Motion Sickness in 3D Games [Planning & Game Design]
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ก.ค. 2023
- Game-induced motion sickness affects different people in different ways, and some much worse than others.
Today, I'll discuss why it happens in the first place, and what we can do to counteract its effects. - เกม
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If you ever wonder why crosshair is important for games, this is why.
Glad you mentioned this -- it goes even for first-person games without shooting, e.g. why there's a crosshair in Portal even before you get the portal gun.
I often disable the crosshair if I can.
That makes a lot of sense...
For accessibility, 3rd and 1st person games should have the option to have a persistent dot/crosshair even in a game with no shooting.
as a only slightly related point, i'd suggest trying a first personed game where you shoot things and turn off all crosshairs/ads
eventually you just sort of "aim" by peripheral vision much better than you might think
It's cool that Sakurai is explaining why people get motion sick, I honestly never thought about it myself.
man this channel is the gift that keeps on giving. not only do we learn about game development, but we even get scientific explanations for things like motion sickness
It's so true, my gosh ^^ I'm really thankful for them as well, they really help as an aspiring game developer!
Thank you, Sakurai and team!
This is why when designing games, the camera tends to be separate to the character. Your eyes are actually constantly shaking as you walk, but since your inner ear is in step with it, your brain thinks you're traveling in a straight line.
To be fair, the eyes do have some stabilisation
There are many nuances to video games that not a lot of youtubers will talk about. It takes someone with development history in the game industry to get the discussion going. Thank you, Mr. Sakurai.
Mirror's Edge was one of the first non-fps/rpgs I noticed to keep a focal point on screen even though you almost never have a weapon to aim.
Considering how much spinning and whipping around you do in that game, the focal point *really* helps keep you grounded.
This topic is pretty interesting to discuss. I remember while I played Spark the Electric Jester 3, my father entered into my room looking to my screen, and he asked me, "Do you feel sickness from this game while doing loops?". Which I don't really experience of these at all and still while replaying this game.
I just bought the Spark trilogy during the last Steam sale and I was pleasantly surprised by how good Spark 1 is. I'm looking forward to playing Spark 3 eventually!
Just played Spark 1. On my way to play Spark 3 soon. How is it though?
It's sensory attenuation that requires training to help the brain make sense that it's not in a moving vehicle and not some poison tampering with a sensory organ.
Particularly rare individuals can adapt a shaky camera feed akin to uncompensated drone feedback.
There was exactly one tim where I got motion sickness in a videogame, and that was in Portal 2. There is a part where you have to go through like a tunnel or pipe or something like that, but because of how it is colored, it was really hard to fathom if I'm going up or down. And when I moved my mouse, it didn't really move how I wanted to, because appearently I was already looking either up or down. And that really made me feel sick. Had to finish it with relatively closed eyes.
Every other part of portal 2 was super fine btw, just that one in particular made me feel ill.
The only games i have gotten motionsick from are the portal and half life games
@@natzos6372 Same, I've never been carsick or anything, but for some reason I would feel a bit sick after an hour or two of playing Half-life 2. not sure if it had to do with motion sickness or not
For me it was first half life game. No matter what setting and mod, it was painful. For only 30 minute i already feel want to puke
The motorboat portions of Half-Life 2 and the excessive motion blur of Dead Island were the two biggest instances for me.
I think I might know exactly when you're referring too! After getting through all of underground Aperture, there's a bit where you're climbing upwards through vents and stuff to get back to the main lab, and there's _one particular shaft_ that you walk up at an angle. Because of how high above the ground you are at that point, you have virtually no way to tell which angle is straight up or down. I don't suffer from motion sickness in general, but that specific shaft always throws me for a loop and makes me feel queasy.
Sakurai is the wise guru of gaming that just shows up and tells people snippets of wisdom.
Descending from the heavens with a great call of
*_ZATSUDA~~~N_*
i used to be car sick alot as a kid so wow never knew the tidbit about looking into the distance stops it Great video Sakurai san🎉
Don't read in the car if you are prone to car sickness and try having a mint or mint gum. It helps. Lemon and ginger might help as well.
how the hell did you not figure that out
As a kid I was able to binge all kinds of 3D games for hours, but these days at my ripe old age of twenty-something, motion sickness strikes fast and strong. No matter which game I play motion blur gets turned off immediately, and screen shaking/bobbing is next to go if the symptoms persist. I found that FOV changing tends to make things _worse_ rather than better, in both directions, but I also know that for most motion sickness prone folks it does help them and I'm just a weird case. Nowadays I'm pretty good at intuiting whether a game will make me motion sick just by looking at it, and even putting FPS/TPS/etc aside, I think it has to do with a specific popular professional engine, though I don't know which beyond that. AAA games make me motion sick a lot faster than indies.
