COLOR
Color has formed the visual substrate of video gaming since the 1970s. As with film, the significance of color in the medium can be traced through the history of technology and design practices, and has consequences for game aesthetics, player emotion, and embodiment. Early monochromatic home systems such as the Magnavox Odyssey (1972) featured plastic overlays that added color to games (Winter, 2010), extending the visual experience of gaming in a manner analogous to the hand tinting of early cinema pioneers such as Méliès (Yumibe, 2012). Nintendo introduced its “Color TV” home gaming systems in Japan in 1977 (Plunkett, 2011b), and arcade technologies enabled color output to raster-based and vector-based displays several years before games such as Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) and Tempest (Atari, 1980) were released. In the first few years of the history of the medium, video game designers quickly gained a limited, discontinuous palette of colors that expanded and became more nuanced over time. The 8-bit sprite-based games of the late 1970s and early 1980s articulate a basic vocabulary of color for interactive play that laid the foundation for later 16-bit and 3-D games, in which color serves both functional and evocative aims.
Analysis of the uses of color in the history of video games begins with traditional color theory. The color contrasts of Johannes Itten (1970), developed at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, provide useful categories, though Itten’s color theory emerges from the static fields of painting. The expression of color in games, however, is rooted in the designer’s creative struggle with a specific gaming platform, and is realized ultimately in the dynamic experience of play. Unlike the common practice in traditional color theory, in which object and light color are considered separately (Hardin, 1988), any discussion of color in video games needs to acknowledge the unique synthesis of light and color that is implicit in computer graphics, as well as the linkage between game color and gameplay emotion. Monochromatic or achromatic games, such as Limbo (Playdead, 2011), instill melancholy qualities of mood, space, and depth by sapping color from the world. At the other extreme, games such as Rez (United Game Artists, 2001) demonstrate the potential of video games to fuse color effects with gameplay emotion as a means of achieving a state of “voluptuous panic” (Callois, 2006, p. 138).
We receive color from games as we receive all color: light enters the eye as a spectrum of hues, differentiated by wavelength, and is absorbed by the retina. In addition to directly experiencing color, we also communicate its qualities. Many of the color organizing systems that we use to select, manipulate, and understand color reflect the way in which we describe color to one another. The Munsell system, for example, breaks color into the components of hue (base color and position on the color wheel), value (relative brightness or darkness), and chroma (or saturation, the amount of neutral gray value mixed into the color). The way in which color is specified in video games and computer graphics, however, is not perceptually organized in this manner: colors exist as numerical red, green, and blue (RGB) values that lend themselves to computation, and are ultimately displayed within the additive color space of screen light, in which the RGB primaries mix to form white. The nuances of color in computer graphics are dependent upon the internal memory allocated to determine the color of each pixel. “Color depth” describes the number of individual colors that a file format can express: 8-bit color is capable of defining 256 discrete colors, 16-bit renders 65,535 colors, and 24-bit over 16 million (Stone, 2001).
The designers of the first video games made the most of color limitations, and the best of the early 8-bit games possess a jewel-like beauty. The environments of Sabre Wulf (Ashby Computers and Graphics, Ltd, 1984), a game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, glow like stained glass, and the effects of color purity are enhanced by contrast with the black background. Sprite-based games, in which individual game elements are animated against a background, often display significant contrast between figure and ground, a feature of the process by which the image is drawn on the screen. Indeed, is fair to claim that there is a lot of black in early games, and not just those set in outer space.
Working individually or in small groups, game programmers in the 1980s quickly developed a basic vocabulary of color for interaction, wrestling with the refractory materials of early game systems. Consider the Tetris (Pazhitnov, 1984) tetramino: depending upon the platform, the J-shaped puzzle piece was successively colored white, magenta, blue-violet, yellow, or orange, before finally being standardized as blue. The J tetramino has no meaningful real-world referent, and the choice of color for the puzzle piece is arbitrary—the only important thing is to differentiate it from other tetraminos so that it can be rapidly rotated into position as it falls. This is one of the most basic forms of color design for games: using color to identify and differentiate elements within the game scene and interface, and to direct the eye appropriately.
