Last week, thanks to the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Demo, an old video game discourse returned and overtook social media: The use of yellow color to mark certain objects or ledges in the game. All it took was a nowviral tweet from Cloud climbing some yellow rocks in the new demo and a comment about yellow paint being a “virus” and bam, the debate rages again. Like a comet returning for another scheduled flyby of Earth, the topic of yellow color has predictably resurfaced, giving rise to endless takes, jokes, threads, opinions and arguments. Why is this topic so incredibly capable of captivating anyone who deals with it for days or weeks? Well, it’s not really the color, but everything the yellow spots represent.
People quickly began sharing the post by Dave Oshry, head of indie publisher New Blood, who has over 100,000 followers on Twitter. From then on, we were once again inundated with debates about yellow color in video games.
If you look on TwitterYou’ll find hundreds of tweets from players, developers, journalists, and others about how yellow color is either terrible and disruptive to the gaming experience, or necessary to make it easier for people to navigate levels. There are some people who think that it’s fine, but that it should be an option that you can turn on and off. Others (incorrectly) think it’s a sign that game developers are lazy. And then there are the people who make memes about it. I just saw Sam Lake--Alan Wake II‘s director—Post a joke about yellow paint earlier today.
The question that came to my mind was: Why is the yellow color debate so impossible for people to ignore? What is it about paint stains on stones or doors that breaks people’s brains and leaves them endlessly discussing the color yellow for days every few years, like clockwork?
Yellow color can visually summarize so many debates
It could be that the yellow color debate touches on a wide range of other contentious video game topics and provides a perfect, easy-to-share image for these topics.
Want to make fun of how gamers these days aren’t smart enough or need “git gud”? Yellow color gives you visual, often viral, evidence to support your claims. Do you think games are becoming too realistic, making the worlds too confusing and difficult to read? Well, luckily the yellow color is here to provide a beautiful image that expresses your entire point of view. Do you find modern AAA games bad and boring? A collection of yellow color screenshots from various titles will help you sell your case. Are you a developer who wants to show the lengths developers have to go to to get people to pay attention and follow instructions? Here you can use a tweet with yellow color and an image to start your thread. Want to show how some players get upset over silly little things? Take a screenshot of a group of angry people shouting over a yellow color screenshot. A yellow tweet is like a yellow traffic light: be careful ahead.
And then there is the other discourse with which yellow color intersects: Difficulty options. Like clockwork, when a new FromSoft game is releasedsome will argue it doesn’t need A difficulty slider that allows you to build your character in a specific way or defend the lack of options while the studio stays true to its creative vision. Others are now feeling this too a few options could Help more people play the game and would not affect others’ experience.
I can’t sit down with my grandma or my non-gamer friends and explain why Elden Ring whether easy mode is required or not. But I can show them an out-of-context screenshot of bricks or boxes covered in yellow paint in a photorealistic video game and get an answer that boils down to “Yeah, that’s weird.” This ability to go viral even among non-gamers has helped bring everyone into the yellow color debate. I’ve even seen people writing in mainstream, non-gaming media discussing this topic online.
The really twisted thing about the whole yellow color debate is that while it can be used as a visual shorthand for so many different topics, there are no easy answers to the game design problems associated with yellow color. Getting rid of it will make some games unplayable for others. Keep it and people will make fun of it and complain. Add a switch, and then you have to build your levels and graphics so that non-yellow players can direct all the people they turn off.
Combine this lack of a clear answer with the yellow color’s ability to insert itself into a dozen other video game debates, and you get a perfect storm of online discourse that never fails to captivate everyone around it. Even though this particular round seems to be finally coming to an end, I expect another major AAA video game to ship with yellow borders and a tweet to get the whole thing going again.
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