Please think about motion sick gamers when making games! You never know when your sense of motion light change and you will find yourself bolstering our ranks!
If you're right about it being based on a specific game engine, then it's probably Unreal Engine 4. It's pretty infamous for it's Texture Pop-In issues, where a texture will load in, in a low res, blurry state; before "popping into" it's proper resolution. seconds later. Usually affecting the world geometry the most. So basically imagine you're watching a cutscene where characters are talking to each other, than it does a reverse shot to the other character, and in the background the walls are all blurry for a moment before going back to normal. Even if you don't consciously notice it, your brain probably does.
Examples that come to mind for me are Hogwarts Legacy and Borderlands 3. If you're playing an Unreal game with bad pop-in like that, it seems to be because of a feature called "Texture Streaming" where the game will only call a texture into memory the moment it's required. Sometimes you can disable it, either in the game itself, or more often by forcing it off via a launch command. Though of course, only PC users can do the latter.
If you do disable Texture Streaming, it should fix the pop-in issues, but the reason companies use it, is because the alternative is loading every texture into your GPU's VRAM at game launch. So it will take a lot longer to initially open the game, and if you don't have enough VRAM or regular RAM to store the textures, it might make the game unplayable instead.
Personally, I don't even get motion sick from games, not even in VR (I get it really bad in vehicles in real life in return). I just hate the way the texture pop in looks, so that's why I looked into alternatives.
After all that though, a final tip I'll give is to make sure your game is at a stable frame rate. Preferably at 60FPS or higher, but even a stable 30 would be better than a fluctuating 60. That of course goes double for VR, where you'll usually want 90FPS.
As a someone who's about to throw up every time when playing shooters on a big screen, I appreciate you bringing attention to this relatively rare issue that some of us have.
I usually manage to counter act the sickness to some extent with ginger candies, popsicles and ice packs, but at some point I just stopped trying and decided that PC is the only FPS system for me.
If you're designing a first-person game, the easiest way to help players with motion sickness is just to have a FOV slider. It's amazing how many people are sufficiently helped by that alone
Sadly, I'm not one of those people :(
Excellent video, Thank you for explaining so well what causes it. I hope more game devs see this. As someone thats greatly affected by this I tend to return games if they dont have proper motion sickness mitigation options.
The nastiest case of motion sickness I ever had with a game was one where I literally only had myself to blame. It's in a game I'm currently making, a 3D platformer that I was adding a 2D platformer mode to, which means a different camera system. And my first attempt at that new camera system was extremely jittery.
I've had vertigo for most of my life, and I wasn't at all expecting Sakurai to address any of this. Very nice explanation!
I appreciate that Sakurai is talking about this! When I tell people I sometimes get motion sick from video games they often think it's weird or they haven't heard of that happening. I have found that broadening my field of vision does help. When I play on PC I don't play the game in full screen mode, I make the window smaller. =D
Multiply this topic by 10 when you're playing a virtual reality game. In these games, even the hud is in a 3d environment, so it is very easy to get motion sickness when the camera moves forward and rotates at the same time.
One trick in these games, done for example in google earth (for VR) is to make the lateral areas black, it helps reduce the feeling to be in a real 3d environment and diminishes a lot the motion sickness.
I never dealt with this the first time I tried VR. And even now, I don't really feel it while I'm engaged. But I do definitely notice some dizziness and disorientation after I take off the headset.
I love VR and I feel sorry for anyone who has it but doesn't take their time to get past the initial nausea.
It always happens when you first try it, but that goes away once you get used to VR. Once you've gotten used to it, it won't come back even after months of not playing VR.
So THATS what it is that i feel sometimes with videogames. That sick feeling when im stuck and immersed in a certain section of the game. When i cant progress immediately i feel so physically sick that i have to turn the game off for a few hours. Its freaking motion sickness...wow....
