Topic: This Whole Yellow Paint Debacle

Hi, I'm RoomWithaMoose.

You might remember me as that obnoxious moose that hates Playstation, or something. I'm not usually 'round these parts, but I'm losing my sanity over this topic and have no other viable outlets for discussion.

You probably know what yellow paint is, and you probably know something recently rekindled the discourse surrounding it. Since I've already wasted enough time trying and failing to evoke Troy McClure, let me just get to the point: I think yellow paint is a perfectly viable design choice and am incredibly annoyed that so many gamers think it some cardinal sin that devalues an entire experience.

I've had several debates (re: arguments) both in reality and cyberspace that I found inadequate in either rebutting my opinion or satiating my ego. So, in my hour of desperation — and procrastination — I turn to whomever bothers to open this post to opine poetic about paint of the yellow variety so that a satiable dialogue might satiate my satiable need for satiation.

I won't exorbitantly soliloquize all my thoughts on the matter; if this thread picks up, I'll likely lay my opinion bare for all to judge eventually. But I will provide some general thoughts I have on the topic, to clarify my stance:

• Yellow paint admonishers don't actually know what they're complaining about. It's not literally yellow paint, but they struggle to articulate exactly what it is and separate it from any literal instances of yellow paint. And, to this effect...
• Yellow paint isn't literally yellow paint. I mean, it is. But it doesn't have to be yellow, and it doesn't have to be paint. I would describe it as high contrast environmental hues meant to guide the player forward or denote interactable set dresses.
• Yellow paint can be poorly implemented, but its cadence and efficacy are often smartly considered. I do think there are clunky uses of yellow paint, but showing me one egregious instance doesn't convince me all yellow paint is bad design. And, even at its worst, I'd argue poor implementation is mostly inconsequential.
• The challenge yellow paint deflates often isn't the intention of a games' level design. Like, was Uncharted designed around the player observing the environment to find the right path, or was it designed to be an exciting, snappy tour from set piece to set piece? Would a game like that really benefit from making traversing its linear design more obtuse? (I don't like Uncharted, by the way, but I think it utilized yellow paint fairly well.)
• I don't see how yellow paint, per se, is more offensive than any other diegetic method of pointing the player forward. It can be yellow paint, it can be an isolated light, it can be a shadow, it can be a door cracked open, it can be a floating coin — I consider them all good, equitable designer/player dialogues, and generally prefer them to HUD notices.
• Even if a particular use seems excessive or pointless to you, keep in mind that not every player is following the same train of thought. I am fairly confident that the majority of ostensibly egregious instances were implemented because play testers seemed lost or designers imagined they could become lost. If the path forward is obvious to you regardless of the yellow, I fail to see why the yellow would bother you anyway.

All right, just a few quick lines I've said that I liked:

• This complaint is the equivalent of saying a book using italics for emphasis is a direct insult to the reader's ability to discern essential information themselves.
• Yellow paint itself is not emblematic of bad design, rather symptomatic of ubiquitously high-fidelity, low-contrast art direction.
• Yellow paint is just a universally understood design language — no different from 'red barrel go boom.' Is that equally bad design?

All right, what do you think...Pushers? Yellow paint good? Yellow paint bad? Moose talk too much?

@RoomWithaMoose yeah I don’t have a problem with it tbh. I just think people want to moan about things these days, so when something becomes ubiquitous… it’s an easy target.

Good Troy McClure intro btw

I'm still gutted that The President's Neck is Missing was never a real movie (starring Troy McClure or otherwise, I'd still watch the heck out of something with that title).

The way I see it, yellow paint (or its equivalent, depending on the game) is an accessibility feature. Nobody should complain about accessibility features making games more accessible to a wider audience and allowing more people to play and enjoy a shared experience. If you do, you're at best trying to arbitrarily gatekeep a leisure activity, and that makes you the bad guy.

Back in 2019, Shadow of the Tomb Raider featured three separate settings for its yellow paint (obvious, subtle, or non-existent). If a modern game doesn't feature similar, or at the very least an on / off toggle, then I'd argue that's poor accessibility design on the developer's part.

What amazes me is that yellow paint draws all this criticism, and yet nobody ever complains about the far more widespread use of lighting as environmental signposting.

@ZeroE @Werehog Honestly, in all my arguing over this, I've never thought of making it a togglable feature. Nor has anyone bothered by it really suggested that to me.

I typically agree that options are always better, but I'm a little torn here. On the one hand, if someone really doesn't like being lead by visual cues, more power to them if they can turn them off. On the other hand, I don't think visual cues are ever much detrimental to the holistic experience, and hence aren't worth turning off in the first place and obfuscating level design. Really, for its removal to be a legitimate feature and not some novelty, levels would still have to be designed to lead the player without its use. Which would kinda circumvent its need in the first place. I'm actually planning on playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider later this year, so maybe I'll try the non-existent setting and see what their compromise was.

