Motion sickness accessibility in video games | Hacker News Reader

Motion sickness accessibility in video games

madelinemiller.dev

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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 headaches get quite painful, so I very much appreciate games that give me an FoV slider with a reasonably large maximum. I'd rather not need to take meclizine to comfortably play a game.

Motion sickness in Far Cry is why I stopped playing first person or any 3D games. It has taken about 20 years before I seriously tried again and figured out that with higher frame rates and wide enough FoV I could actually play them again.

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

Games often widen the FoV when sprinting (or boosting or whatever verb applies) because the stuff at the edge of your screen really zooms by and makes it look like you're going faster.

What probably happened in Far Cry was they had some stupid narrow FoV like 65 degrees and bump it up wider when sprinting, then when you stop sprinting it goes back to 65 which overrides the wider angle that parent commenter had set.

I'm the same way: low FoV gives me terrible headaches, like I'm walking around with binoculars strapped to my face. I can go up to 180° very comfortably in minecraft on the other hand. I think the main reason is that the lower the FoV, the faster the image moves when you rotate. If you imagine a comically small 10° for illustration, you will go through 9 full screen wipes if you turn 90°, but if you have 180° of FoV it is only a single ½ wipe.

Higher FoV just inherently feels less disorientating to me as well, being able to see all your surroundings makes the virtual space feel more cohesive and real, instead of a series of disconnected whirling imagery.

> 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?

For me, it doesn't matter how far I am from the screen. If the camera is too far from the character in first person or too close in third person (Darksiders is impossible, Metal Gear 5 is fine), I can't play it.

Also, screen shake, head bob, and small FOV are impossible.

Overwatch has a weird default perspective that took me a while to adjust to. I wonder if changing from the default (103 degree) FoV would have helped? Though reduced FoV means that you won't see as much on screen without looking around.

fov is 99% of motion sickness for me too. thanks to all the games that allow fov adjustment, even if it is indirectly like in a config file.

Isn't that because of the missing head bob?

Head bob would make it worse in these cases where the FoV is too narrow for the viewing distance

The one thing that will universally get me in a video game is head bob mixed with weapon sway. My brain will nope the heck out of those games almost instantly. I will happily ride the worst roller coasters, boats, busses, and cars I can find and get zero motion sickness. One minute playing Call of Duty? Done.

FOV helps with some games, but the bob is always what gets me. I would love the option to turn stuff like that off.

The head bob ruined the modern Tomb Raider games for me. I had to return them after less than 30 minutes played because I was getting ready to vomit.

That you can't turn it off makes it completely unaccessible to me. And the camera's bobbing around like a drunkard.

I love Halo because it doesn't trigger any motion sickness for me at all. No head bob.

I played a top-down 3D RTS once and had to turn it off because the camera had just enough acceleration/momentum/drift that it was triggering dizziness.

Head bob mixed with weapon sway almost ruined Dusk for me. I learned then that those two „features” are no go for me. After turning them off I could play just fine and fully enjoy this fantastic game.

> head bob mixed with weapon sway

That's the only thing that ever bothered me in a game displayed on a monitor, when combined with underpowered hardware for said game and thus low fps.

Fortunately the game had the option to turn off bobbing/swaying so I could keep playing it until i upgraded the video card.

I'm also one of the unfortunates that can't stand more than like 30 min in a VR headset sadly.

Yeah, frame drops hurt my brain a little. What's funny is that I'm totally fine in VR after using it for a few months for flight sims. Although, after the initial novelty wears off I just prefer head tracking and a flat screen now.

Hmm I haven't tried any flight sims. I guess those would be much easier on the brain because they don't really simulate your head moving but an enclosure you're sitting in moving.

I also hear VR is great for Euro Truck Simulator. Which simulates the same thing, vehicle driving.

Maybe I'll even try one day, but the only PC option left on the market requires a Facebook (or Meta, I don't care how they call it so don't correct me) account doesn't it?

When you first use VR for flight sims it is WILD. When you roll the plane you actually feel it in your vestibular system. Eventually you learn that it's not real and you don't get that vertigo feeling anymore but until then it's exhausting.

