Brown Fatigue

One of the main visual design problems in games is the ubiquity of brown and grey, which is in part due to the subject matter of the game, but also in part due to misconceptions about what the players want.

If you look at perhaps the 3 most popular game franchises of recent years (Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto), you begin to see a pattern emerging:








It might be in part due to the fact these games are supposed to be ‘macho’, and apparently they’ve decided that brown is the most manly colour, but there is also the fact that they’re are trying to achieve realism (or some aspects of it, at least), and in often cases the kind of world they are drawing inspiration from in fact brown:




However there are games that are trying to buck this trend, and games such as Enslaved: Odyssey To The West show that you can even make a compelling post apocalyptic world with colours other than brown:



This screenshot is actually quite interesting in that the use of green actually gives the use of brown more power through juxtaposition, whereas overusing brown will just wash everything out and rob the colour of its intensity.