In the “bad old days” of the early Web, many people (myself included) preached constantly that you couldn’t design Web pages to any specific monitor resolution. The eggheads in charge of W3C came up with CSS to try to make Web design as display-agnostic as possible.

Of course, “we” lost. Designers are going to design to a specific format no matter what you tell them. They took CSS and used it to make their pages even MORE resolution-dependent. If you ever hit a Web page that doesn’t get the CSS quite right for your browser choice, you know what that means. Elements all layered on top of each other. Fonts too small to read or too big to fit in their “boxes” so you lose half the text.

Well, now the problem is creeping into video game design.

When I bought a PS3 several years ago, I bought my first “big screen” TV along with it—42”, 1080p, LCD. PS3 games look beautiful on it. So do Blu Ray movies. Heck, so do regular DVD movies. What has never looked good on it is a computer screen. When I have hooked my computer (via HDMI) to the TV and set the resolution to 1080p, the screen is unreadable from a normal (~10 feet) distance, unless you have very good eyesight (I don’t).

But, this wasn’t a problem with video games because video games in the 360/PS3 era were not “designed to 1080p.” High definition TVs were still rare enough and the gaming hardware still underpowered enough that games were generally designed to 720p—even if they eventually sent 1080p output to the TV, the original design was based on 720p.

Now, with the PS4 I see game designers have upped their “base” resolution to, at least, 1080p. Here’s the problem—what looks good to designers on their high-resolution, high-pixel-density monitors a couple of feet away from their face looks horrible on my HD, low-pixel-density[1] television that’s ten feet away from my chair. Put simply, the text is too small; I can’t read it. And I’m not alone. On top of that, small elements in the game are easily overlooked[2]. And if you don’t even have HD TV? Forget about it.

Assassin’s Creed IV. Wolfenstein: The New Order. Dragon Age: Inquisition. If I actually want to read any of the text in those games, I have to go stand a few feet away from the TV or yank my chair half-way across the room. What’s really maddening about this is it’s easily fixable. All that’s needed is a font-size adjustment either built into the game or built into the console’s OS.

Or, you know, game designers could start allowing for us old, impaired-vision folks who don’t have Retina Displays right in front of our noses.

[1] Seriously, pixel density (pixels-per-inch or PPI) matters. Here’s a Web site that measures PPI for you. My 5.2” 1080p smartphone has a PPI of 423—nearly twice human visual acuity. At 42”, 1080p is only 52 PPI. It makes a huge difference, especially with text.

[2] Don’t get me started on the tiny loot bags dropped by enemies in Dragon Age: Inquisition.