Motion sickness in Doom (or other FPS)

[Optimus]

Tell me your experience with motion sickness and doom (or even other FPS). I just searched for this subject in the forums here and I've seen it doesn't exist. So I decided to post something. It's a subject that is really interesting to me and so I'd like to further discuss it here..

From what I've heard around, different engines and different games or different graphics configurations and other minor reasons, can cause motion sickness or not to different people. Each person is affected by something different that works well for others.

For example, fortunatelly, thank god, Doom is one of the FPS where it's hard for me to get motion sicknessed and so I can play for an intense ammount of hours before this happening. For other people, the opposite is happening. Some have blamed doom as the most motion sicknessing games.

There are though occasions where Doom still produces motion sickness for my case in few minutes.

1) While watching other people playing Doom (much)
2) While watching my own recorded LMPs (very much)
3) Either playing OpenGL doom or with the mouse (maybe the shearing of the view?). That's why I still prefer to play with the keys. (very much)
4) When instead of playing carefully, I IDKFA/IDDQD and blast through the level with bazuka at my face (lesser)

Other games that produces sickness too easilly are Wolfenstein3d (That ancient thing, yes. So, I never managed to finish it just for the records. It still makes me puke after 5-10 minutes!) and Halflife (though because it rules, I had to finish it by playing for half an hour each day before feeling very sick). Hopefully I don't get easilly sickness by Unreal Tournament either which is my other favorite one. Quake 1 iirc produced sickness in the past (and I prefered a slow frame rate than a fast one to not get the effect :P) but after playing for a while, it seems like my brain got used to it and I could play without the effect. After finishing the game and having to play for months, when I tried to play it again, the effects were bad again. There are many strange phenomena and parameters in motion sickness in FPS, that differ for each unique person out there, that I'd like to once mention. Some people get sickness by OpenGL versions of various game engines and not Direct3D or even stranger things. And it's the opposite or no effects for others!

Just ranting..

[myk]

I remember gettting it playing Wolfenstein 3D, and also briefly at one point where I changed something in my DOOM (movement input) settings and I hadn't played for some time.

I don't normally get any form of discomfort while playing, or when watching demos (either my own or others'). I did get motion sickness a few years back watching some bad (slow, and recorded with keyboard only) demos, but not too long ago I watched some that were probably as bad but didn't feel sick. Maybe it was the monitor, or perhaps the players' movement style was different even if both were slow.

[Naked Snake]

My uncle gets dizzy when he watched me play FPS games.

[Steeveeo]

I havent gotten motion sickness from DooM, but other games I have gotten a bit of it...

Descent was one of them, a slight vertigo feeling...

Also, Battlezone II was another. 80% of the game is set in hovering vehicles. And in the options menu there's a setting for Autoleveling (automatically making the ship horizontal whenever this is on). It was really fun, turning it off made it so you could do flips off of hills, bridges, and even other vehicles. So, since you could do this, I started ramping off of hills in a scout (light and fast, good for tricks), backflipping and pointing my nose straight down, and raining bullets upon my enemy. That was the only time I ever got any real vertigo in a video game. After a few of these tricks, it just went away...

[CODOR]

I don't watch Doom demos much anymore since I get queasy after a few minutes of watching them. Which is too bad since I enjoy seeing some of the tricks and techniques used in many of them. On the other hand I can play Doom for hours just fine.

The only other time I got motion-sickness from an FPS was about nine or ten years ago when I was watching a friend playing Blood. It was bad enough that I eventually had to leave the room, but I was never sure if it was the strange perspective of the Build engine or the fact that he had the subwoofer cranked (or a combination of the two). Again, I have no problems when I'm playing it myself.

[lupinx-Kassman]

One of my friends once was playing coop with me on Final Doom (Via Doom 95 and a cable, linking the old computers in my house.) The detail on his game was set to low. I noticed he stopped moving in the game, and went over to check on him. He had his face laying in the keyboard with vomit all over the place. I was surprised and got him up, and apparently he got sick from seeing the pistol bobbing in the first two seconds of the game. We laugh about it now though.

[Stilgar]

Wolfenstein 3D and some other games of that era & tech level gave me headaches and stomachaches if I played for a while, like after one or two levels. I rarely feel ill effects from Doom, and don't recall ever having had problems with anything more modern than that.

[BobT99]

Yeah, I got sick from Wolfenstein alot.

