Doom makes me sick. No, it's not because of the violence.

[FalloutJack]

Basically...no. And this is the first time I've heard of the condition. Sorry to hear that you suffer from it.

 

[northeast rower]

I get this when playing the oldies, yeah. Especially Doom, where everything zooms by at a mile a minute.

 

[George Hovhannisian]

Can anyone ell what this is about???
About 3-4 years ago, I had Doom I on my flash and went to my aunt's house. I was bored and decided to play for about 5 mins. My aunt started screaming "No, don't start that game. Let me get out, then you can play..." I was astonished by how she reacted. I couldn't in any way imagine that it really litterally does make her sick!!
But what was worse after a month or so, I started having the same problem. I can go fine without plaing Doom 1 & 2 (don't like these games that much), but what's a total disaster is that I can't play the game of my childhood Quake I!!!! I had no idea that simply looking at those raphics can really make me wanna puke!!
So I see a lot of people have the same here. So, can anyone halp me?? Is there a way to get rid of this?? Rewind back to normal??

 

[Chased]

I remember spending long nights chugging away at my keyboard playing Wolfenstein 3D back as a kid. I never got motion sickness from the game. My Dad on the other hand who purchased it in the first place could barely play it for more than an hour before becoming sick.

If I had to guess, it probably has something to do with visuals and genetics in terms of how we process and digest information. I do feel sick if I play the same game for hours on end, like a 7 or 8 hour secession (I've only done this a few times...).

 

[Zaik]

Absolutely I do. Not really modern FPS's, thank god.

I haven't tried Doom, but two FPS's that definitely make me physically ill are the original Half-Life and Prey.

Half-Life 2 doesn't make me ill though.

My theories on what caused it have changed...at first I thought it was:

Prey: the changing gravity.
Half-Life: the speed at which the camera moves/turns.

After trying Prey again recently, I've realized that it's neither of these, but rather simply the way the room/world moves around you.

In most modern FPS games, the dimensions of a room don't really change in relation to where you're looking, but in Prey (and presumably HL), there's this weird effect where something that seems far when directly in front of you winds up swinging in closer as you turn away from it. It's this weird kind of tunnel vision. I don't know how to explain it better. Just thinking about it makes me queasy.

What you are talking about is an effect used to simulate peripheral visio, I think. If you decrease your field of vision, it should eventually flatten out. At least, I think so. I've seen it get worse with an increase in FOV, but never tried to get rid of it myself.

Edit: you can see this effect really easily if you own minecraft. Start up a game and switch the FOV from whatever it is set on to Quake Pro, it's VERY obvious.

 

[targren]

Are you female?

No, that's not intended as an insult. I just ask because I've known many people who have had the same problem with 3D in general (not just first-person 3D), and all but one of them have been female, but I'm not aware of any actual study that's looked into it.

My (noisy feminist) girlfriend is one of them, and she keeps saying that that would be something better looked into than all the "objectification" garbage (paraphrased) when it comes to getting females to buy games.

We're still waiting to see if she can handle Guild Wars 2 (she could handle GW, but not WoW, for example) to know if she can play it.

 

[Another]

I don't get that, but I do get sick from headbob effects in games. If I can't turn off bob than I can't play it.

What's even worse is sidebob, when you strafe right or left and your screen kind of tilts to simulate your head tilting. Dark Messiah has it, and it doesn't bother me in combat to much, but walking around with it turns my stomach.

 

[Smeggs]

I thought I'd take a moment to find out how many of my fellow Escapists suffer from a problem I have with certain FPS games. You see, I suffer from DIMS, or Doom Induced Motion Sickness (the official name is simulation sickness). Basically, whenever I play early FPS games like Doom, Marathon, Dark Forces, etc. I end up feeling nauseous after about 30 minutes. I have to stop and take a lengthy break soon after or risk purging the contents of my stomach.

