Today I followed a link to a Flash game called Bubble Fun, and for the life of me I could not work out what was so fun about it. This is because I could not work out how to play it, which is always a bad thing when it comes to online short attention span games. I figure if I can’t work out where I should be clicking within the first 30 seconds or so then there must be a design problem. After much confusion, I finally discovered the problem…

I am red/green color blind!

Not that I didn’t already know that – I’ve been aware of it since about the age of 13 – but because of my defect I hadn’t realized that the bubbles were not all the same color. I only deduced that they were different when I noticed that the Player 1 and Player 2 sides of the screen were different, something that I hadn’t even noticed when I first started playing, unlikely as that may seem. I look to the left and I see pink, I look to the right and I see green, but when I look at the screen as a whole, it just becomes a sort of undefined crappy pastel color.

Anyhow, since people always ask "what’s it look like", and since it’s really hard to describe in words, I thought I would attempt to illustrate what I see by reconstructing an image as I perceive it. It is quite an interesting challenge trying to create something very different that still somehow looks the same. If you are not red/green color blind I can only assume that these two images will look substantially different to you. For reference I have included separated red and green channels.

Original colors

The colors as I see them

My non-color blind friend Richard tells me that the original colors are not exactly well chosen in the first place, and that if he squints then the two images here begin to look the same.

To the normal sighted, the image on the right should be alternating between a mess of dots [what I see] and a mess of dots with the number 45 in there [what I don't see]. For me, it is simply a frustrating animation, as I can briefly see the number as the image changes, only for it to dissolve back into the same random dot pattern.

For more information on color blindness, you can check out some of the standard visual tests here, and read a good summary of the associated issues here. Two everyday problems which I am very familiar with are an inability to see red objects against a green background (especially flowers on a tree), and an inability to detect subtle changes in skin color, meaning that I tend not to notice when someone is sunburned or blushing.