Yellow paint debate

In video game design, yellow paint is sometimes used as an environmental directional marker in level design. Yellow paint has the benefit of being highly visible, but the downside that players may find it immersion-breaking or patronizing. Its use has at times drawn controversy.

Description

Bright colors are attention-grabbing, something expressed in nature through warning coloration and in everyday human life in the colors used for safety indicators, such as safety yellow. In video games, the game environment represents a simulacrum of some real space, in which player movement and environmental interaction are usually limited compared to real life. As players may miss realistic cues on where a path is, or which items will respond to interaction attempts, game developers may choose to use brightly colored indicators to draw the player's attention.^[1]

The amount of detail in video game levels has gone up as the underlying technology improves, and this makes some historical solutions, such as unique art assets for climbing points, less obvious than they were in older games.^[2] If the path forward is sufficiently unintuitive - a subjective problem discovered either by playtesters or the community that plays the game after its release - it can leave players stuck, in some cases causing them to give up on the game entirely.^[3] The use of in-world markers guiding the player's direction, typified by (but not limited to) yellow paint, represents an attempt by the game developers to provide guidance without breaking the game's sense of immersion. The debate around yellow paint is over the extent to which this practice is necessary and effective.^{[citation needed]}

History

IGN's Vikki Blake cites Uncharted as an early example of yellow paint guide markers in games.^[3] The Stanley Parable, a satirical game from 2013, features an extreme form of yellow paint guidance in which the player is instructed by the game's narrator to follow a yellow stripe on the floor.^[4] More recent games involved in the debate include the Resident Evil 4 remake and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.^[3][5]

Reception

Games journalist Celia Wagar described yellow paint as "a cheap and easy way of" indicating interaction points, "but it probably represents an earlier failure in the art design of the game".^[2] PlaytestCloud wrote that "It's hard to say whether or not the use of yellow paint is the right solution, as we’d argue it all depends on the type of experience the developers are trying to create... Nevertheless, it's hard to disagree that the yellow paint can sometimes be intrusive, leading us to believe that game developers could devise an alternative."^[6]

In a 2024 article, Kotaku summed up the yellow paint debate as unsolvable: "Get rid of it and some games become unplayable for folks. Keep it and people will make fun of it and complain. Add a toggle and then you have to build your levels and art in a way that can guide players without yellow paint for all the folks who turn it off."^[7]