You only need Facebook for Oculus products. The rest mostly use SteamVR. I originally used an HP Reverb G2 but it was discontinued and now I'm looking into a PiMax Crystal. I hear the Valve Index is also pretty good. But VR is just so dang expensive.

Oh right. Valve Index. I forgot there are some non Occulus products still in the market.

But I also remembered why i stopped looking. Everyone thinks you want those motion controllers and want to clear a space in front of the pc/tv to dance around.

I just want to sit in my chair and command my spaceship/giant mech/truck. I don't want the fancy controllers and I especially don't want to rearrange my house around a VR headset.

And yes, they're -ing expensive. And they probably require an even more expensive video card (i have a 4060 now and i'm not willing to pay more than that for pretty poligons).

Add to that my motion sickness that means short sessions.

Maybe in 5 years...

The newer VR headsets with eye tracking are a lot more forgiving graphics card wise. My 4060 handles VR just fine. Most games I play are sitting down as well. I'm not a huge fan of walking around blindfolded!

This is an important topic and I don't think this article is really getting into all the important things that have been learned about it over the past few years, primarily by VR developers.

Too much of the current dialogue is about how players can "get over" it. This is silly. There are demonstrable, proven things which cause motion sickness via the visual system. Unfortunately there are some irreconcilable issues with doing certain activities (ie moving/turning without player input) in VR games so it's either abandon those activities or blame the users. Considering Meta has now poured nearly $85bn into their AR/VR effort, there's a lot on the line and the last thing they're going to do is admit that the technology is fundamentally limited to certain activities.

Here's an early video from Oculus when it was still a bunch of enthusiasts chasing something magic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DgfiDEqfaY&t=1356s

But nowadays you have people that play VR and have "VR Legs", and then you have the rest of us who have normal human brains and normal human eyes and don't want to take it upon ourselves to relearn how the world works so we don't puke when playing an FPS.

The bottom line is that the human visual system is very sensitive to acceleration, especially in the peripheral vision. Acceleration can be linear, angular, or even in odd dimensions like during an FOV shift which god forbid a game would do without telling you.

The easiest thing you can do to save yourself is get a smaller display or sit further away so that your peripheral vision is spared any of the motion and your fovea is gathering the majority of it. This is why "tunnel vision" in VR works for some people.

Hi, I'm the author of the article, thanks for your comment. I definitely agree I didn't mention as much around VR as I would've liked, mostly as it's an area that I've paid a lot less attention to in recent years. I was an early adopter of it (as a developer), but mostly dropped off when the industry moved away from teleport-style locomotion. I'm honestly really glad that research is actually going into this in the VR/AR space.

The article was primarily focused on non-VR games and the various accessibility settings that can greatly diminish the problem, but are often an afterthought even in games that are praised for pushing accessibility. Eg, the recent Indiana Jones game inspired me to write this article, as it's being heavily praised for pushing accessibility standards in many ways, but lacks accessibility options to disable the head bobbing and weapon sway when moving.

Something I've become fairly aware of are all the little "quirks" in the ways I like to play games that I've developed over the years, that I hadn't realised were actually to reduce motion sickness. I do definitely plan on going back and updating the article to include some of my learnings since writing it. Eg, I always play in windowed 1440p on a 27inch 4K monitor because it then takes up less of my total vision, which I guess is a workaround when having a display that's too large for the sitting distance.

I think there's a middle ground

Provide options for people that get motion sickness the same way we provide accessibility options. Let those of us that get less motion sickness get the "full experience".

So far I'm lucky. I've only got sick in VR twice. Once from trying Breath of the Wild via the Labo VR kit. Once trying a hacked GTA-5 VR. Both made me feels incredibly sick, far beyond what I'd have expected before experiencing it. So, I'm super sad that some people experience this more and I hope we can find ways to accommodate them.

That said, I played Half-Life: Alyx back when it came out. In my mind I assumed teleporting, the default, was the way to play because I assumed stick motion (normal joypad controller based FPS motion) would be more sickening. But, for me, it turned out after a few levels, teleporting felt worse than sliding. I think because each teleport was so disorienting.

