Slashdot Mirror
The Red Team Wins
Voltageaav writes "Recent studies indicate that in both First Person Shooters and even athletic competitions, wearing red gives you an advantage. It's speculated that this distracts the other team slightly due to the psychological aspect of people turning red when angry." Of course the Blue Team loses — as evidence I submit the history of the Detroit Lions.
Red shirts!
I'm in a corp in Eve Online, a heavy player v player orientated spaceship game.
With Eve, a hostile ship that is attacking you is displayed on screen, and also on the overview as a flashing red bar - the flashing red showing that the enemy ship has you targeted and is activating modules upon you with hostile intent.
One of the first things we do with newcomers to our corp/Eve is tell them to change the overview colour of a hostile ship from a flashing red to a solid green.
The change has had noticable effect. Before people would see the red and get an adrenaline boost, often resulting in them freezing for long enough to lose the battle. When seeing a solid green stating a metaphorical 'go go go!' as opposed to a red screaming 'Danger!' the newcomers perform better and freeze less often.
Blue is a better camoflage colour in UT. They have numbers on this I believe. Blue has a slight advantage over Red.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
"Da red wunz go fasta!"
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's speculated that this distracts the other team slightly due to the psychological aspect of people turning red when angry."
I'm black, I can't turn red you insensitive clod.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
The fine article is a little light on details, only mentioning Unreal Tournament, but in Team Fortress 2 there is a good reason red win more (bottom chart in parents link).
In any of the Attack / Defend maps blue plays the attackers, and red plays the defenders.
To keep things fair the attackers respawn a lot quicker than the defenders (since the attacker has to respawn and run halfway across the map, while the defender usually respawns only a short walk from the final defence point).
Since waiting 10 to 20 seconds to respawn is pretty boring a lot of servers reduce the respawn rate, this gives a major advantage to the defenders (red).
So why do red have a slight advantage in other TF2 maps? After someone has played TF2 many hours, they'll realise that they generally win more as red, they may not analyse why they win more, but the end result is players with a lot of TF2 experience tend to join the red team without really thinking about it.
Personally I think Tribes 2 did it right, the enemy always is red.
...if you are my opponent in Day Of Defeat (I'll keep the camo) ;-)
C - the footgun of programming languages
The results would have been the other way around if they hadn't stacked the deck by removing Star Trek crewmen from consideration.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
As an aside, people also turn red when they are embarrassed or drunk, so wouldn't the psychological effect cancel itself out?"
Funny...I remember when I bought a red Corvette...that everyone told me not to get red, because it would make your insurance higher. I'd heard that all my life.
I called State Farm and asked them if color mattered as to my insurance rate. Nope.
What matters is your driving record, your sex, the price of the car (repairs), and it seems these days strangely enough...your credit rating?!?!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Approximately 7% of males are red-green colorblind, and so have a slightly impaired ability to distiguish a red figure from a green or brown terrain. This might have something to do with it.