On Colorblindness

So there's this game called Frenzic. While the gameplay isn't particularly appealing in itself to me, I'm considering buying the game solely on the strength of its consideration for colorblind people like me.

A lot of games, both electronic and non, revolve around the player's ability to reliably make judgments about whether two colors are the same or not. Worse, many such games require this judgment to be made very fast. This puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage.

That much is obvious. This is why I have a lot of trouble playing games such as Set. I have to spend too much time trying to tell whether two things are the same color, and by that time it's too late.

Frenzic is timed and involves distinguishing three colors, but the authors of the game spared a thought for people like me. Frenzic has a setting that adjusts the colors of the game pieces to be friendly to colorblind people of different types — there are different settings for protanopes, deuteranopes (like me) and tritanopes. The game's default colors are green, red and blue. I, of course, have trouble distinguishing between small samples of red and green quickly. So I use the setting that mutes the green, darkens the red and brightens the blue.

While I was playing, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Although I was able to distinguish the three colors instantaneously, I would still second-guess my color judgment while playing. I'd compare two colors and judge them as the same, but then think, "Wait...I bet they're actually different and I'm just not looking closely enough." Of course, the colors were so vastly different that whenever I thought that I was wrong.

To me, being able to trust my first-instant color judgment is a very strange feeling. To those of you with normal color vision, here's an idea of what life is like for me: put two swatches of similar colors next to each other and decide whether they're the same or not. You don't even think about it. But imagine that once you'd decided, the colors shifted before your eyes so you thought you were wrong the first time. Imagine staring harder and seeing the colors shift again.

Long story short, imagine that when you tried to decide whether two similar colors were exactly the same or not, you were wrong about 50% of the time.

I've learned that if I trust my first-instant color judgment in close cases, there's a fairly good chance I'm wrong. So I've learned to always double-check. Until I played Frenzic and set it to "deuteranope", I never realized just how little I trust my eyes to tell colors. Of course it's for good reason, but I never realized how much cognitive effort I devote to double-checking myself.

It's really hard for me to train myself that in Frenzic, my color judgment is infallible. It's a completely unfamiliar feeling — or rather, it may have been familiar back in the days before people started making fun of me for coloring the sky purple in a drawing I made.

There's no way to simulate this to normals, short of a game that actually does change the colors of game pieces on the fly. If I get bored one day...

I used to not feel bad about being colorblind, content in the knowledge that I get along fine, and that I don't know what I'm missing anyway. After playing Frenzic and feeling what it's like to trust my eyes again, I'm not so sure.