It's also worth noting that I've had several arguments wherein, after my interrogation, the other party eventually reckoned that they don't mind yellow paint, but hate when presented with a contextual, mindless gameplay section with no challenge or expressive player input. It just so happens that those sections are often populated with yellow paint. At some point prior in these arguments, they still bemoaned all the typical yellow paint talking points — ergo, "[they] don't actually know what they're complaining about." But I think the big takeaway there is not even an on/off toggle would satisfy every detractor.

(Also, don't feel bad about missing the Simpsons allusion, Zero. I didn't think it was very clear in the first place, hence my name dropping to both clarify that intent and make a joke out of my opaque writing.)

@greymamba I literally just want to say the exact same thing. A lot of contemporary online discourse feels like people just jumping on a hate bandwagon without understanding or internalizing the criticisms they spew.

Though, to the haters' credit here, I do think there's something tangible to the criticism. Their mobs have just failed to accurately articulate it. That failure is probably what bothers me the most. Although, even my theories on what's actually bothering them would imply a deeper failure on their part to understand mass appeal, appreciating art on its terms, and/or designer's intent. But I never even get to that discussion, 'cause they're so hyper focused on yellow paint itself.

@RoomWithaMoose I can’t remember a time when I felt that any type of virtual handholding ruined my experience. The closest I’ve ever been to annoyed has probably been NPC characters chit-chatting with constant verbal clues about where to go or what to do for a puzzle. Even then it usually doesn’t bother me. Sometimes it’s downright helpful, so I can tolerate times when it’s pointing out the obvious or perhaps slightly ‘immersion breaking’. Having played many games before the advent of online guides and YouTube video walkthroughs (and even now Sony’s own proprietary “Game Help” feature they introduced on PS5), I know the frustration of getting stuck and having progress halted with no recourse of how to figure out your next move.

Game design has definitely evolved to be more elegant in many ways. I guess the detractors from in-game built-in clues like yellow paint would argue that they prefer to just wander around and figure out progress points on their own, but I wonder how often that would result in large portions of gamers walking away from a game after wasting an hour in a cave unable to find the exit. Even with modern visual and audio clues, that’s happened to me. I’ve even been stuck trying to get to the next progress point and looked up an online guide, only to find a description that’s completely unhelpful like “after retrieving the chalice from the chest, proceed to the south and return to the forest…” and I’m still left feeling like an idiot thinking “but where’s the exit! There’s no doorway to the south!” If I’m lucky then it eventually clicks a hour later that you have to climb up to the exit. If I’m not lucky, I’ve abandoned the game and moved on to another.

I can definitely recommend Shadow of the Tomb Raider and one of the aspects of the game I found really innovative was the tiered difficulty options. Not only can you choose in the settings how much (if any) paint signposting to have during exploration, but you can independently vary the combat difficulty and puzzle difficulty also. So if you want easy exploration but difficult combat and medium puzzles, you can individualize that. I don’t know why other games haven’t adopted that.

All this said, I respect the need for games that straight up lack any intrinsic help and continue with old-school cryptic gameplay. Not every game needs to have handholding features. Dark Souls wouldn’t be the same if there were yellow paint scattered throughout the various ledges in Lordran. The game is punishing to the player and the process of trying to navigate and explore is a large part of the frustration to newcomers. As a result people ditch the game in the opening hours. However the feeling of accomplishment is very large for those who stick it out. Nevertheless, not every game needs to be that abstruse. Uncharted wouldn’t be the same masterpiece without the yellow paint. (Actually, in my memory the paint was white but I can’t remember. Maybe that was The Last of Us…)

That prompts a thought — what was the first game to use “yellow paint” (or its equivalent visual cueing)? Uncharted may be the first where I remember the paint thing.

All I would say on this subject is let people have the option to have it on or off, which I believe is becoming more common.

I just read a fascinating article by an acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins (on gasp The Guardian) who discusses his role in making films in a way I find weirdly correlative to this issue.

I have never heard of the concept of yellow paint before reading this post, but I understand the concept you're referring to, and in the article with Deakins, the way he talks about his craft and how he expresses the contrasts of cinematography as he understands it and how it isn't being applied in modern cinema is a great read. Blah Blah Lawrence of Arabia, every frame a painting etc. etc.