Welcome to the club!
I rarely get motion sickness from games but the only one that caused it for me every time was Super Mario Galaxy. 😢
Banjo-Tooie on the N64 for me. Those First-Person segments with all the narrow corridors made me sick.
Splatoon but only if I use motion controls, must be my involuntary shaking
It honestly is rather ironic that out of all of Nintendo's game serieses, the ones Miyamoto created tend to take accessibility the LEAST seriously. I guess he doesn't want "the art of the experience" to be compromised in any way.
This is the first time I've heard anyone really talk about motion sickness in games, it was a great video to help me begin to understand the challenges and solutions to this interesting problem.
Had problems when playing fps games with inconsistent framerates. Had it the worst during the wii generation with games like the conduit. Was so happy that the metroid prime trilogy was a solid 60fpss 🤓
I never knew that motion sickness worked like that. This channel is more than just a educational video game channel
I feel this, I can’t play certain fps games for too long without feeling motion sickness and I’m glad he’s covered this
FOV settings are in my option the most important when it comes to fighting motion sickness.
if I play a first person game with an FOV that's smaller than 90° horizontally, it feels not great.
anything smaller than 80° and I barely even can play it.
I think a wide FOV helps to contextualise the camera movement better, while a narrow FOV gives way less environmental clues on which you can focus on to easily digest the camera motion.
Meanwhile I have troubles with FOV that goes over 90.
@@TheOrian34 It could also be your distance from the screen. Think of it like looking through a window, when you stand right in front of it, you can even look up and down to see what's around, but look through from the other side of the room, you will be seeing a small amount of the world outside.
When I play on a TV I'm usually happy at around 90-95 horizontal FOV, but when I'm at my computer, I tend to play FPS games anywhere from 110-125.
As someone with a very particular case of motion sickness, I consider this to be very important. For example, I usually get sick in car rides but never when I'm playing a racing game.
However, playing or watching gameplay of a First-person game for 10 seconds is already enough for me to feel extremely sick, and there isn't a single game option effective enough to reduce it.
For third-person games, it is usually the same thing, but some exceptions I can find are the 3D mario games. If I take Mario Odyssey for example, the maps are almost always very large, leaving much room for the camera to go where you want. And when that's not the case, they add a fixed or semi-fixed camera angle covering the whole room, or a bird-view for those glass cages you can find sometimes. Heck, even Mario 64 did pretty well with the camera changes in the Boo mansion. In the end, it's something I really wanted A Hat in Time to have for the DLC boat map.
Being a Metroid fan, I will never be able to play the Prime games in my whole life. I can't play Minecraft (even in third-person) and other similar 3D games.
On top of my head, some third-person games I can play are the Earth Defense Force franchise and Ys 8 & 9 thanks to their excellent camera management.
Considering a certain Final Fantasy game's recent issues, this seems oddly well timed.
Fun fact, when Spyro came out in Japan. A lot of people felt these exact side effects. So they did not have full camera control but instead relied heavily on a fixed camera. I remember seeing a ton of people struggling with the Mario 64 SpaceWorld demo. Keep in mind this was the mid to late 90s where we were trying to figure out 3D game development.
It’s extremely rare for me to get motion sickness when playing games, I could count the times it’s happened for me throughout my years of playing games on one hand. But when it comes to watching others play, especially in something like a screenshare or a stream, I can feel it a bit more often and sometimes need to take breaks from watching pretty frequently, or at times for a while altogether. This holds especially true for when I’m watching anyone play a VR game.
I’m glad you made a video on this and explaining how it works! Funnily enough, even as someone who’s experienced it myself I often forget it’s a thing that happens, and I learned more about it from this video!
Just having HUD elements seems to help for me. I got sick walking around in The Witness but was fine spinning uncontrollably in Outer Wilds.
If you ever visit the Museum of Illusion in Chicago, there's a room with a raised walkway in a straight line. But it's inside a bright spinning cylinder with pictures of space. As soon as you walk past the doorframe the dizzyness and nausea will set in immediately. I had to hold the handrails and close my eyes to get through the room. Once I could clearly see the exit I was fine.
It's amazing what a change in visual context will do to your mind.