[Inferno]

Don't recall getting dizzy from Doom.

Wolfenstein a few times when I got back into playing and wasn't used to the movement. I got a bit dizzy watching my friend play the Jaguar version a few months ago, which actually has decent looking graphics for an old school fps. Probably got dizzy that time because I was sleepy.

I tried playing Painkiller the other day, and the level after the first boss got me real dizzy for some reason. I actually had to turn the game off and put my head down.

[Erp]

Turok bobbing up and down makes me want to puke. I like the original game but can't play it very long.

[Kristian Ronge]

I experience what you might call "motion sickness" (really only a slight discomfort of things not feeling "right") when I haven't played a game in a while. Perhaps it has something to do with the brain needing some playing time to be able to predict motion in the engine (i.e. "at which angle will I be looking up when moving the mouse this much?"). Real-life motion sickness (in cars, boats, etc.) has to do with the brain confusing visual input and the balance input from the inner ear.

[TwinBeast]

I've never puked because of playing Doom or other Doom clones :P

But I did get a weird effect when I had been playing a lot Doom 3. It has that zoom feature and I used that feature a lot to hit the distant enemies better. So I had played it for some several hours and then I got a phone call from my friend and asked me to come into msn. I stop playing and go back to the desktop and msn. Some part in me didn't realise that I had stopped playing and was very confused that I couldn't zoom in and out..

[deathbringer]

I don't think i've ever got motion sickness from an FPS, however i was playing Liberty City Stories on the PSP and walking through the kitchen at uni, i was turning the car in the game and found myself turning as i walked, because the movement i was "seeing" didnt correlate with the movement i was feeling, so i hit the fridge. I also tried doing some taxi missions to kill a bus ride, but it was impossible! the movement of the bus that i could feel didnt fit with the movement i was looking at, so i tried to 'compensate' and ended up driving into walls and things

[BASGTA]

The only game I have ever gotten motion sickness from is, Prey. Although I'm not sure if it was actual motion sickness, or just the fact that you don't know if you're walking on the ceiling, floor or the wall.

[Optimus]

In the past, I was wondering if someone can actually puke because of motion sickness in games. Because I always got very sick, feeling like puking (but I never did) and just stopped the game and tried to calm down. Only once upon in a time it happened to me, playing Oblivion for so many hours, feeling sick and actually puking in my bathroom this time. I solved my question now :)

Well, one interesting theory is that as motion sickness in real life (cars/boat/etc) occures because the inner ear senses that you are actually moving, but not your eyes (If you are inside in the ship or reading a book inside the car instead of watching outside). And the funny thing is that exactly the opposite seems to be happening with FPS. You are tricked while game playing that you are actually the hero and you are so absorbed in that and you think you are really moving around just like your hero (How many times didn't your real self tried to jump/shear away from the monitor to avoid the imp's fireball? :) while you inner ear tells you now that you are standing still and not moving at all.

The question I also had once was, why should my organism vomit? The most interesting theory is that because your inner ear senses diferrent things than your eyes, the brain takes this as an alert that you are actually hallucinating. And as a defense to the possibility that your organism has received some poison, it forces you to vomit so that the organism is cleaned by that. Not much to do with Doom, but I found that interesting. That's why we have to puke! Our organism/brain doesn't get it that it's just a game :)

[Technician]

Wolfenstein and catacombs can make me queasy playing them any length of time.

[david_a]

Try playing Descent using a primitive 3D headset. I couldn't play it for more than 10 minutes at a time without feeling like my eyes were suffering permanent damage.

[printz]

I NEVER get motion sickness when playing a 3-d game. But I do tend to get immersed in the game in order to prevent that. So when I quit, I'm already kinda addicted. But I NEVER get sick for that, because it's all virtual, unlike cars and boats, where I am bobbing without my eyes/brain wanting that (which brings up that sickness is self-induced... so you should think about nice things :) to stop it -- such things as Doom, heavy metal...).

[Quasar]

I don't get motion sickness, but some kinds of color patterns and images and situations cause me to feel very odd, like I have space inside my head, and I get all weird for a while and can't really do anything (I just sort of stare into space and wait for it to pass). My mom has this weird problem too; I think it's a borderline form of epilepsy :P

[EarthQuake]

I'm not susceptible to motion sickness at all. However, I've been diagnosed with migraines and sometimes I can be playing a game and certain flashing lights or furiously changing colors and such can trigger a migraine. Then I'm out for the next day or two. :/

[DJShrimpy]

I feel kinda queasy after playind Doom shareware after a long time. So much brown...