A similarly fundamental use of color works in a temporal manner, establishing memorable game environments and creating variation in the experience of navigating virtual space over time. Knight Lore (Ashby Computers and Graphics, Ltd, 1984) was also designed for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a fairly crude machine that tended to have difficulties with color bleeding of superimposed hues (Collins, 1998). In Knight Lore, notable for its rendering of orthographic 3-D space, each of the more than 100 rooms of the game are defined with a single color—yellow, green, blue, or magenta—including the player’s avatar, which changes color to match the room. Every scene change invokes a color change, providing a very basic source of visual variation and relief.
Other essential functions of color developed in early games to support player activity, either by indicating affordances for future actions, or else providing feedback for completed player moves. Hue in some versions of Pac-Man, for example, is used to indicate edible affordances for the protagonist; perhaps the fullest later development of this strategy is in Mirror’s Edge (EA Digital Illusions CE AB, 2008), in which red in the otherwise neutral environment cues the player to platforming and way-finding affordances. Finally, color can be used to acknowledge that the player has taken an action and that the game state has changed. In Miner 2049er (Big Five Software, 1983), for example, zones of color are filled in beneath the avatar as the player progresses through each screen. Color feedback can also take the form of reward: completing a level or setting a high score in the vector-based arcade game Tempest is accompanied by a burst of colorful fireworks.
Increases in computing power and new gaming platforms extended and enriched the color palettes of video games through the 1990s. These developments granted game designers a number of intermediate hues, values, and degrees of saturation, allowing for more nuanced color choices and the option to create game worlds with greater verisimilitude. One of the most basic color design decisions is choosing the colors of the limited palette that will be used, and we can consider Itten’s basic color contrasts as dimensions for categorizing the color palettes of entire games or sections of games. The human visual system responds most vigorously to changes in the visual field, rather than to stasis and homogeneity (Hardin, 1988), and, accordingly, Itten proposed seven color contrasts: hue, light–dark, cold–warm, complementary, simultaneous, saturation, and extension (Itten, 1970). We can, for instance, make general statements about games that contain relatively saturated (Jetset Radio Future by Smilebit, 2002) vs. desaturated (Shadow of the Colossus by Sony Computer Entertainment, 2005) color palettes. Predominantly warm (Journey by thatgamecompany, 2012) vs. cool (Gears of W ar by Epic Games Inc., 2006), light (Echochrome by Will, 2008) vs. dark (Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly by Tecmo Ltd, 2003); these are further dimensions that we can employ to distinguish the use of color in games. Achromatic games composed of light–dark tonal variation, such as Limbo, rely upon grayscale changes to communicate space, depth, and player focus, and draw upon the emotional power of a muted world.
Itten’s categories allow us to begin to identify the aesthetic color choices made by game designers. There are several different tools that are useful in the analysis of color palettes in games. Swatches generated by sampling the colors of game scenes provide one method of drawing broad comparisons between games, helping to identify patterns and initiating discussions about the uses of color. One article on game color reduces the color design of specific games to a single Pantone chip (Plunkett, 2011a), a strategy that forces reflection on the significance and memorability of individual colors within games. A more precise method of comparing color is to generate histograms within game worlds. Canossa explores color palette choices in a level of Hitman: Blood Money (IO Interactive, 2006) by generating a 360-degree panorama every 5 seconds, then analyzing the images in the histogram tool in Photoshop (Canossa, 2009). This process allows more detailed conclusions to be drawn about luminosity and relative color changes as one moves through the level. Finally, powerful image processing and analysis tools hold promise for extracting color information from complete game walkthroughs or speedruns (Huber, 2010).