Strangely, I got zero motion sickness from Jet Island. One of my top 5 VR experiences of all time and at a glance would also seem to be the most likely game to make people sick. Why it doesn't I'm not sure other than the obvious (fast framerate)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/587220/Jet_Island/

To add, I got a 38inch wide monitor. Playing any first person came on that screen full screen makes me sick. I have to play all PC games in a window now. I think if I switched back to a 27inch monitor I wouldn't have that issue.

The reason that Jet Island doesn't make you sick is mostly that it does a lot of work to tie the movement to your physical actions. Games like Gorilla Tag have done well here also. The major insult to our vestibular system via visual input is when visuals change without any corresponding physical action... the classic example is vection when a train moves and your car stays still. You have no other physical inputs so the brain says "hol up".

Ironically, we don't puke every time we accelerate a car, and that's because we get to feel the pressure of the seat against us, maybe the decision to push the accelerator pedal, etc.

It doesn't hurt that Jet Island puts your hands right in front of you so you have a frame of reference. Frame of reference is another cue to helping with VR sickness. Cockpits are our friend.

But yeah, it sounds like you've pushed your personal boundaries pretty far. To be clear, I have no problem with enthusiasts testing themselves. The issue is when giant companies like Meta try to mainstream things and they flip the responsibility onto players. I don't appreciate that.

I get zero motion sickness from VR, it’s just never been an issue. And I really abuse the limits of locomotion with my highest playtime being doom wads/duke3d.

Oddly, what will induce nausea is <120 FPS on sample and hold displays. From the day someone put an LCD in front of me, they’ve done the same thing. The blur as my viewpoint shifts, it’s immediately like I’ve been placed on a boat in rough waters.

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 a lazy eye. It's fine most of the time but when I get tired it just drifts off into the outer corner and makes me look scary. My guess at the time was that my brain was just used to getting signals from my eyes that didn't make sense.

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.

If you have an iPhone, check out vehicle motion cues in the accessibility settings. It helped me be able to use my phone as a passenger in a car.

Whoa! Where's that! Why do they have to advertise the latest Product Green or whatever skin and countless emoji and not useful features like this one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA

You can add it to control center, either as its own toggle or via accessibility shortcuts menu

Found it and set it to "automatic" for now.

It wasn't there last time i went into accessibility to enable reduce motion. That one not because it gave me motion sickness but because the background parallax scrolling is pointless and annoying.

It's new in iOS 18, sometime last fall

A while back I had worse eyesight on one eye than the other, and the result was that if I closed just my good eye, after a few seconds, I'd see nothing with both eyes, because even though my bad eye was still seeing the world, my brain was so used to the opposite being true it sketched in the darkness from the closed eye.

What seems to happen is your brain learns to ignore the signal from one of the eyes if the other is "malfunctioning" somehow.

With a lazy eye, the brain tends to just outright ignore the conflicting signals and you end up only seeing out of one eye.

My guess is that the IPD was the primary problem for everyone else. That's real easy to get wrong and it can cause massive eye strain as your brain tries to force your eyes to focus on an image that is geometrically impossible to focus. In your case, you probably ended up just using one eye and your brain filled in the missing data. That way you sidestep the focusing problem.

I too have lazy eye. I get wicked motion sickness from most FPS games. So I would not equate too much to that hypothesis.

They were talking specifically about the VR mechanics though, not gaming in general.

I had some motion sickness when I first started VR. I made a little thing that I found on reddit that helped. It's just a vibration disk hooked to a battery and attached to a headband. You position it behind your ear on the mastoid bone. I don't know why it works, but it does. I eventually got my VR legs and can play for hours without motion sickness, most of the time. Some games still eff me up, though; like The Break In, which I love, but can only play for an hour before I get sick.

> 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)

I believe (as a layman) that motion sickness in vehicles is caused by a mismatch between what the vestibular system perceives and what the eyes do. However, headset-based VR systems have an additional issue called vergence-accommodation conflict, which is where the focus of each individual eye isn't at the same distance as the stereoscopic vision of both eyes together.

