An Experimental Study on Highlighting Objects in Video Game : The Visual Attention Between the Colors Red, Green, Blue and Yellow

Sammanfattning: Background. In order to draw a player’s visual attention towards an object, many video games highlight the object using a colored edge highlight around the form of the object that is visible. Objectives. This paper tries to determine which color between red, green, blue or yellow is best to use for highlighting in order to draw a player’s attention against objects as effectively as possible. Methods. In order to answer this question, an experiment was conducted containing 20 participants. The participants’ task was to play a small first-person game where the objective was to locate an object that was highlighted in either one of these colors: Red, Green, Blue, or Yellow. The four different highlighted colors were applied to four different objects that had different visibility depending on their position. A total of 16 objects were needed to be found by each participant. There were 16 rounds to complete inside the small game to finish the game. The time it took for each participant to complete each of the 16 rounds and the total time it took for the participants to complete the game were recorded and saved inside a text file, which was uploaded to a google drive folder to be collected without human contact because of the COVID-19 Pandemic. To complement this data each participant had to answer a survey with questions regarding the small game they just played. Results. The majority of the participant’s answers shows that it didn’t matter which of the four colors were used for highlighting an object. However, when asked which of the four colors was the easiest one to notice, most of the participants answered the color red. This matches well with the total average time for the color red, as it had the lowest total time compared to the other colors. It can also be seen in the data that the level of visibility for each object did affect the performance for the participants even though they claimed that the visibility didn’t matter. Conclusions. The main conclusion is that the chosen highlighted color didn’t matter when performing the objectives inside the small game. Instead the visibility of the object affected the result and performance of the participants more. Red was the most selected answer when asked which of the four colors was the easiest to notice.