The popularity of 3-D games in the late 1990s signaled the shift to a new paradigm for color, one in which pixel color output is calculated by the game engine renderer based upon contributions from illumination sources in the scene as well as surface color. In these games, simulated illumination and color need to be considered together, as the distribution and qualities of light and shadow affect one’s perception of the color palette of the overall game scene. Further, color choices in 3D games can be discussed with reference to cinematographic functions, such as creating depth, conveying time of day and season, enhancing mood, atmosphere, and drama, and revealing character personality (Calahan, 2000; Seifi et al., 2012). Often working in teams organized by specialization in a manner not unlike the film industry, game designers have continued to exploit the functional uses of color in games, with a new freedom to explore the evocative potentials of color in storytelling and the dynamic modulation of emotion (Seif El-Nasr et al., 2007). After 30 years of development, the black vacuum of Space Invaders (Taito Corporation, 1980) has given way to the beautifully variegated and shifting hues of the sky over Istanbul in Assassins Creed: Revelations (Ubisoft, 2011).
Color in games is indeed striking, though it remains woefully underexplored as a topic in game studies research. There are over 3,000 items in the Digiplay Repository of game studies articles (Rutter, 2012), but only 1 with “color” (or “colour”) as a keyword. Color also receives scant mention in most of the widely used game design texts. Instead, one has to hunt out game color discussions in writings on level design, computer graphics, platform studies (Montfort & Bogost, 2009), or game industry post-mortems (Fiorito & Stitt, 2000). One reason for this apparent neglect has to do with the status of aesthetic raw materials in complex artistic constructions. Ever since Aristotle, aesthetic hierarchies have relegated the sensory display that the audience immediately experiences—termed the enactment or “spectacle” in the Poetics—to the bottom of the creative hierarchy, the furthest removed from the formal means by which the poet evokes the full emotional power of his or her medium (Aristotle, 1996). In his updating of the Poetics for interactive media, Mateas remarks that “the mechanics of interaction (spectacle) provide the low-level resources for player action” (cited in Waldrip-Fruin & Harrigan, 2004, p. 25). We have seen that color indeed serves this function in games. Yet it is a commonplace among artists and designers that color and light also have an immediate and powerful effect upon the emotions. How can we understand the contribution of color to the full gaming experience?
Teasing out the contribution of color to the play experience vis-à-vis the other elements of games—story, character, sound, interaction modes, and player activity—is challenging, for several reasons. First, speculating about player response to color is complicated by the vagaries of transmission and display; it is difficult to make any assumptions about the monitor settings, cabling, and ambient illumination in play spaces. Further, color effects can be subtle, video games are a highly complex and evocative medium, and there are few integrating frameworks that really do justice to the experience of color. And finally, games are capacious and engaging learning systems, in which new color associations can be established within the span of individual games.
Despite these challenges, there are several key strategies for understanding the player’s response to color. The first approach—acknowledging the influence of culture upon color reception—seeks to identify the symbolism of individual colors. Red, for example, is frequently used as a wash over the game image to indicate flagging player health, drawing upon associations with blood and danger. But most hues are associated with a range of meanings; according to Zammitto (2005, p. 4), black can express “death, evil, criminality, hidden aspects, sinister, depression, grief, pain, repression, hopelessness but also sophistication, authority, style.” Running representative games through this list demonstrates some of the limitations of a symbolic approach: in many early sprite-based games, for example, it makes more sense to consider black as a contrasting ground for activity and feature of the technology of rendering than as a bearer of symbolic cargo. The fact that the player can learn new color associations within a single game also makes it difficult to claim that a specific color will hold a given meaning for the player. Context is very important to the meaning of color in games.
A second strategy for understanding the shared meanings of color in games is to mine the tacit knowledge of game designers. In one study we conducted, a game level depicting a large walk-through model of a human heart in a museum interior was created in the Hammer game engine, with in-level controls for setting illumination brightness and hue. During a workshop, game designers were asked to light scenes and create concept art for three game genres set within the level: an educational game for children about understanding the body and the circulation of blood, a relationship game for adults, and a stealth or horror game. The results suggested that each genre was associated with a specific palette: the educational game evoked a mixed and saturated palette, the relationship game tended to look warmer, and the horror and stealth scenarios were played out in dark and cool environments (Niedenthal, 2008). These patterns suggest that color palettes in games achieve some of their power through resemblance: generic associations within and across media work to prime player expectations and responses.