Another fantastic video from Sakurai! Thank you for the explanation of what causes motion sickness and the tips for players and developers to help alleviate that sickness. :)
The only game I have ever felt motion sickness from was actually Kirby Air Ride. I think it's kind of funny that Sakurai mentioned how you should keep the camera stable when he made the screen shake all the time in that game.
Aw sweet! Ridge Racer 7! Sakurai cares more about RR more than Bamco does!
My wife struggles with this when in games that utilize first person view. She finds open areas much more easy to handle, where as indoor areas where she is forced to move her perspective a lot affects her the most. Even 3rd person games can affect her if she's forced into tight quarters where the camera zooms in and out a lot due to hitting walls.
Peppermint settles the stomach and she's found that things like peppermint tea and peppermint candies that contain peppermint oil can take the edge off it and allow her to get more done before she has to turn the game off for awhile.
Peppermint is probably a placebo but is definitely interesting.
In this case it actually has been examined and studied and found to actually work. The "anti car sickness" bracelet she likes to use I'm a little more dubious about which is why I didn't mention it initially.
Thank you Sakurai for the informational video !!
This topic is interesting, because when I talk to my Dad about Fighting games, he often says he can't tell "what's going on on screen" because the characters move around too fast for his eyes to track. I find that when you first start playing videogames, there's a habit where you "jerk the controller" in the direction you're trying to move towards, even though this isn't something you do without the directional pad or analog stick (this was before Wiimotes and Nunchuks and motion sticks) .
I think, fundamentally, it boils down to how accustomed you are to the games you play... and sometimes practicing helps alleviate some of that discrepancy.
A few corrections here. Motion sickness doesn't happen because of poor eye tracking. It also doesn't go away with experience. Quite the opposite, the longer you force it the worse you feel. I have been playing fast paced video games all my life, yet 1st person is always making me nauseous regardless of what screan I use or how many times I play.
What you're describing has little to do with motion sickness and more to do with processing visual information (which gets better with experience, yes)
I thought it was about acutal "3D" games (like 3DS) but it's interesting because I feel motion sickness for "normal 3D" games often goes under the radar
Edit: I also was thinking about VR but I forgot to write it
Yeah meanwhile 60% of people in VR experience motion sickness but he doesn't even touch on that
It’s the same general idea: What’s going through your eyes doesn’t match up with what’s going through your ears. 3D/VR is more likely to cause trouble because the added immersion makes it harder for your brain to separate what your eyes see from what your body feels.
Excellent video Masahiro!❤
It's always great to ensure that as many people are able to play your games as possible, and that includes dealing with people with motion sickness. Great wisdom as always!
Thank you for making a video on this topic! I didn’t realize it could be an issue until it affected me and I imagine a lot of others are not aware.
I get motion sickness in cars from time to time, typically when I’m sitting in the backseat of a large car. But I’ve learned how to counteract this (sitting in the front passenger seat if possible, not reading or looking at my phone).
I never had an issue with video games until I played the Spyro Reignited Trilogy for the PS4 on launch. I was playing for about 30 minutes when I started to feel ill. I grew up with the original games and never had a problem, so I didn’t know it could be motion sickness. It wasn’t until they made a patch with the option to turn off the motion blur when running that I was able to fully enjoy the game.
Interestingly enough, when I played my ps4 copy on the ps5 a few weeks ago, I was able to play with the motion blur on no problem.
I try to include a lot of options in my games to “reduce motion” in general. This is helpful especially helpful to reduce distractions for certain players. It does sacrifice on presentation, but it makes the game accessible to a larger audience.
thanks for addessing this, sakurai!
it's really hard to deal with motion sickness, in-game or in real life. personally, there just isn't really a solution that works besides not being inside vehicles and playing those kinds of games at all.
Ohh so thats why I always feel headache whenever I'm playing my phone while in a vehicle
Big tip about FOV motion sickness: The difference of perceived motion rates don't only alter from speed/angle, but also distance the player is from the screen.
If you have a game played on a television, you can usually get away with lower FOV angles but remember that some people sit with a chair in a gaming room, some at a table, some on a couch a couple meters or more away.
If you take the AAA approach and lower your FOV for higher detail with a steady performance, I HIGHLY suggest finding a good 'highest FOV possible' and allowing the player to have a selection.
Many games are beginning to have a one-time accessibility settings screen when first launching the game these days. I would advise having this with live examples on screen while the player adjusts, and having these settings ready in an options screen for future adjustments.