I think it has something to do with the "pseudo-3D" effect of these old games for me. Most early FPS titles only simulated 3D by manipulating the 2D pixels and vectors that constituted the game world. My brain can't handle this visual approach, and thus I become sick. I'm fine with newer titles that utilize actual 3D environments (though some sufferers of DIMS can't handle these either).

So how about it? Do you get sick playing certain 3D/3D-esque titles? If not, do you know someone who does?

I get that with a lot of old games with a clunky camera. I remember a number of PS1 games made me dizzy. Also, things with EXTREME MOTION-BLUR tend to make my eyes feel weird.

 

[Smeggs]

Damnit, lagged and double posted.

 

[piinyouri]

Nope, I sure haven't.
And I get motion/carsick VERY easily, but thankful no video game has ever caused me to double over and do the stomach contents kahuna.

 

[Bostur]

For the old games sitting farther from the screen or playing on a smaller screen may help. Back then 17" was considered huge, and CRT screens didn't show games as pixelised as modern flat screen monitors do.

I occasionally get motion sickness. For me this is mostly caused by narrow FOV, motion blur or delayed controls/mouse acceleration.

 

[TrevHead]

For the old games sitting farther from the screen or playing on a smaller screen may help. Back then 17" was considered huge, and CRT screens didn't show games as pixelised as modern flat screen monitors do.

I occasionally get motion sickness. For me this is mostly caused by narrow FOV, motion blur or delayed controls/mouse acceleration.

This, we all had much smaller screens back then, so I would recommend anyone to play on a smaller screen if they can't play around with their settings

Saying that the only 2 times ive had motion sickness was 1: watching Matrix 2 at the cinema and 2: A video of a iphone vertical scrolling shmup where the background was a 3d cityscape that scrolled too quickly for my eyes to get a fix on it. 30 seconds of watching that in a iphone sized window and I was feeling so bad that I had to have a lie down, so yeah size isn't everything.

 

[blah_ducks]

I basically can't play a majority of 1st person games. Half Life? Lasted ten minutes before I had to lie down for an hour. Minecraft? Half hour intervals, but anything above that and my head would need to rest on my keyboard. Skyrim? Actually that one is fine for some reason.

Portal? HAHAHAHAHA...ha...no

 

[Kiardras]

Ive had it on a couple of games, one was a really old combat flight sim, Fury 3 I think it was called, and the other was Section 8. Just something about it made me sick after playing it.

 

[Rock-nerd]

damn i get that with games nowadays! the most recents being battlefield 3 and mass effect 2

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I love threads like these: it's like stepping through a time portal to the mid-90's. Although this is the first one I've seen where people are talking about a lot of modern games giving them motion sickness. It always seemed to me like it was a rare thing to begin with, and it went away as people started growing up with 3D games, kind of like it requires you to train your brain to perceive things in a certain way. I always figured it was easier to do that when you were young, hence why it mostly seemed to affect people who were in their 30's or older when Doom came out. Now I'm wondering if there might be something else going on.

And yeah, I know it's a necro, but it's a rare good necro. Less a zomby thread, more a resurrected one.

Edit: zombie, not zomby. Can you tell I've been playing Dungeons of Dredmor lately?

 

[McMarbles]

Yeah, I got that all the time when I played first-person games. YThat's why I haven't played one in twenty years.

 

[Doclector]

Strangely enough, I'm fine until looking up and down in such an enviroment implemented, like in duke nukem 3D, or BLOOD. Honestly, it could be the graphics or the fact that controlling a FPS in which you could look up and down before the advent of the analogue stick is, more often than not, physically painful to someone who only started playing FPS games during the PS2 era, meaning such a control method feels more alien to me than some others.

Duke nukem on xbox live was the worst, though. If I remember rightly, they added analogue sticks, but using them caused the wierd effect of the graphics bending in ways they were never meant to, like it was never meant to cope with the player looking diagonally. That made me really nauseous, so much so that I never really finished the game, I gave up when it got to the later, harder levels.