motion sickness???

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Bman123

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Dec 19, 2007
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I guess that what I should call it. Was wondering if anyone here has gotten this from playing a pc game or game in general? I have been gaming since a little kid on a atari and have never gotten a sick feeling from playing a game until today.

A buddy that I play MW3 with invited me to try out arma 2 with him and a friend. I installed the free version and tried it out. That game made me sick as hell. I got a really bad headache, made my eyes hurt and I even threw up. I guess that would be motion sickness right?

Was just wondering if anyone has ever experienced this or not. I played the game for about 25 minutes yesterday at 5pm and felt like shit all night long.
 
It's more normal than you realize, especially with high-speed first person shooters. My friend's mom got motion sickness just watching us play Mario Kart for the SNES
 
The only game I've ever become severely motion sick is from Blade Kitten within 30 minutes to an hour.
 
I have to be very selective when I play an FPS. I first noticed it with some N64 titles... I would get a horrible headache and throw up (then go back for more!).

Now, I just make sure I can get a decent steady frame rate and play with the lights on. I also turn off any "bobbing" if possible. I limit myself and stop playing when I start to feel it in my eyes (or for sure when the sweats start!).

Newer games seem to be a lot better for me. I tried to go back and play doom 3, and couldn't make it more than 20 minutes in. Fear gets me, too... still haven't been able to get through that one.
 
This happens a lot with FPS games for me. I used to get it in HL-engine games, and I get it with HL2. I don't have much of an issue with Fallout/Skyrim games unless I'm indoors a lot.

Some third person games like inFamous will make me feel awful too.

It's called simulator sickness. There's not much you can do for it. You can try ginger, but in my experience it does next to nothing. Distance from the monitor, ambient light, and what's in your peripheral vision play a part in how bad it can get.
 
Yes...it happens really bad to me sometimes.

If I am not at a reasonable distance for the monitor size, fast motion, pretty much anything can set me off and it sucks. Playing something like my gameboy in the car...no go.

You are not alone.
 
Low FoV gives me motion sickness. I'm fine with correct FoV even at high speeds.
 
A friend of mine succumbed to sudden Motion Sickness when he played Fear 3 around 2am with no lights turned on in his
room, hes using a 23 inch full hd monitor, he said what triggered and intensifies his sudden motion sickness are the tons of goose
bumps he got while finishing a scary scene there where you'll enter in an abandoned warehouse and you'll end up passing
through lots of stacked large LCD tvs where some zombies will suddenly attack you and on the scene where you'll pass
through a room where some dead skinned people are hanged, that's where he ran to the comfort room and threw up when
he got out of the toilet he opened the lights and rested for a while then he shuts down his PC and went to bed.

Though this is not the first time that has happened to him, the first one he said occurred while playing Doom 3 at midnight.

- Honestly saying i dont know how goosebumps can trigger motion sickness BUT, for me spare the motion sickness coz
when i play FEAR 3 and DOOM 3 i got lots and lots of goosebumps too and when i play at night i never turn the lights
off in my room coz those games are so scary...
 
Last edited:
Dark Shade said:
It's more normal than you realize, especially with high-speed first person shooters.
Click to expand...
This...

I got a little nauseous playing HL2, but other games don't bother me as much or at all. Got a few friends that can play games based on source engine for ~20 minutes or so before it becomes unbearable for them.
 
This just gave me an idea for an anti-piracy scheme. Didn't pay for the game? Enjoy blowing chunks all over your screen every 20 minutes.
 
CEpeep said:
This just gave me an idea for an anti-piracy scheme. Didn't pay for the game? Enjoy blowing chunks all over your screen every 20 minutes.
Click to expand...

It would fit in well. Even people that paid for the game get screwed! :)
 
Yeah, its called simulator sickness. Apparently its where your eyes are telling your brain you're moving, but your inner ear is telling your brain you're not moving, so it starts screwing with you in a similar way to motion sickness.

I rarely ever get it, but a couple of games have really bothered me. For me I think its linked to camera shake/sway/bob.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness#Simulation_sickness

The first game I ever noticed it in was F1 2010, and after a while I narrowed it down to the camera vibration in helmet cam. The game actually had different levels of vibrations in different cars so it was different depending on what team I was driving with, but it was never too bad and only affecting me after I'd already played the game a lot. Luckily the game had an xml file which could be edited to remove camera shake. I actually noticed other racing games (which I used to play a lot of but never gave me motion sickness) tended to have the cockpit shake and the world stayed reasonably steady, where as F1 2010 had the whole game world vibrating on screen.

Then there was Dead Space. That game was just shit. Low FOV, the camera sweeps slowly around and the mouse input was sluggish and inconsistent. Something there caused me to get motion sickness and since the game camera can't be modified I never narrowed down what caused it.