As someone highly affected by motion sickness, that's something i'm confident in adressing in my games
I've read that giving your VR character a visible nose can help with motion sickness, since it's always going to be in the same place on the screen.
That's crazy if that actually works.
This is a very important topic! Accessibility should be a top priority for game devs.
I can't play FPS for more than 15 minutes.
I also get sick travelling when I'm not the driver.
Thank you for creating awareness with this video.
one interesting thing is that i'm on the side of those who feel easily car motion sickness but virtually never game motion sickness, and yet, there was one time where i felt motion sickness to an extreme level:
when playing the resident evil village(8) demo, i was playing with no camera accelleration the whole time, played for an hour or two, and then just for fun tried to play with accelartion on and i kid you not, any movement i did with the camera would give me nausea.
i immediately understood what people susceptible to videogame motion sickness feel, and it's unbearable.
My most upvoted and "awarded" Steam review is one warning people who are prone to getting motion sick that a game is a rough one.
I remember, back in the day, playing original DOOM at a friend's house on their 486-class PC. My familyhad a 386-class PC, so we could play Wolfenstein 3-D but not DOOM). Binged it the whole afternoon (with cheat codes, but still). Came down with a noticeable case of videogame motion sickness then, but that was basically the only time it's ever happened personally.
I always thought this was an issue unique to VR. I always learn something watching these videos, even as someone not interested in the design side of things. Thanks!
It is massively multiplied in severity in VR, but yeah, players have always had issues with Motion Sickness. If you've ever seen a game with a "Show Crosshair" option, and wondered why it's even an option, it's usually to try and aid with mitigating Motion Sickness. And of course, as Sakurai mentioned, View Bobbing disable: which has been in Minecraft for as long as I can remember.
Thanks for sharing Mr Sakurai! ... I got motion sickness just by watching sample videos above so I'm very sensitive to this sickness.
I love that Sakurai recognizes Ridge Racer.
As one who has REALLY bad motion sickness (to the point where I can't play most First Person games), all of these REALLY help. It makes me so happy when I see an FOV option in any First Person game, cuz it at least shows they tried (doesn't always work sadly, but it's the thought that counts)
It certainly beats having a bottle of Pepto Bismol next to your computer desk to take swigs from during gameplay... That was the only way I made it through Portal 2 in high school... Love the game, but I wouldn't recommend that strategy.
FOV, 3rd person mode, consistent FPS, turning off all forms of camera shack and cross hairs all help.
In my experience, having a dot in the middle of the screen in any first person game is essential. I get motion sick within minutes when a games doesn't have it.
That, and of course, reducing screenshake and disabling footstep bobbing.
Semi off-topic tip bit: The reason some people get motion sickness is our body is trying to prevent poisons from affecting us. When you are poisoned, your senses work wrong, but our body has no real way to tell that "everything is green" or" why is up down" is inherently wrong, but it can tell that combined, our senses are giving impossible information.
By getting sick, you either throw up the poison, or you at least realize something is wrong and get help, or people around you see and get help for you.
Interestingly, since not all people get motion sick, it's clear that it is not absolute evolutionary advantage. Maybe because getting sick while poisoned makes fatal result more likely?
I've never felt any motion sickness when playing videogames. Except for Resident Evil 4 Remake. There was something about the combination of camera wobble, motion blurring and the general speed of the game that made me quite dizzy at times.
I love this channel!
If people want to read more about it, it can be helpful to google "cybersickness". Because motion sickness, as said in the video, is more the mismatch with the vestibular sense feeling that you move (like in a car, train etc.), but your eyes don't see the movement (because of reading a book, or the vision is occluded). While in cybersickness you see the movement (on a screen, VR headset etc.) but your vestibular sense is telling you that you are not moving.
This is why we should always consider toggles or a prompt at the startup in every game before someone actually plays it if they can help it.
I cant be certain, but i would imagine fluid camera movement could also help when compared to super fast response: for example, in a game like Ace Combat, instead of having the camera locked to the tail, have it _follow_ the tail. This means that making a sharp turn not only has an element of anticipation (waiting for the camera to lock to the new heading), but it also doesnt have a quick "jerking" motion that implies a shudden shaking.