My prediction is that one day (in twenty years, perhaps) we'll have miniature holograms for displays and thus get a proper match between accommodation and vergence!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence-accommodation_conflic...

In VR, some games make me sick, though most of them don't.

One of the worst was a roller-coaster simulator. What really did it, I think was the lack of g-forces. If you have ever ridden a roller coaster, you are probably familiar with the crushing feeling after the drop as you go back up again, I was, and braced myself for it. Except... nothing happened, of course, but it felt really weird. Even weirder when looking to the side, the acceleration is all wrong! I lasted about two minutes before getting sick.

I took some time to recover then tried again. Now, I did much better. I wouldn't say it was comfortable, but it wasn't to the point of wanting to stop immediately. But also, the immersion was broken, I went from "I am in a roller coaster" to "I am watching a 3D movie", which made for a pretty boring experience. To be honest, I enjoyed the first two minutes where I had to call stop more than the half hour or so that followed.

I am sure the same thing happen with the rope swings. Like a roller coaster, rope swings alternate between weightlessness and high g-forces, which VR obviously cannot transcribe. But if for some reason, your brain didn't expect these sensations, then no problem.

That's the reason I think motion sickness is a real problem for VR, even if you can deal with it. Because the way you deal with it is essentially by breaking immersion, but immersion is the whole point of VR. It also applies to non-VR immersive games to a lesser extent.

So, yes, I think it is something we should take very seriously, first by fixing the "bugs": low framerates, unnatural camera movements, etc..., by adjusting gameplay to avoid unnecessary motion sickness, and finally by providing accessibility features.

It is a bit of a controversial take, as it may seem "woke" or something, as if caring about motion sickness will make the experience worse for those who aren't motion sick. But it is actually the opposite! Fighting against motion sickness breaks immersion, even at a subconscious level. The general idea is that motion sickness appears when the sensory experience is inconsistent, try to make the sensory experience as consistent as possible, both against motion sickness and for better immersion.

Microsoft has amazing resources[0] for gaming accessibility and also provide services for auditing accessibility during development. While I haven't been directly involved in a project using them I did take part of their report for one of the games developed at my previous job (Thunderful) and was really impressed by how thorough it was.

With all that said, I can't find anything there about motion sickness. I must just be missing it, right? Also, the only reference I find to VR are in relation to UI scale.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/accessibility

A friend, whom works in accessibility, has also spoken highly of there efforts. Strange they don't have motion sickness included.

I run into this with melee attacks in a lot of first person games (Cyberpunk, Deep Rock Galactic). Often the camera is pinned to the character's head, the head which is animated during a melee attack. Both games above actually have screen shake accessibility sliders which critically do nothing to prevent this source of motion sickness.

I suspect it has to do with "camera movement I didn't control". I recall some research done by Valve during the VR development days that resulted in the "teleport" movement fix.

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.

I don't normally get motion sick in games, but I actually have the worst time with 2D card games the most. And these games are the ones developers will bother least with any comfort settings!

I recently had this experience with Wildfrost - a decent game but I find it migraine inducing on big screens - big flat colors, lots of wiggly animations, poor scaling, all combined with the need to do lots of reading. My eyes felt fried after 20 minutes.

I turned off a ton of the effects in Balatro. That helped. Some games don't give you half the options you should. I guess this push towards accessibility across the board would help here.

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 deal out of it back then compared to now. People still don't know what FOV a game is generally suppoed to be on a 16:9, and games don't usually care to educate you.

Monster Hunter Wilds comes with accessibility features for motion sickness[2], which is a pleasant, and rare, surprise. But people with motion sickness would probably prefer some kind of assurance before they spend money on it, I imagine.

[1]: https://www.wsgf.org/dr/bioshock

[2]: https://www.eurogamer.net/monster-hunter-wilds-arachnophobia...

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.

Does anyone else have a backwards brain when it comes to traditional games vs VR?