Then recently Dead Island. The camera wobbles as you move and it gives me a headache.

Those are the only games I can think of that have ever affected me in 20+ years of gaming. I've played a lot of FPS games and third person games that are more or less fast paced, but something about those games affects me badly.

Its quite a common issue and I think developers should make an effort to fix it by allowing camera settings to be adjustable as that's the cause for most people (FOV, camera shake/wobble, excessive contrast).
 
Dark Shade said:
It's more normal than you realize, especially with high-speed first person shooters. My friend's mom got motion sickness just watching us play Mario Kart for the SNES
Click to expand...

ARMA 2 is probably the slowest paced first person shooters in recent history.
 
Happens to me too. HL:2 was the first game I ever really noticed it on, and it's still one of the worst offenders.
 
I get headaches/nauseous playing mostly first person view games. Even Resident Evil 5 gives me big headaches. I've never played more than 10 minutes of it due to the way the camera moves in that game.
 
The only game that I get motion sickness in was Crysis. I could never get through that part where one of the mission was to float around the tunnel to get to a place. I would get terrible head ache. It was weird!
 
The only time I get it is when a game has view bob as if the main character is a brain-damaged seal being tasered.
 
This has happened to me more and more recently in the last couple of years. It used to not bother me so much. But I think it may have something to do with since I've had my kids I got out of playing as much. Watching my son play FPS on the 360 really makes me sick. Bioshock did it to me on PC and most others to a lesser extent.

I read something I thought was interesting a few months back when I was looking for information for what I could do for this, and I don't know if it's true or not but it said that what happens is that your body thinks that it is being poisoned and to get rid of the "poison" it makes you want to throw up. I don't know if that's accurate or not but I thought that was interesting.
 
Check your field of view setting and see if you can adjust it.
 
Only time I got motion sickness from a video game was when I was watching a friend play FEAR1 on 360. It wasn't even during a scary part, just normal run and gun, and I started feeling a little sick to my stomach.

Walked outside for a breather and was good to go after that.
 
remember a old game that it bounced left and right so much that it made people ill. They had to patch it to reduce it. Thats about all I remember
 
I get motion sickness from games as well. Off the top of my head:
- Every Half Life game has given me motion sickness. Though I don't have that trouble with other Valve made Source based FPS games.

- If I watch my friends play BF3 on the consoles, I get motion sickness. Odd considering that if I play BF3 at my computer, I'm totally fine.

- Halo 2 gave me motion sickness as well.Though all the other Halo games didn't give me that problem.
 
Well I've never suffered from motion sickness (maybe it's from being in the womb while my parents traveled all over the place with my fathers work). But I do get headaches when FOV is too constrained/narrow. If it's bad enough, like the demo of ME3 is, then I won't even play the game because its literally not worth the headache. I know that at least with headaches and crappy FOV, it can be fixed really really easy with a FOV slider or adjustment to a config file, but not sure about the motion sickness people can get.
 
Ive had it on lots of games 1st person and 3rd person. It was really bad when I had been exclusively playing WoW for a long time and then went back to FPS. Seems to go away after playing the game for a week or so.
Only symptom I get is nausea, but have never thrown up from it.
 
It is just crazy to have experienced this for the first time at 27 years old. I have been playing games since atari and nothing has ever done this to me.
 
Stangely the only time a game has made me feel unwell was recently playing GTA4, after I reinstalled it and didn't think to turn the res down so the frame rate was a bit choppy. I didn't even realise that's what was causing it at first. After I tweaked it and got it running more smoothly I was fine.
 
I've gotten motion sick from jets in BattleField 3, other than that I never have been in a game (and I've gamed since the NES first came out). It only happened twice, when I turned on V-Sync and Triple Buffering together, so I turned them back off as I normally don't game with either, waited a week to fly again, and have been fine ever since again. Still, I at least understand where some people I know are coming from when they say that certain games or camera angles make them motion sick now!
 
Bman123 said:
I guess that what I should call it. Was wondering if anyone here has gotten this from playing a pc game or game in general? I have been gaming since a little kid on a atari and have never gotten a sick feeling from playing a game until today.

A buddy that I play MW3 with invited me to try out arma 2 with him and a friend. I installed the free version and tried it out. That game made me sick as hell. I got a really bad headache, made my eyes hurt and I even threw up. I guess that would be motion sickness right?

Was just wondering if anyone has ever experienced this or not. I played the game for about 25 minutes yesterday at 5pm and felt like shit all night long.
Click to expand...

Descent was the first time I got motion sickness and the last time. it took all of 2 days to get used to it :)
 
FOV set too low is the #1 cause for motion sickness in games. Use the WSGF Games List to find out how to increase FOV in the games that make you sick. There are very few games that can't be fixed, though some games (particularly Oblivion) make it very inconvenient.

