“How important is colour in Video Games
from a gameplay perspective?”

Introduction

Colour and colour theory/psychology plays a significant role in immersion, evoking emotions, and setting the mood in video games—that much is true.

However, what would happen to a player’s decision-making if all the colour-related signifiers and identifiers that guide and inform the player were taken away?

For example, could a player deduct what is and isn’t dangerous purely on deductions, and does it affect how they approach a scenario? How difficult, if not impossible, do games become if it relies on colour and has no accessibility options for the colourblind? What about contrast?

The question I ultimately want to answer isn’t ‘if’ colour is important, it’s ‘how’ important.

Literature Review / Secondary Research

For my secondary research, I looked at numerous articles related to colour and its many applications in video games. Many cover the same or similar topics, so I broke down my findings into subtopics: Signifiers and Identifiers, Colour Game Mechanics, Visual Impact, and Colour Theory/Psychology.

Signifiers and Identifiers

Signifiers and Identifiers, simply put, mainly exist for the player’s convenience.
They are used as a simple way to separate gameplay elements or as a means of telling the player important information in a strikingly short amount of time.
A few examples include:

• Differentiating and separating two distinct teams through colour.  E.g Team Fortress 2, with Red and Blue.
• Mirror’s Edge and its “Runner Vision” show the player the most accessible route by making certain objects bright red.
• First-person games that change the crosshair’s colour or shape depending on what or who you aim at.
• Coloured outlines on objects or enemies to make them stand out more to the player.

As you can guess, removing colour in some of these examples would make things quite tricky for the player. Imagine playing a game like Team Fortress 2 without being able to tell who is on what team.

Colour Game Mechanics

While there may be some overlap between Colour Game Mechanics and Signifiers/Identifiers, this primarily focuses on games that use colours as an integral part of the game’s visuals, mechanics or lore.

A few examples include:

• De Blob: A puzzle-platform game that involves collecting red, yellow and blue paint and restoring colour to the city by splattering the whole place with colour.
• Hue: a puzzle-adventure game “where you alter the world by changing its background colour”
• Splatoon: A third-person shooter where you play as anthropomorphic squids and use weapons to shoot coloured ink everywhere, which you can then swim or hide in.
• Superhot: A first-person shooter that has a minimalist style with bright red enemies, which contrasts the white/grey environments.

Removing colour in some of these examples can be disastrous to its playability, as they are integral to the gameplay. Thankfully, games like Hue have a ‘Colourblind mode’, which adds distinct symbols to the coloured areas, making it possible to play colourblind.

Visual Impact & Colour Theory/Psychology

From the dark, gritty and desaturated tones of Resident Evil, to the bright and cel-shaded style of A Hat in Time: Color Theory and the visual impact it has is one of the backbones of video game design and the importance of it cannot be overstated.

Part of a player’s game sense, emotions and mood is directly related to certain colours and the expectations a player expects from them. These vary from player to player and from game to game, but here are some assumptions I’ve personally found:

• Anything dark and/or purple in an otherwise bright and colourful game is almost certainly evil or corrupted in one way or another.
• The colour Red is commonly associated with health, enemies or both. It’s also commonly used to convey a dangerous area/atmosphere.
• In competitive multiplayer games, it's almost always Team Red vs Team Blue.
• Blue is bright, calm and soothing, but occasionally cold.
• Casual games are (almost) always bright and colourful.

As for exactly why these colours are used where they are and why it has different effects, it all comes down to colour psychology and contrasts.
Red is loud, action-packed and stimulating, while Blue is calming.
Green is relaxing and gives off a sense of safety, while Purple is unnatural and mysterious.

However, that doesn’t mean all applications of these colours are the same. If you are creative enough, you can use this information to your advantage in creative ways.

For example, Hollow Knight is a game that mainly uses blue, black and grey colours. Using dark colours in an already somewhat dark game wouldn’t work, so the game does something quite clever: It uses bright orange as the game’s ‘bad and evil’ colour, as it directly contrasts the game’s already-dark colour palette.

Secondary Research Conclusion

Overall, The secondary research was incredibly useful and insightful. A lot of my questions have been asked or answered already due to those who are colourblind. If their colourblindness is strong enough, it can practically lock them out of entire genres of games that use colour as their primary information relayer, like fighters or shooters.

Relying on colour for conveying essential information seems to be common practice when developing a game, but it also puts crippling limitations on how much colourblind players can enjoy it.

Methodology

First, you must pick a game that everyone can reasonably understand and play, but only a few have played.
The average person isn’t gonna be able to play a difficult game, and making someone play a game they are very familiar with may potentially skew some results.

Second, the game must not fundamentally rely on the use of colour. 
Games relying on colour is an accessibility/colourblind issue that is already well-established.

All the players are split into two groups: ‘Control’ and ‘Experimental / Colourless’. The Control players will experience the game as-is, while the Experimental / Colourless players will experience the game in monochrome.

It’s important that both groups are not told what the test itself is.
If the game being grayscale is an issue in any way, they will bring it up themselves.

Each player is then asked to play the selected game of choice for a certain amount of time.
Each player is also observed and tallied to see how well they do. For example, The number of Lives Lost and Levels Beat if the chosen game is Mario.

