Colour my Games - Game Studies Week 4

Colour My Games.

Building on my thoughts from the previous weeks blog, I decided to look at the use of colour with Uncharted 3 and The last of us, both games are my by Naughty Dog. I wanted to look at how both games share similar uses of colour but at the same time have found ways to differentiate from each other. I thought this would be a good way of being able to take two games from different genre’s and compare how they are coloured in a way to suite their respective genre’s. This lead me to looking at colour techniques that are used within video games, for instance the use of colour grading which was a technique borrowed from film to be able to suggest to the player different times and locations. Or to try and imply a different tone. Another interesting use of colour within video games was colour cycling which was a form of animation for video games in the early 90’s, it allowed for the ability to shift colours around on screen to give the player the illusion of animation when in actuality the programmer placed a code to change the pixel colour to give it movement. This was mainly used for the elements like water, fire etc. Colour Cycling died out eventually and would be due to the advancement in technology. As it was used as a way to save memory for more important things that would happen in game, when you think about events such as the release of the original PlayStation, which arrived as the first console in history to be able to support up to 16.7 million different colours on screen where prior to this the highest number was 4096 from the NeoGeo in 1990 of a possible 65536. The PlayStation was a monumental jump for console gaming and since then has not looked back. Upon further research for my artefact, I did not find much in the way of colour psychology, as a lot of the information was countered by other research that was done. The main issues I found was that because of colours highly subjective nature, being influenced by our surroundings, upbringing or culture it made it difficult to back up any claims that I could make. It was at this notion that I found colour physiology as a way to help provide proof. As colour physiology was less reliant on an answer from the participant reviewing the use of said colours. This was a breakthrough As I felt I was not getting much traction in regards to my artefact.