A third approach to game color is to borrow methods from experimental psychology to explore player response to color in custom game segments. Studies of the effects of color suggest that color has an impact upon emotion (Gao & Xin, 2006), and one can identify a parallel body of research in the area of light (Knez, 2001). There is, however, a great deal of disagreement in the results from studies of color and emotion. According to Valdez and Mehrabian (1994), this is due to problems with color stimuli in experiment design, and to differences between interpretive frameworks. They found that the emotional response to color could be attributed almost exclusively to the effects of value and saturation, rather than to hue. Seeking to extend color studies to a virtual environment more appropriate for understanding games, Joosten et al. (2010) found that red is experienced as arousing, and yellow as positive, though their observations proved valid only for inexperienced players, and the experiment’s stimuli colors were limited by the toolset used to construct the game level in the Neverwinter Nights engine (BioWare, 2002). In another study, players navigated through a maze-like Hammer environment lit with warm and cool hues that were controlled for value and saturation with histograms. The results suggested that warm illumination is associated with greater positive affect and better play performance, but it is difficult to draw any broader conclusions from this study due to the elementary nature of the game task (Knez & Niedenthal, 2008). Emotion researchers conducting empirical studies of color in game worlds still face a number of significant experiment design challenges.
Instead of creating custom game environments in which to study player emotion, we can gain a better grasp of the unique characteristics of video game color by examining the ways in which existing games engage color in play activities, and link color effects to gameplay emotion. There are several games in which a key gameplay goal is to bring color to the world; in Okami (Clover Studio, 2006)—which has a strong nurturing component—revitalizing a desolate game world triggers animated sequences of blossoming flowers that function as a reward for the player. These scenes dynamically link the emotions that the player experiences in the game (concern, satisfaction) with a color correlative. Flower (thatgamecompany, 2009) fuses the experience of speed and swoopy navigation with saturated sky and landscapes to bring about a similarly heightened awareness of the natural world.
Besides environmental color, many games also employ color effects to a similar purpose. Video games are distinguished by powerful and transitory color effects used in a performative manner to stand for a range of functions, including spell casting in role-playing games and motion-blurred attacks in fighting games. Explosions and fireworks also feature in many game genres (Niedenthal, 2010), including rhythm games such as Boom Boom Rocket (Bizarre Creations, 2007) and puzzle games such as Fantavision (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2000). In games with fireworks simulations, bursts of color are often timed to the player’s controller input, establishing a rapport between the display of shell detonation and the player’s experience of tension and release. Game color receives its fullest expression through these ephemeral forms. Rez, for example, was influenced by Kandinsky’s paintings, but the game achieves much of its power by linking hallucinatory bursts of hue to the gameplay emotion of a first-person rail-shooter. The lesson of Rez is that color can constitute a fundamental form of play in a video game.
This is also the sort of play that happens during the Indian holiday of Holi, when free-form color hijinks accompany a time of misrule and overturning of hierarchies. You “play” Holi by ambushing friends and pelting strangers with saturated pigments, or hosing them with colored water. Holi color play is an example of what Callois terms “a vertigo of the moral order, a transport that suddenly seizes the individual. This vertigo is readily linked to the desire for disorder and destruction, a drive which is normally repressed” (2006, p. 139). Like Holi, the bursts of simulated firework shells in Tempest or Fantavision, the colorful explosions of Rez—even the splatters of hue in a round of paintball—establish a tie between color and Callois’ concept of ilinx, the sensory whirlpool. This is the color space that video games can simulate very well: a synthesis of sensuous wonder and strong emotion that constitutes the purest expression of color in games, and is key to the contribution that video games can make to the broader field of color in art.
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