I think he does have a point. Is he a product of his training and his experience? One that is no doubt a result of his education, his particular artistic sensibilities, and how he was beholden to the technology and practices of filmmaking during his career? Is it gatekeepy to refer to an expert of long standing, or is there validity in the crafstmanship and attitudes of someone who has been doing a thing for a long time? Does that make them stuck in the past? Or does it give them some sort of authority? Again, a tangent but you may understand what I'm trying to get at.

Yellow paint could be incorporated into a game at a number of different levels; the more "cosmetically" it is applied, the easier it would be to have a toggle feature. If the paint is applied to the game's environmental and mechanical design, then the ability to toggle it becomes arguably impossible.

You mentioned purpose and used Uncharted as an example (I only played some of the first game when rental from a shop was still a thing, and that is actually the reason I didn't like the Tomb Raider reboot, because I saw it as trying to be Uncharted, as well as a "how much crap can we subject Lara to" simulator... I digress).

What is the game meant to be? What experience do the developers want the players to have? What range of parameters allow a broad variety of players to meet the story, design, and interaction expectations of its creators? How much control do they want over what the players experience? How limiting is the gameplay? How do you draw the line between freedom and meeting the limitations of things like hardware, storage, time, lifestyle, players' other commitments, etc?

How much of an impact do the developer's own proclivities and sensibilities have on how they design a video game? In many ways, it is a unique artform because it is interactive. What is obvious to one player may not be to another. How delicious is strawberry ice cream, objectively?

There are some developers who might even detest the idea of yellow paint, and seek to subvert or sabotage a player's expectations by punishing them or deterring them from "standard" gaming behaviour... unknowingly training them to adhere to whatever version of yellow paint they're using to make those subversions. You have to find some other way of delivering information to the player about what to do next. How large is the semantic range of the term yellow paint?

I'm rambling. Fascinating post. Enjoyed thoroughly and has given me a lot to think about.

@DemonStar89 I quite love this response. It adds a great deal to the discussion, not least being languages of art and their perceived relevance and authority.

There can certainly be a presumption that any universal practice is only so ubiquitous out of artistic habit rather than objective quality. And there's absolutely truth to the idea that 'the old ways,' despite their established efficacy, are largely limiting. This is something difficult to reconcile in a general sense; to stick with the proven or branch out with something unproven is entirely a question of a creator in the midst of expressing their craft. But we can assert it's quite the slippery slope. Stay too close to tradition, and you're effectively recreating the past with no valuable iteration (which sounds like the crux of Deakins' article). Eschew the fundamentals, and you risk making something that fails in its intent and alienates the language-literate audience (re: basically the contemporary 'anti-abstract art' movement).

Which is all acutely applicable to yellow paint. It's used so frequently because it's used so frequently. One can argue there are better ways to accomplish what it does, or that the vast majority of games that use it should've tried something else. And those are entirely fair conversations to have. Likewise, entirely removing it can alienate audiences (both the language-literate and illiterate, in this case) and can obfuscate the intended design. Ultimately, there is not an end-all solution. It's up to every individual designer to decide how they're going to communicate designer/player dialogues, and what works best for their game and intent.

Anyway, definitely checking out that article when I get a minute. Thanks for the comment!

I’m currently paying two games that deploy the “yellow paint” signposting design, but in slightly different ways.

I found it curious that Silent Hill 2 has part of the tutorial actually tell the player “hey, whenever you see white cloth on an opening somewhere, that means you can go through there.” Most of the time the yellow/white/cloth/flag/lighting type of visual cue is part of the predominant design language to bring your attention to a ledge or opening, but it’s not typically said so openly. I don’t think games usually stop to point it out to you during gameplay like SH2 does. Slightly immersion breaking.

The other game I’m playing is Horizon Forbidden West which does have tutorials about using the “focus” gameplay element to highlight ledges, but the ledges and handhold also already have yellow paint you can see without the focus. So it actually is a tiered system of cueing - if you don’t see the yellow paint (and in truth it looks much more subtle than other games, largely due to the muted color of the yellow but also the fact the game is so vastly colorful anyway) then you can optionally enable the “focus” tech Aloy has to highlight grapple points and ledges.

HFW also has a bounty of accessibility options which I think can make the ledges and handholds even more obvious. I don’t know for sure. But I did enable the one that highlights pickups in the environment automatically. I can’t be fussed to keep spamming R3 the whole time to find supplies scattered around. 😅

The Invincible had yellow paint in the form of very light grey dust and it was needed for that section. It was so open and specific that I'd never have found the path. Most of the games I play don't have it. Horizon Zero Dawn stands out as one from memory, it makes sense if it's a massive title that's going to appeal to all kinds of gamers. I'm sure if I played Triple A games I'd see it more, The Invincible was probably the first time I'd seen yellow paint in years.