Next, each player is asked to do a survey that asks multiple questions about their experience playing the game.
For example: “Was there anything about playing the game you found difficult? If so, why?”.
Asking why is crucial: If colour or the lack thereof is an important factor, it’s expected that those in the Colourless group will mention the lack of any colour in what they just played–while the Control will find unrelated or little to no issues whatsoever.

If there is a divide or no divide in score and survey answers between the two groups, it should answer the question of “How important is colour in Video Games from a gameplay perspective?” for the chosen game.

Results

Some answers to “Was there anything you found difficult?”:

• “Getting used to the control”
• “Just getting used to the controls”
• “The controls, because my hand-eye coordination isn’t very good.”
• “Some of the parkour because the way the buttons are on the controller.”
• “The mechanics and how to implement it into the game, I struggled getting onto surfaces”

Some observations:

• The lowest engagement score was a 6.
• Everyone said they would play the game again.
• The total and average engagement was higher for the Experimental group.
• The Experimental group just barely died more in total than the Control.
• Almost everyone beat a single level, and none beat two.
• A notable number of players found issues with the mechanics and controls the most.
• Only a single person asked why the game was in black-and-white.

(To not clog up the results, all 12 surveys are located in ‘Appendices’)

Discussion

The secondary research I conducted was to see what areas colour plays an important role in video games and video game development to see how important it is. The answer I got from the research was quite clear: Very. It was brought to my attention that those who are colourblind have already run into issues with games relying on colour to convey information.

So, the idea of my primary research and survey was to see how important colour was in a given game. One set of people plays it normally, and another plays it in monochrome. A difference, or lack thereof, in performance or engagement, would then hopefully back up the secondary research.

However, the results I got from both groups had no statistical difference. It’s likely due to my sample size being so small that all my results are within the margin of error and are overall inconclusive.

Yet, this could also be due to the game I selected. Super Mario World is designed in such a way that one can reasonably beat the whole game in monochrome. Almost everything has a distinct enough sprite and shape to tell at a glance what it is. Goes to show just how well-designed that game is.

Conclusion

I suspect the importance of colour gameplay-wise depends on the game and how much it relies on colour-related signifiers and identifiers.

My secondary research seems to confirm this, as a game that relies on colour for conveying information is outright crippling for those who are colorblind and is already an established issue, while a game that doesn’t is theoretically playable–albeit not very practical.

However, my primary research results are inconclusive at best–and useless at worst.

I am severely limited in time and the number of people I can test, and that caused my methodology and sample size to be flawed.

First, my sample size of 12 people is really bad. I would need at least 32 to 64 people to get any sort of sizable evidence/results.

Second, I should’ve tested players for longer. Having more than 5 minutes per person would’ve allowed players to potentially encounter any obstacles where colour would be of importance.

Lastly, this is a type of question that has an answer on a per-game basis. While the answer to the question concerning Super Mario World is “Not that important”, it wouldn’t be the same for a game like Puyo Puyo. As Puyo Puyo is a tile-matching game that requires lining up four of the same coloured slime-like creatures, attempting to play that game in monochrome would be absolutely disastrous.

In conclusion, my answer to the proposed question is a simple one: “It depends.”

Bibliography

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Karolina Cieślak. (2022). Color psychology in game design – how do colors help design better games?. [Online]. try_evidence. Last Updated: February 17, 2022. Available at: https://tryevidence.com/blog/color-psychology-in-game-design-how-do-colors-help-design-better-games/ [Accessed 20 February 2023].

DVNC Interactive. (n/a). Color Theory in Games – An Overview. [Online]. DVNC. Available at: https://dvnc.tech/2018/06/04/color-theory-in-games-an-overview/ [Accessed 20 February 2023].

Mathieu Robillard. (2016). The Importance of Colors in Game Design. [Online]. Bishop Games. Last Updated: October 19, 2016. Available at: https://bishopgames.com/importance-colors-game-design/ [Accessed 20 February 2023].

Game Design with Michael. (2019). EASY COLOR TRICK for better gameplay - One Minute Game Design. [Online]. YouTube. Last Updated: Nov 29, 2019. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmrD6Grkmcc [Accessed 20 February 2023].

Meghan Furney. (2020). How Color Takes Video Game Worlds From Ordinary To Extraordinary. [Online]. TheGamer. Last Updated: AUG 24, 2020. Available at: https://www.thegamer.com/video-games-art-color-persona-5-god-of-war/ [Accessed 20 February 2023].

n/a. (n/a). Ensure no essential information is conveyed by a fixed colour alone. [Online]. Game accessibility guidelines. Last Updated: n/a. Available at: https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/ensure-no-essential-information-is-conveyed-by-a-colour-alone/ [Accessed 20 February 2023].

Mike Griggs. (2020). What is colour grading? Here's all you need to know. [Online]. Creative Bloq. Last Updated: August 03, 2020. Available at: https://www.creativebloq.com/features/colour-grading [Accessed 20 February 2023].

Doug Stewart. (2017). Color in Video Games: How to Choose a Palette. [Online]. Game Developer. Last Updated: April 11, 2017. Available at: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/color-in-video-games-how-to-choose-a-palette [Accessed 20 February 2023].

Appendices

Survey Results (Control)

Survey Results (Experimental / Monochrome)