Motion sickness from video games really sucks.

[chase210]

I've always kind of gotten motion sickness from select video games, almost all first person shooters, and its only gotten worse. This definitely isn't just a me issue, its relatively common, but its really rough. The ones I know for sure that make me want to be sick

- Almost any Valve game. The only way I managed to finish Half Life 2 in fact was the PS3 version, which according to YouTube, has lower FOV than the PC or 360 version. Portal was still rough.
- Bethesda games, horrendous.
- A new one I've just discovered, the Metroid prime games on Gamecube. I definitely didn't use to get it from these, so thats really bad.
- Goldeneye 007 for the n64.


Any of you lot suffer from this? It's a shame cos I'd like to play Wolfenstein and Fallout.

[stvnorman]

I suffer from it occasionally. Doom 2016 was the first time, but like an idiot I played through the whole thing getting ill in thirty minute bursts! That’s the only FPS I’ve suffered it with though, and I do wonder if the colour palette had anything to do with it because I’m red/black colourblind and there’s a lot of red in hell!

Wipeout in VR was the absolute worst - one race set me off for about an hour, and I had to go and stand outside in the middle of winter to try and stop sweating!

Tetris Effect Connected is the most disappointing because I’m a massive Tetris fan, but even on a regular TV I could only last one level on PS4, though I did try it again on Xbox yesterday and managed a whole area! And like an idiot I might keep playing that too!

Weirdest is the cloud version of Control on Switch. I tried the demo and that set me off within about ten minutes, and I can’t really work out why. There’s nothing obvious like the other games I’ve mentioned.

I started getting sea sickness for the first time when I was about forty, and this for the first time about five years later, so guess it’s age related, but it is really selective. I just fired up Metroid Prime on GameCube just to see if that did it, and no problem. Bethesda games fine. Actually, 99.5% of everything I’ve played since I first got it has been fine. Weird.

[Gadget8Bit]

Weirdest is the cloud version of Control on Switch. I tried the demo and that set me off within about ten minutes, and I can’t really work out why. There’s nothing obvious like the other games I’ve mentioned.

If the trigger is red tones, then Control will be bad for you. There’s lots of red hues and implicit red tones in the graphics. It’s almost a signature colour of the Hiss

For me, I’m fortunate that games don’t tend to make me sick. For me its screen tech. Anything that uses Pulse Width Modulation makes me sick and gives me migraines.

So that rules out LED monitors and even certain LCD monitors (VA panels, to be precise). Until now it’s also affected phones. I wasn’t able to use any OLED phone until the iPhone 12.

I’ve heard that limiting frame rates and lowering the FOV on some games can make them easier on the eyes, have you tried that OP?

[Alex79]

Only ever had it with a couple of games. Half Life 2 was the first time I ever noticed it, on PC. For whatever reason, this seems to be a pretty common one. Weird because it wasn't the engine, I used to play Counterstrike Source and Day Of Defeat Source just fine. There was another one fairly recently on PS4 I think, but I can't remember for the life of me what it was now. But yeah, it's horrible, just get headaches and feel nauseous from it.

[Truk_Kurt]

I've only had it twice, first was with GTA Vice City on PS2 but it was because motion blur was switched on in the settings, once I turned it off I was fine. The other game was Jazzpunk which I was given a code for to review, I felt really bad telling the dev that I couldn't review it as I bet he thought I had just tried to blag a free copy of the game, but I just couldn't play it for longer than 15 minutes without having to throw cold water on my face and step outside. I think it was the striking colour palette.

[chase210]

Weirdest is the cloud version of Control on Switch. I tried the demo and that set me off within about ten minutes, and I can’t really work out why. There’s nothing obvious like the other games I’ve mentioned.

If the trigger is red tones, then Control will be bad for you. There’s lots of red hues and implicit red tones in the graphics. It’s almost a signature colour of the Hiss

For me, I’m fortunate that games don’t tend to make me sick. For me its screen tech. Anything that uses Pulse Width Modulation makes me sick and gives me migraines.

So that rules out LED monitors and even certain LCD monitors (VA panels, to be precise). Until now it’s also affected phones. I wasn’t able to use any OLED phone until the iPhone 12.

