.
However if you're just looking for fresh, dichromatic teamcolors, here is an experimental sheet I made. Originally for colorblindness, but can work for team colors just fine too.
If you are really curious, you should make a little game that tracks statistics and does a bunch of tests.
Hell i'm kind of interested now. Maybe making a little prototype to test that out could be fun.
So in a quick summary. Enemies of your team would always show under the colour "Best choice" and your team mates would be the colour of "Second best choice". Surely to do that would not be that hard would it? Or would that require an extra overhead as the game would have to draw double of the correct team indication depending on who is viewing that person at the time?
This times 1,000,000.
To be more specific, it's the worst possible configuration for protan (red weak) and deutan (green weak; I'm this one) color vision deficient people. Very, very few people are truly and completely "color-blind."
BTW Red and Blue is waaay older than TF2:
Surprised more games don't use this:
I'd count the Red Sox - Yankees 100 year rivalry
You can find this confirmed in all sorts of places, including Latin literature, but I know you guys probably don't read Latin much so here's a history page: www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/circus.html
Ctrl+F color
Or you could go with the imperial Red wearing Romans and the Blue woad picts
its a common theme throughout pre camouflage history that you kind of have a national colour.
Blue vs grey has also been mentioned
http://www.1up.com/news/study-red-team-beats-blue
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/12445842/
At least on PC if not console playing at night people will be playing under darker conditions with the ambient light around the monitor and tv. Admitedly it will also depend on the environment in game, but I remember plenty of dark environments in twitch games like Unreal or Quake.
Also dfacto, you mention peripheral wont make much difference because the monitor/tv is close and in one planr of distance. The forvea actual focus area is still much smaller than this. http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/4435/what-is-the-maximum-size-of-content-the-human-eye-can-focus-upon
I dont mind having a good discussion, but your gif rubbed me wrong.
That being said, the best I have is a hypothesis based on already studied areas of red detection while the data showing red teams do have a slight advantage.
But have you ever experienced a Purkinje shift in a game (especially a colorful one like Quake or UT where it would be very obvious)? Unless you have your cones are still working fine and doing their job, and the blue-shift is irrelevant.
From the full study you linked: " In sum, these studies generally concur that the light-adapted retina (cones) has fairly constant color vision from the fovea out to the far periphery, provided that targets are scaled with eccentricity to compensate for the cortical magnification factor."
Cones are densest in the fovea, but they extend outwards and are responsible for our color vision in the periphery. They are dense enough in the 40-60 degree FOV we have of our monitors to make your hypothesis about rods affecting our perception in games suspect.
As for the "science bitch" pic it wasn't my intent to put you down, I just think stuff like that is awesome and the image fits that perfectly.