Spyro the Dragon, Half Life 2, Psychonauts, Portal, etc all make me insta-hurl. Meanwhile flying around a space station at a million miles per hour in 50FPS VR, smashing into surfaces and flipping around like an olympic gymnast.... totally fine.

I think VR sickness is very different to motion sickness in traditional games. I've gotten VR sickness a few times. (first time on a DK2 in HL episode 2 during the car toss sequence because the FoV changes)

Watching a streamer play Hyperbolica gave me motion sickness, but playing the same game myself in VR gave me no issues at all.

Possibly me too. I haven't had a lot of VR experience, but what I have had was, remarkably, pretty fine ( > 30 mins each time).

I've made a huge list of games that I've played over the years with notes on whether or not they make me motion sick.

Spyro the Dragon was my first ever video game, and I played that series for years. Came back to it a few years ago and I could only last about 20 minutes before feeling sick for the rest of the day.

The Airboat scene in HL2 made me motion sick at the time, but the whole game does now.

These days it's very hit and miss, and new 3D games are something of a risk. E.g:

- NieR:Automata (motion blur off), fine. NieR:Replicant (motion blur off), 20 mins tops.

- Portal 2, Overwatch, Control, Talos Principle(s), default settings, fine.

- Bioshock, back then and now, 20 mins tops.

- Spyro Remastered, default settings, insta puke, less than 20 mins. Super Mario Odyssey, fine. BoTW/ToTK, fine.

- Spyro un-remastered, I can watch on stream (lounge room TV) for ~15 mins before feeling ill. 1 hour if I'm watching it on an iPad.

- Oblivion c2009, fine. Skyrim c2013, couldn't last 10 minutes.

The list goes on. I watch all these sorts of threads with enormous interest so I can figure out exactly how to enjoy 3D video games again without a literally sickening trial-and-error experiment.

I'm older now but been playing games since I was younger. In the years of playing games, I can't place why certain games gave me motion sickness while others didn't. One of the worst games I played was Silent Hill on the PS, the fog or something in the game was so bad, I couldn't get past the intro level. Another game was Half-Life 2 and the boat levels, again, it felt like the rest of the game but that level was awful.

Recently as I'm up in age, I have noticed I do better with third person games and having the monitor further away with a high refresh rate. Certain games like Counter Strike 2, since it plays so quickly and feels fast, doesn't have that feeling, and Fallout4, isn't bad but I couldn't play it for hours.

I can't play any first person shooters because of motion sickness, it's quite annoying. Anyone else in this situation that managed to figure out something?

Turning off motion blur and other high end graphic effects can really help, especially if they are hurting your framerate

I find if I'm getting a consistent framerate then the effects don't bother me as much, but motion blur plus a sudden framerate drop is guaranteed to make me nauseous

My wife on the other hand cannot handle motion blur effects at all, and any time we play a game together I turn it off immediately

Depends on the game, but usually turning up the FOV to much higher than most defaults will help a lot. But screen size, etc. will have an impact as well.

Exposure therapy. Just play for a very short amount of time, even 2-3 minutes, then stop for a while. Do this over and over. Always keep the duration below the threshold of your motion sickness. Eventually your brain gets used to playing without being sick and you'll be able to play for longer and longer periods. Always stop the moment you feel motion sick in any way - don't try to push through as doing that makes it worse. This is what I had to do to get used to games in VR, and it worked great. I can now play for hours without issue.

Honestly while this does work for some people, it doesn’t seem to work for everyone. I’ve tried this basically my entire life (am 27), and it’s never improved. If anything it feels like it’s gotten worse with age. I’m not sure if it’s just a different underlying cause, or it only works if you’re under a certain threshold of motion sickness sensitivity.

There are so many games I’ve played in 30-60 minute increments because they’re in my “make me motion sick but not immediately” bucket, and a lifetime of doing that hasn’t done anything to improve it.

FWIW, I've tried everything suggested in the replies to you so far, and nothing's worked. I've just given up trying to play any first-person POV games, sadly.

Exposure therapy helps for me. If I dont play video games for a long period of time I'm always a lot more nauseous coming back. But easing into it over time helps.

