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molehill

Videogames and nausea.

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I was just playing Half-life 2 recently (for the first time) and noticed that I felt a rising urge to chuck up. I don't know if it was the colours or lighting or game physics that induced this reaction but whatever it was I won't be playing Half-life 2 again (seriously overrated in my opinion). I got as far as the Hovercraft segment.

So I've been wondering how I can play games like Doom, C&Q, Fallout etc. for days on end without any adverse conditions, but others like Halo 3 or Serious Sam 2 are physically (!) impossible.

Does anyone else have a similar experience?

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I felt sick when I played CoD MW 1 for like 2 hours straight. I think it had to do with all the blurring of the screen when you got hit and the smoke that forced you to concentrate your eyes to the extreme when you were aiming down your sight. Or maybe I just need glasses.

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I remember reading in The Masters of Doom that players of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were calling in to complain about motion sickness from playing those games.

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The only time I have felt even the slightest hint of motion sickness when playing a video game was in a Doom WAD where all the walls, floors and... well, pretty much everything had been made to warp, change and generally disorientate the player. I can't remember what the WAD was though. Even then, the feeling was only slight and soon passed.

IRL, however, I do suffer motion sickness in a car as a passenger quite easily and I have once been very ill in a small glass fibre survival boat on a very rough sea during an offshore evacuation exercise. Sea sickness REALLY sucks in a way I don't think you can imagine unless you have actually had it.

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I don't know if it was just to get me off his back, but years ago when I asked my father why he stopped playing Doom he said that it "made him dizzy". He used to play it fine when it first came out (I should know - watching him play is what first got me into it) but I guess perception changes after a while (though he was in his 50's at the time)

In terms of why not Doom and why Half-Life 2? I can only imagine it has something to do with the differences in motion handling and gameplay style. Not to mention the type of graphics each game uses are on different ends of the spectrum. Bah, who knows

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If it's not all the way up, I'd say to try cranking the FOV to somewhere around 90. I've heard that people get an odd version of claustrophobia from the tunnel vision that a low FOV provides. After that, turn off motion blur and mouse acceleration (if they're on) and see if that helps any.

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My mom used to play video games like Wolfenstein all the time. Then one day, she played it when she was sick, and she couldn't play it without feeling nauseous. It even persisted after she got better, and when she played other FPSs. Ever since then, she's stuck to puzzle games.

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I only feel weird when there's really fast strobing lights, that also have a huge contrast in their on/off states, though it's not necessary to have a huge contrast, but it sure makes it feel more weirder.

The strobing lights in Doom are fine, but it's possible to annoy me with the glow effect, which can have a faster effect. I guess if about every sector in the level was strobing, glowing, blinking and flickering, I'd feel weird.

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I haven't gotten motion sickness from playing any game before. But I recently discovered that I'll get sick from watching Doom demos for too long.

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I've felt sick exactly twice playing games. The first time was when I watched my friend playing a snowboarding simulator in an arcade. When he flew off a cliff on that huge screen my stomach just turned. Weird.

The second was when I was playing Oblivion and I was in one of the gates. The sky had two different textures moving either at different paces or in different directions. Looking up at it made me feel sick briefly. It was weird. I never otherwise feel sick from games -- even that same effect has never felt the same way for me since then.

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The only game I ever got sick while playing was Eradicator. Something about it, I dunno.

edit: damn, something about watching that video still makes me a little nauseous.

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I've never suffered this but I've heard like Steeveeo that a low field of view can cause some motion sickness - and this is becoming increasingly prevalent now that we get games where the default FOV can be as low as a paltry 60 degrees (Skyrim). This depends on the engine I'm sure, but I always feel as if lower FOV's don't scale evenly with your mouse sensitivity, so it can feel quite weird. Rather than simply having a more narrow field of view I'd feel like I'm constantly zoomed in or leaning forward.

The old Catacomb 3D games were like that - in theory, they used the same raycasting as Wolfenstein 3D, and yet whenever I looked around the walls seemed to sheer in this strange way. Perhaps it was a different rendering method, but thinking back on it I also think that game had a really low field of view. Things were very close up and I never felt right playing for a long period of time.

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molehill said:

I was just playing Half-life 2 recently (for the first time) and noticed that I felt a rising urge to chuck up. I don't know if it was the colours or lighting or game physics that induced this reaction but whatever it was I won't be playing Half-life 2 again (seriously overrated in my opinion). I got as far as the Hovercraft segment.


I can't remember if it behaves the same in vanilla HL2 but I've noticed that in a lot of HL2 mods the guns sway around considerably when you look around. There was one I remember playing where every time you looked left the gun would drift to the right, almost going off screen, and when you looked right, it'd drift almost directly to the center as though you were looking down the iron sights. Just watching the gun while playing made me feel sick

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Can't say I've ever gone through that. I do, sometimes, get a little panicked when I fall from great heights, which I assume connects with my fear of heights.

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PRIMEVAL said:

I do, sometimes, get a little panicked when I fall from great heights, which I assume connects with my fear of heights.

That's just your immersion in the game though. Kind of like whenever I'm fighting some oversized spider in a game it makes me squirm (including the trites in Doom 3), and I instinctively look around he room I'm in to check if there's no real spiders around.

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The only times I've ever felt anything clsoe to actual dizzyness when playing a video game, was when using any Doom source port with freelook when falling down a really deep elevator shaft -such as the one in Deus Vult- or when watching a rising pillar up-close.

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I have had problems with headaches while playing Skyrim if I don't adjust the FoV at the beginning of the game to something like say, 80 or 90.

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Its good to be immune to such problems. I never had problems with any FPS games including quite extreme rotations in Descent or Terminal Velocity. Games with incorect (consolish) FOV makes me just feel that something is not right. And even Portal crazy rotations are fine with me. I also retain quite good spatial orientation in these extreme cases.
Only thing that almost made me sick was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpksyojwqzE in fullscreen late at night.

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I had issues with playing Wolfenstein last few times I tried playing it on my desktop. On my laptop, I'm fine, though. I think it was just meant for smaller screens.

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It's a phenomenon I'm familiar with, but have never experienced myself. An old fling of mine suffered from this, but it only really applied to modern games (she handled GoldenEye like a pro). Come to think of it, a relative has trouble with shaky-cam films, and who can blame him? Not only is it awkward to watch, the whole technique seems to revolve around making the viewer as uncomfortable as possible.

PRIMEVAL said:

Can't say I've ever gone through that. I do, sometimes, get a little panicked when I fall from great heights, which I assume connects with my fear of heights.


UR Map20? :P

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