HN.zip

Motion sickness accessibility in video games

80 points by headalgorithm - 71 comments
ziml77 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

quag [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
jezzamon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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

wlesieutre [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

recursivecaveat [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

bentt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

gamedever [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

bentt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

foxyv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

Espressosaurus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

roywiggins [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

nottorp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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.

foxyv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
nottorp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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?

foxyv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

nottorp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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...

donatj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

tomashubelbauer [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
nottorp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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!
wlesieutre [3 hidden]5 mins ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA

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

nottorp [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

wlesieutre [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's new in iOS 18, sometime last fall
imzadi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
fatnoah [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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)

seabass-labrax [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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...

GuB-42 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

mystified5016 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

sumtechguy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I too have lazy eye. I get wicked motion sickness from most FPS games. So I would not equate too much to that hypothesis.
BobaFloutist [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They were talking specifically about the VR mechanics though, not gaming in general.
bradbeattie [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

legitster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

Triphibian [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
kmfrk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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...

joshuaheard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
dni0 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

extraduder_ire [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

Agentlien [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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

elwillbo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A friend, whom works in accessibility, has also spoken highly of there efforts. Strange they don't have motion sickness included.
rfreiberger [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

ge96 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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
Triphibian [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
conductr [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> 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

roywiggins [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

Cthulhu_ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

Triphibian [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
roywiggins [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
recursive [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

rob74 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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...
conductr [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
cherryteastain [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
RankingMember [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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).
leros [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
neilv [3 hidden]5 mins ago
IIRC, Far Cry 6 had a surprising fleet of accessibility settings, including for motion sickness.
adamrezich [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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?
bluefirebrand [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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

Finster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
JamesSwift [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
jalict [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

shrikant [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
legitster [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.

o11c [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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]

mbStavola [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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

opan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
>[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.

SketchySeaBeast [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Half-Life 2's hovercraft area was AWFUL, even on a 4:3 CRT.
Aardwolf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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...

cratermoon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
elwillbo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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...
jrmg [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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?
gorpnuts [3 hidden]5 mins ago
55 years old and I’ve never played a first person shooter because of I get extreme nausea after about a minute.