Been gaming since forever and in the last 5 years I started getting nausated 70% of games I have played (also old once that were fine) and generally this is also what is working for me -- just a little bit here and there it gets a lot better.

I understand the article talks against this, but I am grateful that I am able to do this, but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.

I find that a smaller monitor, further away, and on lower graphics settings helps.

If you limit your brain's exposure to visual information, it's less likely to get confused.

I have found that third-person games that involve a lot of looking up and down -- largely anything with crafting/building or picking up loot -- really hurts me. On the other hand Death Stranding worked great -- largely because you don't have to angle the camera up and down to pick stuff up off the ground. I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any trouble.

There's a moment in Firewatch (first person) where the character ducks under a tree or a fence or something and that's the moment I turned it off, because the camera lurches downward. Incredibly unpleasant.

Also unplayable was Superliminal though that's not a huge surprise, considering the mechanic of the game. Outer Wilds was also a real tricky one.

That sounds like a repeated animation when you exit the tower and duck under the platform (I played it recently); a main issue I have with that game is that at that point it takes over your control without any real reason other than adding in a custom flavour animation / transition of sorts. But first person games should avoid that imo, motion sickness aside.

Outer Wilds I can definitely imagine, its warped perspective / scale / up/down/gravity will mess with your brain.

I was completely stunned that Outer Wilds didn't trigger motion sickness for me. Given my inconsistent history with so many other games, it makes me think that motion/simulation sickness must be a truly multi-variate accessibility problem where different specifics affect different people to different degrees.

There's an animation in Sea of Thieves when you're digging for treasure that kills me. It is this huge up and down swing of the camera.

Yeah for Outer Wilds I don't know if there's anything to be done- it's just what the game is. Firewatch on the other hand could just... not do that, and it would be the same game.

> I play a lot of first-person shooters and those usually don't give me any trouble.

Could also be the “problem”, your eye muscles are weak in the up/down direction. You can do exercises to build it up

I've often wondered if there is a problem with 'handedness', or more specifically 'footedness' whereby my brain is expecting the motion to start off with my right foot moving forwards first, but the game model goes left foot first. Mixed with head bobbing as well this throws off the brain's balancing model, as everything is "opposite". Certain games I have immense problems within 15 minutes playing, such that I feel drenched in cold sweat and nauseous, others I can play for hours or more without a problem, even if they are the same type of games. For instance Quake nope, Unreal tournament fine. Rainbow Six Siege fine, CoD not a chance, though Battlefield is fine. Maybe there needs to be something in games like the goofy test that snowboarders use to decide which foot forward for orientation, but more developed for motion sickness?

I've never felt sick from anything on a traditional screen. In VR, any movement that doesn't match my personal movement makes me feel sick instantly. None of the mitigations help at all.

This even happened on some of the new Harry Potter rides at Universal Park. They have some sections that are kind of like a flight simulator with a wrap-around screen. The ride car is on some kind of articulated arm. The physical roller-coaster parts were totally fine, but this simulator parts made me feel sick. I had to close my eyes to keep from throwing up. I cannot handle a mismatch between my apparent motion and my felt motion. I will never play another first person VR game.

Reticles or Crosshairs avoid motion sickness. It's a well known thing experienced devs. It gives you an anchor as a way to stay focused avoiding motion sickness

https://www.polygon.com/videos/2019/11/14/20962065/reticles-...

I had worst motion sickness after playing Sable because it has no reticle and no textures.

The first thing I do is turn off head bob, motion blur, screen shake, and anything else that induces animations of what should be static background elements.

In the 90s I had a 14" monitor, so one wouldn't think that gaming would be a problem but some FPS games (Hexen I believe was one of them) would just make me feel nauseous after just a few minutes of play, while others never caused it (I played way too much Rise of the Triad and DN3D, then later HL and Counterstrike)

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...

I don’t know if it’s motion sickness for me but I just don’t like having a bright screen right in my eye. Bad memories of burnt feeling retinas from CRT monitors back in the day.

Talos Principle was especially bad in terms of inducing motion sickness! I normally do not get motion sickness, but even with the motion sickness reduction settings turned on, I could not play it for more than 15-20 mins at a time.