Poorly done head-bobbing is an obvious cause, and Stalker had it bad; the Stalker Complete mod turned it off (or at least told you how in the readme, I forget which).
 
Tudz said:
Yeah, its called simulator sickness. Apparently its where your eyes are telling your brain you're moving, but your inner ear is telling your brain you're not moving, so it starts screwing with you in a similar way to motion sickness.
Click to expand...

I guess simulator sickness is the opposite in the sense that you're actually stationary but visually you appear to be moving, It's the contradiction between the sensory input which causes the problem.

I think the main thing to do is make sure your vision is framed in such a way that it's obvious that your whole vision isn't moving that only a subset of that is moving, this means you should sit further back from your monitor such that you can easily see the bezel around the edge and preferably some sationary objects close by, such as speakers or whatnot.

Typically FOV plays a part as well, with a small FOV you lose sense of orientation because you judge your position in your surroundings based off obvious landmarks, the less you can see in the peripheral vision the less sure you are of your orientation relative to the world, increasing FOV should help with this.

Some people also find motion sickness or travel sickness tablets can help for brief periods.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Typically FOV plays a part as well, with a small FOV you lose sense of orientation because you judge your position in your surroundings based off obvious landmarks, the less you can see in the peripheral vision the less sure you are of your orientation relative to the world, increasing FOV should help with this.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think it depends. Dead Island the cause seems to be the head swaying when moving, and when I widened up the FOV it actually made it worse. I found a slightly lower FOV (still higher than standard, but lower than most people recommend) and sitting as far away from my monitor as I could and still reach the mouse reduced the motion sickness a bit.

The stationary items around the monitor could be an interesting idea, never tried that.
 
Tudz said:
Yeah, I think it depends. Dead Island the cause seems to be the head swaying when moving, and when I widened up the FOV it actually made it worse. I found a slightly lower FOV (still higher than standard, but lower than most people recommend) and sitting as far away from my monitor as I could and still reach the mouse reduced the motion sickness a bit.

The stationary items around the monitor could be an interesting idea, never tried that.
Click to expand...

I think you're right, any head bob or sway will probably seem worse with a higher FOV. I never thought of that. I think it was Mirrors edge that gave a lot of gamers, specifically console gamers a lot of problems, because the view point rotates and moves about quite fast and with a low FOV these gamers are losing their frame of reference in the world really easily.

I've never personally suffered with these issues thank god, and the fixed items around the monitor is really just a theory, that might be worth testing a bit to see if it is effective, I'd maybe start with something bright and easy to see, it might even be worth having a bright coloured straight edge along one of the side bezels on the monitor. Essentially you want to mirror the effect of looking through a window, where you know whatever is outside the window that moves is relative to an overall stationary field of view which is what the window frame presents to you.

Actually I just realised I do kinda get the same problem but with my projector screen, that's a little over 120" and only about 8ft away so fills your entire vision almost, I can definitely tell the difference over my monitor but it's not enough to make me feel ill, it's also borderless and often used in the dark so not framed well in your vision, a few drinks and the screen becomes too much to look at though.

Red Dead Redemption + bottle of whisky + full screen motion = you don't wanna know :p
 
I should try drinking and playing Dead Island, I think the numbing of the senses might actually help... I always used to do best at games while drunk :p
 
I have a friend who can't play ANY FPS without feeling nauseous after a bit, no matter the FOV he uses. He's even tried it when sitting on a couch and he just doesn't like it. 3rd person games don't bother him though.

I remember when I was young I used to get a little nauseous when playing Doom II, even though Doom 1 never gave me problems for some reason.

It's very rare that games do it to me anymore, although I remember the narrow FOV in OFP:Dragon Rising made me feel disoriented at times.

Also, the FOV in Arma2 can be tweaked in the .ini, although there is actually a couple of values that need changed instead of 1, IIRC.
 
castun said:
Oh, and check out this moron on the Steam forums in a couple FOV related threads:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2530198
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2530206
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2529523
Click to expand...

That habeebit guy should be legally neutered so he doesn't pass on his worthless genetics. Sometimes I wished I could pay a $100 fee to be able to thrust my fist through a computer screen and knock out someone through the interwebs for being such a subhuman.

Sorry, my inner curmudgeon comes though loud and clear when I see obvious stupidity.
 
ive just started getting this recently and very badly. so far alpha protocol and donkey kong 64 have both made me really nauseous and sweaty in under an hour. dead space doesnt seem as bad. i think those are the only games ive been playing recently so thats all i have to go off of. i played tons of computer games all through college and then basically stopped after graduation in 2006. recently ive started playing more again in the last few months and i just cant do it any more. :(
 
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