I’ve heard that limiting frame rates and lowering the FOV on some games can make them easier on the eyes, have you tried that OP?

I have where I can, but since I'm primarily a console gamer and its not really an option on there often, there's not much I can do about it.

[stvnorman]

Weirdest is the cloud version of Control on Switch. I tried the demo and that set me off within about ten minutes, and I can’t really work out why. There’s nothing obvious like the other games I’ve mentioned.

.

I’ve heard that limiting frame rates and lowering the FOV on some games can make them easier on the eyes, have you tried that OP?

I have where I can, but since I'm primarily a console gamer and its not really an option on there often, there's not much I can do about it.

Same here. I’m also way too lazy to do anything like that!

[Scrustle]

I've personally never had a problem with motion sickness in games, but for a while I've had a theory on why it's a thing, since it seems to be related to FoV so often. Although this is the first time I've ever seen anyone say that decreasing FoV helps. I've always only ever heard the opposite. But that still fits with my theory.

When you look at a game on a screen, you are in a sense looking through a window in to the digital world. The way a game's camera and FoV works is that it decides how wide that window is, or alternatively how close the camera is to that window, since those basically function as the same thing. I suspect that motion sickness comes from when there's is a difference between the hypothetical distance the game's camera is from this window, and the actual distance the viewer is looking at the screen from. So if you sit far away from a screen, the amount of your total vision field that is taken up by this window is small. And so to accurately fit with that, the game's FoV should be small too. And of course if you sit close, the game's FoV should be wider to match your own as well.

I did a little diagram to illustrate this too, showing the scenario of the game's FoV being too wide. For the opposite effect, the viewer and camera would have their places switched.



I suspect the reason I've more commonly heard raising the FoV is the solution is that I've heard this complaint from PC gamers. And you tend to sit closer to a screen at a desk than you do playing a console on the TV from across the room, so maybe that explains it.

[ReprobateGamer]

my wife has always had issues with games, especially anything in first person, but most things that also have a movable camera.

She's been fine on anything with an isometric viewpoint, anything with a fixed camera and there are some odd ones that she has also been fine with (the Ratchet and Clank series and all the Prince of Persia games.
But things like Assassin's Creed and Gears of War or indeed any almost any action adventure game leave her feeling queasy within an hour.

There is certainly some measure of involvement in the game as a factor. I remember as well (possibly Edge magazine) reading an article about two different styles of presenting the camera, one which is commonplace and yet was more likely to trigger motion sickness

[Magical_Isopod]

Every time I've tried to play Mario Galaxy, I get visual hallucinations similar to like... How the room warps when you're playing Guitar Hero for a long time. But I feel dizzy after too. Something about forcing my brain to think in spheres really messes me up. Dunno why. Could be because the camera's zoomed in too close, I dunno. It seems to be less the geometry itself, more my brain frying a bit trying to determine my orientation to relative points.

In short, I am probably not qualified to pilot aircraft or spacecraft of any sort.

[Alex79]

Oh yeah that Guitar Hero thing, I'd forgotten about that. Play it for long enough and the room starts looking like you've had a bag of mushrooms or something

Just wanted to congratulate you on a quality diagram. Much better than the scrawled in MS Paint effort you usually see on forums. Good work!

[Flabyo]

The weird effect after playing guitar hero for a while is caused by a thing the brain does that’s actually useful, it’s just not what you want it to be doing here.

Essentially, we evolved as hunters, and our senses are evolved to pick out motion from the background. Lots of predators can do it. But the really fancy thing we can do is that the background doesn’t have to be static for us to filter it out as long as it’s repetitive. So we can spot something moving in long grass that’s already swaying in the wind.

What the brain is doing is setting up a loop to cancel out the unimportant motion in order to better pick out the important stuff. And when that background stimulus isn’t present anymore it can take a minute or so for the brain to switch off it’s compensation. So if you watch guitar hero for a while (or more easily, just watch movie credits, white text against a black screen, in the dark) then suddenly remove that lopping stimulus everything seems to go in the wrong direction for a short while.

Anyway, I digress. It’s not actually the same thing as motion sickness. One theory for motion sickness is actually related to lag, that there’s a ‘sick spot’ of time between input and seeing the response that triggers it. Tom Scott did a fun video on it: