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Motion sickness accessibility in video games

madelinemiller.dev

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Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#31

Post by opan »

mbStavola wrote: post #16

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to play Halo with my dad. I thought he would love it but he refused to even look at it, claiming that it would make him nauseous. I just didn't get it, we played Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil with no issue, why was this any different? I told him it was in his head or that these newer games would cause less nausea since they looked and performed better. I couldn't convince him…

>[4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again

Only a handful of games I've played make me motion sick, but Half-Life 2 is really bad. I don't think I ever felt sick playing CS:GO, though, so it must be something specific to HL2 and not the whole Source engine.

Most recent game to make me sick was Metroid Prime, played in the PrimeHack Dolphin fork. I actually got full-on vertigo for possibly the first time in my life. When I went to bed that night the whole room was spinning when I got into bed. I don't drink alcohol, but stories of being way too drunk are what came to mind from that. Such a foreign feeling.

I bravely tried to play Metroid Prime again a day or two later. Increased the FoV as high as I could without causing glitches (there's a warning about the highest safe value), also tweaked horizontal camera speed, as I had felt like it wasn't turning fast enough and that maybe that was part of it. I think it was okay after that, but I'm still a bit scared of the game and haven't played it much.

The worst part of the motion sickness for me is that I seem to have to sleep it off, it doesn't go away on its own the same day, so as soon as it hits me, my day is genuinely ruined.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#32

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

opan wrote: post #31
mbStavola wrote: post #16

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to play Halo with my dad. I thought he would love it but he refused to even look at it, claiming that it would make him nauseous. I just didn't get it, we played Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil with no issue, why was this any different? I told him it was in his head or that these newer games would cause less nausea since they looked and performed better. I couldn't convince him…

>[4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again Only a handful of games I've played make me motion sick, but Half-Life 2 is really bad. I don't think I ever felt sick playing CS:GO, though, so it must be something specific to HL2 and not the whole Source engine. Most recent game to make me sick was Metroid Prime, played in the PrimeHack Dolphin fork. I actually got full-on vertigo for possibly the first time in my life. W…

Half-Life 2's hovercraft area was AWFUL, even on a 4:3 CRT.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#34

Post by adamrezich »

A couple years back I was playing Sea of Thieves with some old friends, and one of them noticed he was experiencing motion sickness with a video game for the first time. Obviously the part where you spend most of the game on a ship had something to do with it, but when I suggested he increase the FoV, he said it only helped a little. After trying other things, eventually we discovered the turning vsync on helped immensely. I'd never heard of that being a contributing factor before—I always turn it on for first-person games because I find tearing to be distracting, rather than sickness-inducing—but nonetheless, that was the solution that allowed him to play with us.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#35

Post by Aardwolf »

mbStavola wrote: post #16

When I was a teenager, I really wanted to play Halo with my dad. I thought he would love it but he refused to even look at it, claiming that it would make him nauseous. I just didn't get it, we played Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil with no issue, why was this any different? I told him it was in his head or that these newer games would cause less nausea since they looked and performed better. I couldn't convince him…

High FOV settings really help against nausea for me.

On PC, games may be more tweakable than you think and have FOV settings hidden away somewhere anyway. E.g. Fallout 4 has it in an ini file, some games have console commands for it, etc...

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#37

Post by jezzamon »

ziml77 wrote: post #20

Narrow FoV ruins me. Even after all these years, Far Cry 2 on PC was one of the worst video game experiences ever for me because it had FoV tuned for couch gaming. IIRC I was able to somewhat fix it with a console command to adjust the FoV, but actions like sprinting which forced the FoV to something even narrower than default would undo that. And for me motion sickness isn't felt in my stomach, it's in my head. The…

Interesting, I thought having a too large FOV would result in motion sickness. Which is why when running you might reduce it, to compensate for the faster movement. I guess to clarify, you're mostly talking about PC gaming where you're sitting close to the screen, or is this something you also experience with console games?

In VR, one method of reducing motion sickness is covering the edges of the screen during movement to reduce motion sickness (a temporary tunnel vision effect), essentially reducing the FoV. I suppose playing in windowed mode would be similar :P

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#38

Post by joshuaheard »

kmfrk wrote: post #14

When we transitioned from 4:3 monitors to 16:9/16:10, a lot of people were nauseated by the incorrect application of widescreen, which IIRC ended up displacing the player relative to the camera. It created a lot of controversy for BioShock, and a patch was eventually made to fix it - just as it helped grow the "widescreen gaming" community[1]. Sometimes I wonder what inflection point it took for people to make a big…

I was fine until I got a super-wide curved screen. Then I started to get motion sickness after playing a computer game for a while. I think the article makes a valid point about developers treating motion sickness like an accessibility feature allowing for changes. For me, narrowing the FOV helped.

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#39

Post by rob74 »

Interesting that this is always a big topic when discussing VR, but never really mentioned in connection to "traditional" games. I guess more people get motion sickness from VR, but unfortunately the article doesn't contain numbers on either...

Re: Motion sickness accessibility in video games

#40

Post by fatnoah »

donatj wrote: post #10

Probably a decade ago at this point, a friend got the first publicly available Oculus Rift development kit. We all wanted to try it, so a bunch of us gathered in his attic to give it a go. We were playing this tech demo where you would swing around on ropes to get between flying islands. Every single person who tried it got sick, except for myself. I played it longer than anyone else and did not have an issue. I have…

> To this day however, I still get very car sick trying to read my phone in a moving motor vehicle, so I don't know.

I find this fascinating. Reading in cars, riding in boats in heavy waves, and anything like that does not give me motion sickness. I made it through 45 years of life without even knowing what that was. However, ten minutes of Minecraft in VR was enough to make me sick to my stomach.

(It was also amazing, BTW)

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