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Motion Sickness In Gaming

Started by Viero_Berlotti, September 06, 2012, 10:30:31 AM

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Viero_Berlotti

Anybody else suffer from this?

I recently bought Portal 2 on eBay for £10, but after 10 minutes of playing I had to switch it off as I was feeling the familiar symptoms of nausea coming over me. It's always first person perspective games that seem to do it to me, but the weird thing is it's not all first person perspective games that do it.

I sunk over 150 hours+ into Fallout 3 and New Vegas with no nausea at all. Yes, I switched to third person perspective every now and then which may have helped, but a majority of those 150+ hours were through first person. The Halo games made me feel sick after 10 minutes, but then I've played through other FPS shooters like The Chronicles Of Riddick game and Resistance with no problems at all.

It's not a recent thing either. I remember getting the first Doom game on my PC in the mid-nineties and that did the same. Extreme feelings of nausea after 10 minutes and it wasn't just me, my dad and brother both felt the same after one go on it as well.

Toast

I get this too but only for certain games. The worst culprit has been Half Life 2, specifically when you're in the boat or the buggy. I had to play those parts in 20 minute intervals because they made me want to vom so bad.

When I looked in to it, Half Life 2 had a smaller field of view than most games. Most seem to have a FOV of 90, but HL2 was set to 75. From what I understand, the lower the FOV is, the more you perceive the movement in game. So a FOV of 90 or higher should alleviate the motion sickness. You can change this in most games, either in the regular setup menu or editing the config files. It made a difference for me in HL2 but it's possible this is just the computer game version of sitting on a newspaper.

Here's a guide on changing the FOV in Portal 2, let me know if it makes a difference. Portal 2 is a great game, I can't remember it making me nauseous at any point but it's possible I tweaked the fov and other setting before playing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LKcxBKCoVI

I'm surprised that I don't get this, as I have terrible motion sickness in cars and buses. Maybe it is the FOV then. I like it wide.

Viero_Berlotti

Thanks for that. I will try and change the field of view, never thought of that before.

The odd thing is though, I'm fine in cars, planes and boats, and I absolutely love the sensation of the the ferry moving up and down in choppy waters when I'm crossing the Irish sea to Dublin.

Toast

I'm fine in cars as long as I'm driving, this could be my anxiety cancelling out my motion sickness though. If I'm a passenger then I feel nauseous on long drives. I've never actually been physically sick though, I just feel like I'm constantly on the verge of throwing up, which is worse.

KLG-7A

I am violently sick in road vehicles, but never in trains, planes, boats or games. I can figure out why not in trains, planes and boats (they go in a straight line) but games should fuck me up because they're all bendy.

Not immersive enough, I guess.

Still Not George

Ah, good (bad) ol' Valve Syndrome. Keeping good people from gaming since, er, whenever the fuck Doom came out.

madhair60

I got sick when I played Kinect because a) It's shit and b) I'm fucking fat and I want to sit down

Still Not George

Quote from: madhair60 on September 06, 2012, 04:23:04 PM
I got sick when I played Kinect because I'm a good and righteous man who knows a stack of shit when he sees it

Fixed that for you

madhair60

I've never seen my friend more angry than when he was trying to get through the menus of Kinect Sports and it literally wasn't functioning.  I was just sat there saying like "Oh this is £130 well spent mate" and he was fuming.  It was great.

Big Jack McBastard

Never noticed it myself but my brother mentioned it while we were doing Halo 3.

Playing Guitar Hero (I'm guessing Rock Band as well) for too long, looking at the tracks running down the screen, 'drags' your line of sight and makes an optical illusion of everything being pulled down for a while when you look away from the screen.

The thing that gets me is unintentional falls in Assassins Creed, it's a bugger for making my gut drop when Ezio misses a ledge way up, or you take a chance on a risky blind leap while escaping a mob of shits and end up plummeting to the street. 'Hnnn-Urrrrgh...'

Primal monkey genes in action is that, one missed branch could mean you're a tigers dinner.

VegaLA

Ah yeah. Half Life 2. I did mention this when it was released and one of you kind folks told me about the valve syndrome!
Shame as i'd really like to get into Portal but can only stomach 20 minutes or so. Thank lordy it's just them though.

Jerzy Bondov

I used to get that fun 'Guitar Hero Vision', which is like some kind of amazing drug trip, but I think I've become immune to it now thanks to hour after hour pretending to be in Talking Heads holding a plastic guitar.

Viero_Berlotti

Yes, I couldn't cope with Guitar Hero either. In fact I had a friend who was so addicted to Guitar Hero that he suffered an attack of severe vertigo that lasted two days.

mook

super mario galaxy, i can't find a youtube clip, but there's a bit (and it must be fairly early in the game) where you have to avoid loads of those big bullet things, made me proper skwirley it did. never played it again, thought i was having a stroke.

samadriel

Why's it called Valve Syndrome?  I'd think they do more than most to counteract nausea with their FOV sliders in more recent games.

Still Not George

I can't actually find it on Google. From what I remember it's primarily a reference to people getting sick playing Counterstrike and HL2 due to the immovable FOV being set to 75 degrees rather than the much more common (outside of Valve games) 90 degrees. Because most people don't realise FOV has a strong effect on motion sickness, they just associate it with Valve games.

surreal

Mirror's Edge always gives me a massive headache, which is a shame cos I do like the game a lot.

Rev

I had the field of view problem for the first time ever recently with Skyrim, the PC version of which has its FOV set to - I think - 65 by default, with no menu option to change it (it can be changed through the console though).  The effect wasn't quite motion sickness but it was weirdly suffocating; I couldn't stand to play it for more than half an hour as it felt completely exhausting.