Sorry to be that person, but "did you try..." changing the perspective to 3rd person?

I found the same thing with the Talos Principle (and II) but once I shifted to 3rd Person perspective, I found it completely playable.

This topic always makes me think of Wolfenstein (2009)'s abhorrent head-bob, which is almost guaranteed to induce nausea. There's a way to turn it off, but it's clunky (and causes you to be unable to run).

Botany Manor is a game I played not too long ago that has such motion sickness accessibility settings. It's a great way to allow those to experience the game who otherwise might find it difficult to do so.

Thought I was entirely immune to this. Until I played Mirrors edge.

Whatever they did there with the parkour movement emulation triggers something.

Not bad so could still play but definitely some unpleasant sensation undertones in there.

I remember trying Fo4 VR and there was an option like "turn off tunnel shadow" something to reduce motion sickness, oh man that was an instant regret immediately felt sick when moving

I quit playing most first person video games due to motion sickness. The first game I remember being unplayable was Half Life 2 and that was even after changing things like FOV.

The game that gave me motion sickness was Yooka-Laylee, and it might have been due to all the frame rate dips and hiccups.

IIRC, Far Cry 6 had a surprising fleet of accessibility settings, including for motion sickness.

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 and I went back to playing hours and hours of Halo, Call of Duty, and whatever other crap was on my 360.

15 years later, I'm in my 30s and I cannot even look at most modern 3D games. First-person games are an absolute no-go and third-person games are a toss-up. I missed out on a ton of games[1] and had to drop quite a few[2]. The ones I completed, I did so by forcing myself through the nausea[3]. I've even tried to go back to games I used to play[4] and even those kill me. It is really bad and at this point I mostly just play 2D games like Caves of Qud or top-down/isometric games like Disco Elysium.

The accessibility options in a lot of these games do help a bit, but it is never 100%. I usually turn things like camera shake/head bob off, lower graphics settings, tone down particles, mess around with FOV, adding a center dot... the whole kit and caboodle. At this point I'm not really sure if there is anything else that could be done to help me out, but I still really appreciate it when devs think about people with motion sickness issues.

[1]: Never even touched Overwatch or PUBG

[2]: I wish I could finish DOOM 2016 and Armored Core 6

[3]: The Witness and all those Resident Evil remakes have caused me countless hours of joy and pain, Elden Ring was mostly fine but some sessions I had to stop early

[4]: I will probably never beat HL2 again

>[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.

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

> [1]: Never even touched Overwatch or PUBG

I don't want push you into nausea (know that feeling for myself), but if you're interested in trying it, I found that Overwatch was one of the few modern FPSes that didn't cause any motion sickness for me at all (with default settings). No idea why.

> [3]: The Witness

I am very sad I will never be able to complete The Witness. It's bearable - not debilitating nausea - but very unpleasant.

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...

Seeing these answers... what a total chaos ensued.

There's only one game that has ever given me nausea - the video game of Star Wars Episode 1 The Phantom Menace (1999). [Not to be confused with Starfighter (2001), which was also based on Episode 1 and I think more popular?]

It's very unusual for being a third-person shooter, with a downward perspective (sometimes called "top-down", though you can adjust the angle slightly). This is tolerable for the lightsaber levels, but very annoying when your best weapon is a blaster and you want to shoot a distant enemy that you can't actually see, even if it's not nauseating for you.

[Besides that, it's also notorious for quite a few unintuitive pull/jump/climb puzzles, and an adaptable difficulty system which means that it will get harder as soon as you figure out something that works]

10 mins of playing gta caused 1hr of headache

Add a nose?

https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/archive/releases/2015/Q1/vir...

From my reading the nose is stationary - I wonder if just sitting a cut-out nose shape directly in front of the display would help some people?

I work in immersive video, and the tiniest of vibrations can be a problem. The idea of adding a nose is fascinating, and could be easily accomplished with a layer on top of the video. I have an experiment to try...

55 years old and I’ve never played a first person shooter because of I get extreme nausea after about a minute.

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