My dad suffers awfully from game motion sickness, and he actually gets hit worse by some 2D platformers because rhe background keeps moving up and down when you jump. But Super Mario Galaxy didnt cause big problems for him, because the camera doesnt aggressively shift
Turning off constant bobbing is just a nice feature to have, it's very uncomfortable even without sickness to be so constantly jostled around.
For me I usually turned off options like Motion Blur and Bobbing in First-Person games because I felt they were unnecessary and, I guess, would eventually give me a headache, huh. I guess I never realized I could get motion sickness from games until this was brought up.
One thing to try if you suffer from motion sickness is getting an eye test. Glasses/contacts or an updated prescription can turn motion sickness off in some cases. I went from struggling with first person shooters to watching speedruns of spaceship games like Descent when I got new glasses. The Descent series also has the static cockpit overlay Sakurai recommended
Ginger tea also helps. Buy ginger root in the grocery section, cut a coin-sized peace, put it in a cup of boiling water for five minutes. It relaxes your stomach muscles, which is what's causing the nausea. Your body is seeing the disconnect between the senses, assuming you ate something poisonous and pushing you to bring it back up
It's always been headbob for me. I can play 3D games for hours on end with no problem but if there's headbob of any sort, I won't last more than an hour x_x
Same for me. Resident Evil Village had a setting to disable head bob, but QTEs and even climbing ladders still had very aggressive camera bob. I had to close my eyes during those events just to keep myself from feeling sick.
I am one of those people with a very weird condition where I have no problem either riding in a car, either as passenger in front seat or back, nor playing video games.
But trying to read while sitting in the back seat of a car, for some reason, makes me nauseous. Yet weirdly enough, playing video games in the backseat (as long as there isn't a lot of reading involved) doesn't sicken me.
Dark FPS games with motion blur during the ps3 era used to give me crazy motion sickness.
In a TPS game I made called Posseslime, you move the camera with the mouse, but if you go very fast it could induce a bit of dizziness, so instead the mouse input is smoothed, and the camera spatial movement is smoothed too, I made it so that it gets outside objects instantly but it gets to its target position smoothly too. I analyzed the MGSV:TPP camera to improve the smoothing and I also had to make sure the values weren't too high so it doesn't impact the gameplay either since there's a little bit of aiming needed you might to aim very fast.
The camera system gave me quite the headache and the controller system made it so I couldn't use Cinemachine lol
i more often have this problem with more realistic looking 3d games, but either way the best thing for me is to usually take breaks, it also explains why i never really get motion sickness in moving vehicles
I love this man
Interesting, I never knew this was a thing outside of VR-Games!
high speed segments in games has created some strange optical illusions for me in the past and messed up my sense of motion, it was really disorientating even though I don't have motion sickness in games usually.
The only time a game made me sick was when the Reignited Trilogy came out originally, the motion blur was so awful that it gave me motion sickness.
I had never really had motion sickness for most of my life. Until one day at cedar point. It was lightly raining, so there were no lines for the smaller stuff, and my friends and I got in the old wooden blue streak coaster like 11 times in a row.
That night when I laid down, I felt the sensation of that first drop, over and over...
My inner ears aren't as happy as they once were... But so far the only thing that really messes with them enough is VR.
Having too large of a field of view sounds like a good explanation for why VR games tend to cause motion sickness so often. With your entire vision being the game screen in the headset, there's no way to visually "ground" yourself.
My mom has extreme 3d motion sickness. When I still lived with my parents, she would get sick just looking over my shoulder.
The only time I experienced real motion sickness within a video game was when I recently played Dead Island 2.
I once started getting queasy and had no idea why until I realized Black Mesa tilted the screen ever so slightly whenever you turn.
I used to never get it at all, I'd play my 3DS in 3D for its entire battery life in the car as a kid. Now If I open Discord for 2 minutes in the car I get motion sick. TH-cam isn't as bad, but it's still pretty quick, so now I'm stuck with podcasts.
Oh wow so thats why i get motion sickness in some 3d games. Very interesting. Im glad he addressed this!
The 2 things I notice now that give me motion sickness are if the game has a head bob or if the HUD moves and shakes based on camera movement.
You experience this a lot in VR if you:
have lowframerate
Rotate the Player without a noise indicating changes
Unfocused Vision
What's funny is I have the passenger problem with games - I get motion sick watching other people play, but I tend to be fine playing myself.