[doom2day]

I once entered a pizza place with black and white tiled linoleum (That was my first visit there) and got really dizzy. It hasn't really happened since. I haven't really experienced motion sickness actually.

[printz]

Do you people really get sick for this? I hope there's no confusion between sickness and dizziness, tired eyes, addiction or feeling of sitting too much.

[LogicDeLuxe]

Watching other people playing or LMPs is much more stressing then playing myself. It's hard to watch for more than half a hour, while playing myself for hours is no problem.

Doom and any other first person view game has the point of view exactly on the rotation axis. Except for Wolfenstein 3D which seems to have it somewhat behind it giving the vertigo feeling of bumping right into the next wall when turning. This is quite annoying.
Reading a book in a driving car is worse for me, though.

And I find the fisheye Quake quite comfortable. It looks more natural, imho. Developers should optimize 3D accellerator hardware for such renderers, and game developers should support it.

[GGG]

No instances of motion sickness in games here. A requirement for me to get motion sickness is that my body is in motion. Number one suspects: reading in an enclosed ground vehicle or boat.

[Raikoh_Minamoto]

I got some really bad headaches when I played Half-Life 2 for the first time, probably from some combination of those washed-out yellows of the Water Hazard chapter and the visual cone, which was of a smaller angle than most FPS games.

When I'm in the family RV while it's moving, I can't play games or read, or I get really nauseated. Curiously enough, this doesn't happen when I'm in a moving car.

Never got anything from Doom, though. :)

[Nick Perrin]

Raikoh_Minamoto said:

I got some really bad headaches when I played Half-Life 2 for the first time, probably from some combination of those washed-out yellows of the Water Hazard chapter and the visual cone, which was of a smaller angle than most FPS games.

Yeah a lot of people experienced motion sickness while playing HL2, and it was because the FOV was at 75 degrees, slightly zoomed-in compared to mostly every other FPS at a farther-out 90 degrees. Luckily, I experienced NO motion sickness either way.

I never get motion sickness from any games. In fact, I would LOVE to see a movie made in all first-person.

[Grazza]

I have never suffered from motion sickness in any games, although I do recall feeling a little dizzy on just one occasion, following a long session trying to record a -fast demo on a map where there was constant action and the final parts involved a lot of circle strafing around a bunch of monsters.

I know that I am not immune to motion sickness though. Fortunately, I have only suffered from it on one occasion: I was seasick for about a day when crossing from Iceland to Greenland last year: < 2000 tonne ship + force 9 winds. It still seems a bit ridiculous to me for a little bit of movement to have such an effect - it ought to be a question of mind over matter, but clearly it isn't so easy... [To anyone who doesn't know, I should mention that seasickness is far far more unpleassant a condition than you would imagine if you have never suffered from it; even if you "definitely don't ever get sea sick", take some pills with you, just in case, if you are going on a small vessel that might encounter heavy seas.]

A few people have mentioned difficulties watching demos as opposed to playing. I have never had this myself, but maybe I can suggest a couple of things:

* Watch with uncapped framerate enabled. Or with it disabled, if that helps. Or check that there is nothing slowing it down somehow (visual features you don't need, resource-hogging programs running in the background, etc.), so that when you uncap the framerate, you are getting genuinely smooth movement, rather than jerkiness. (Maybe adjust the FOV too, as judging from some posts above, that can be a factor.)

* Be more interactive in the way you watch demos. Pause it sometimes, look at the stats, use the walkcam to see what it going on elsewhere or to watch the action from a different viewpoint. Or turn on the walkcam and just try to keep up with the player. You don't just have to sit there as a spectator. This advice tallies to some degree (sort of) with one of the ideas for combatting seasickness, i.e. making sure you can see the water itself, so you can be more in charge of events by having a reliable reference point in addition to your body's own balance mechanisms.

[The Lag]

i've never experienced motion sickness from games, but i remember when i first got doom and i was showing my sister a level i was making for it and she couldn't watch for more than a few seconds without feeling queezy.

[Abysmal Seed]

My dad used to get carsick playing Need for Speed on a Playstation with a steering wheel control.