Color Coded

When playing a game, what is the first thing that comes to your mind when you see a horizontal red strip? How about a horizontal blue one or a yellow one? What if I show you a bunch of little purple or green circles? Jagged yellow lines? An undefined red shape with points? A blue area with mild noise? This list can go on for as long as I am willing to type. The answers are: a health bar, a magic/sp meter, a stamina bar, poison, paralysis or electricity, fire, and water, and I would guess most folk reading this got at least five out of seven. Be it games, movies, or even just text, color alone can define what something is for us. For example, there is a difference between a potion and a potion in some games, where the second is probably harder to come by.

This is not a discussion on color’s effect on games, but games’ effect on color. In games, many icons, indicators, and representations are nearly if not exactly identical, and if there is anything that remains the same between age and genre, it is the colors used in such representations, so much so that we as people who play games are so familiar with them they have become as familiar and instantly recognizable as the letters of this alphabet.

It's a perfectly reasonable alphabet

If I had given that same list to a person who does not play games, he/she would not have done as well. Gaming types see things like health bars and magic bars and stamina bars all the time, and since they seem to standardize to red or green, blue, and yellow respectively, it takes no more than a passing glance or even the words red bar to be automatically recognized as a meter for health. These days, plenty of games have abandoned the health bar, but even they have a color-focused way to show damage: paint the screen red: the redder the screen is, the more damage you have. No second thoughts, no hesitation or questioning of what it means–players just know.

Status ailments also share a lot of similarities between games, and even if the animation for them is different, the colors attached are seldom different. Poison is always purple or green, paralysis and stun is always yellow, freezing is always a light, almost white blue, and sleep is always a cool blue or tinted white. Nearly any game with status ailments, be it a turn-based RPG or a more real-time game, will follow these trends, which is why when I ask what purple or green circles are, it does not take much thought to reach the poison conclusion. I recently had a telling moment playing Phantasy Star Portable 2 wherein I was hit with a status ailment I had never seen in the game before that make me completely unable to act, leaving my character just standing there without even so much as an animation for the malady, my only hint being a little off-white circle next to my name. While I was caught me off guard at the sudden inability to move, the white coloration of the icon lead me to think “I must be asleep.” Sure enough, when a friend more familiar with Phantasy Star took a look, he confirmed my thoughts. Even though the icon did not to me mean sleep, the color of it did.

Elements are perhaps the most color-tied. To use a big example, Pokemon has a color for each of its seventeen elements: black, blue, blue-violet, brick-red, green, grey, grey blue, indigo, light blue, light brown, orange, olive, pink, purple, and steel blue (can you guess which color is which type). Some of the elements are simply attaching colors people already associate with that element to them–such as blue to water–but many are pretty unique. I would not associate brick-red with fighting and martial arts without Pokemon, nor would I think of dragons at the sight of indigo. Another reason elements are a particularly strong example of game-color associations is that unlike status ailments, they need no shape. Even health meters have to drain somehow, if not strictly a bar, but elements can be just colors.

I've always liked color-changing bars. They make figuring out what'll two-hit or three-hit me easier to figure out.

Unlike many color representations, green meaning grass, for example, purple and green meaning poison or yellow meaning stamina are created by games. Games have their own set of color-coded icons, symbols, and meanings that, like all iconography and color-association, has been ingrained in player minds so much that not only is it easier for designers to use the same colors and symbols, it would be foolish not to, as they would have to re-train the players to re-associate colors with things their minds already have colors for, and developers know this. The colored iconography and color-coded systems of games have become so universal they are usually skipped in most tutorials–the last time I had to look up what a status ailment was in any game was way back in the day with Pokemon Red, before color was even introduced, but even then the greyscale shades correlated to the later, colored versions so much that any game I played with a purple status ailment afterward needed not explain it to me, icons or no icons.

What we have here is called a top-down learning mechanism. Top-down learning is the process in which one is made consciously aware of some information and uses that conscious information until it becomes second nature. For reference, the opposite, bottom-up learning, is the process of taking something made second nature and making one conscious of it. A common example of bottom-up learning is learning how to type with a covered keyboard. Alternatively, a common example of top-down learning is a normal school algebra class, where formulas are fed to students and they practice them consciously until (ideally) the students can use them without consciously thinking of the formula. Games have done just this. Sometime during your game-playing life, probably when you were but a wee sprout, some set of data attached to a face told you that the red bar at the top of the screen is for health. Since that moment, you have assumed all little red bars at the top of screens are for health, and because of this you no longer need to be told, and that part is left out of the required tutorial. In another game a pack of data masquerading as a teacher taught you all about status ailments, and that purple meant poison and yellow meant paralysis, and since that fateful encounter you have never needed to ask another teacher about ailments.

Controllers, too, use color in a top-down teaching fashion, as their confirm and deny buttons are colored in such a way that show players which is yes and which is no. For example, on the gamecube controller, the large A button is green while B is red. It is a color scheme that needs no further explanation. Everyone in the world who has seen a stoplight knows that when green and red are options, green will always be affirmative and red negative. The Xbox and 360 controllers use the same coloring for their A and B buttons as well. The Playstation controller, in the West at least, is similar with blue and red, making the blue X affirm and the red O deny since we associate blue with good, though games with less localization will have it the other way around. In Japan, O is yes and X is no, for over there, a red circle is the universal sign for correct, like a check-mark here, and a blue x is the universal sign for incorrect, as to them, when red and blue are together, they make up the yes-no combo that green-red does here (to those who have played any Pokemon game from Heart Gold and Soul Silver onward, you may have noticed that nature boosted stats have a red shadow while decreased stats have a blue one). While controllers do not give players new color associations they would not normally have, they do the opposite of what the games themselves do and use our preconcieved idea of what colors mean to teach us how to confirm and deny in games, with A always moving forward and B always canceling or going back. They do not tell us what colors mean until those meanings become second nature, but use colors to tell us the meaning, until A becomes inherently affirm and B inherently deny.

When I figure out the connection between triangles and green, I'll let you know

Games have hard coded their players to recognize colors without second thought with an almost standardized color-coding of HUDs, types, and effects to the point where long-time gamers have no second thoughts on the subject, just as controllers have used color to make our text scrolling unconscious. Health bars and fire-based attacks have become as iconic and instantly recognizable to players while playing as stop signs or green lights while driving.