I remember hearing something similar to this when Valve released the developer commentary for Half-Life Alyx, in a scene where a player enters an elevator, saying to reduce player sickness where the game moves the player, they put a ton of obstruction in the player's space.
I started getting motion sickness with Minecraft, I think because I was moving so fast navigating tight corners in the caverns. Thing is, swapping to third person didn't work any better because the controls are a little different and I can't see where I am in tight spaces! I prefer games to have third person and for the camera to remain a certain distance from the character so I can "breathe" and see everything. I imagine that space behind the character to be like a person's sense of space (proprioception?). Link can't see bokoblins approaching behind him, but he can probably hear or feel them coming. In first person, you can easily be snuck up on by an enemy if they don't make any sound in-game, which isn't realistic or fair gameplay wise. In real life, you can generally sense a person approaching you from behind even if you can't see or hear them.
This is not just a topic, it’s a big topic
I got motion sick yesterday playing a game...imagine my surprise when mr sakurai released a new video specifically about it! lol
This is a good example of why it’s good to have diverse play testing groups- there’s multiple studies that show Asians in general are more susceptible to motion sickness in video games than other ethnicities, part of the reason that FPS games aren’t popular in japan and other Asian countries
I love that Sakurai is talking about accessibility stuff, which has been sorely lacking in many Japanese games. I hope it makes an impact.
A great topic. I have some friends that really have problem with first person camera. One so bad any time in first person gives them a headache. The other only when the screen bobs up and down from walking. Their fav games are FallOut but once they put on a power armour in fallout 4 they almosy threw up from the extra HUD and bounce the suit gave. Not enough devs worry about motion sickness. I mean I get artist vision but options are good. Oh and meds don't help either of my friends sadly.
I had motion sickness when trying to play early 3D Mario games to the point I couldn't finish them. I think back then Nintendo was still trying to figure out what works best. Most newer games don't bother me as much.
Yeah, I never really noticed it, but now that you mention it I do feel a little bit uneasy with some very big impacts in SSB, specially Ultimate and I do suffer from motion sickness in real life.
Almost feels like this was made for me, with how my motion sickness has just gotten worse over the years :P
I have...a few games that leave me feeling nauseous and dizzy after playing, and some games I can't play at all because it's so intense I either can't get past a certain part or can get started to begin with.
It's...actually one of those things where it's impossible to really notice when you only have a little bit of motion sickness that only triggers in very specific situations, (if any at all), but also borderline inescapable when you have a genuine sensitivity; seems like every other game has to have some kind of fast moving background or screen shake you can't turn off...
Though, nothing'll beat that time I played Minecraft for, like, two hours and then had to lay down for four hours (guesstimating, it was a while ago and I wasn't actually timing it) because it felt like the room was spinning. I still have no idea what specifically about Minecraft sets my motion sickness off so bad, even without motion bob and an adjusted FOV, even when I try all of that + playing in third person. It just...does, I guess.
'nother game that instantly comes to mind is Little Nightmares. It has a "boat rocking" effect on...I think the whole game? And I didn't know it was going to have that. Got the game on Steam, got distracted from it for a long time, finally decided to play it, realized I physically can't play it without running the risk of throwing up (unless I want to play it for about two minutes every day and attempt to inch through it), and. well. That's the end of that. You can't turn off the rocking effect, and I can't get a refund either :\ So now I just...own a game I can't play. (LN2 seemed to lack the rocking effect at least, which is why I wasn't expecting it.)
Animal crosssing gave me motion sickness with the weird (but original) way to display the map in a 3D environment
This explains why VR hits so hard, it's actively trying to create the illusion rather than dispell it.
Motion sickness is a major issue for me when playing 3D platformers. In some games, the speed and fluidity at which the camera moves does not always match the action of the game. This can be made much worse when a game suffers from framerate issues.
One example of this is the indie platformer A Hat In Time. It's a fantastic game that became one of my favorite platfomers. But, if they had not included options to adjust the camera, I would have never been able to continue playing it.
This is a core reason why I don't play 3D games where you can move the camera, sometimes It feels I am stuck in gaming before 2006.
At least I have retro games and indies now. :D
Omg! I though i was just being dramatic, i am so happy to see i am not thr only one who gets motion sickness from games.