First Person View - Immersion vs nausea

[Gray-Philosophy]

Escapists! I Needeth thine aid!

I'm trying to do some research on first person perspective in gaming, and how to potentially optimize such an experience.

Personally, I'm a bit of a roleplaying nut so I love a well made first person camera because of the immersion. However, sometimes there's just something wrong with it. The FOV isn't wide enough, the controls are wonky, I've even heard from some people that they can start feeling nauseous after playing around with an FPS for too long.

So in that regard, I'd love to hear your experiences and what you think makes for a good type of first person view, and what ruins it. Which games that you've tried did it well and what did they do right, which games did it...less well, and what went wrong?. Thanks for your time!

 

[Aerosteam]

There's something about Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior (probably the others as well, but that's the only one I played). I've had two sessions with that game, totalling up to a bit over an hour of play time. After both times I played, I felt really sick and had headaches. Which is odd, since that's the only game to ever do that. I'm not really sure why.

Anyway, it doesn't have to be an FPS, but I always turn off any sort of motion blur, I never invert the camera and always go for exactly 60 FPS if there's an option. I know what I like and like what I know.

 

[aozgolo]

While I don't mind First Person games, I'm not fond of simulated head bobbing, or force simulated through violent camera shakes, I mean immersive feedback is important but I don't like my neck being the only part of my body I can't seem to control.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

I usually don't mind first person view in a first person shooter, as long as I can widen the FoV..
I've only gotten nauseous when trying to perform tricky platforming or when I've forgotten to turn off blur.

If I was given a choice I would have all such games include both first person and third person view, everything from pure shooter to adventure/action to space-sims.
I Do Not like the current batch of over-the-shoulder cams as it distorts the view and hides a vital area from sight, it feels lopsided quite simply.

One type of game I love to play typically only feature a cockpit view which I find incredibly annoying, anachronistic and restrictive.
When moving around asteroids and perform dogfights around stations, a good overview of your position and surroundings is crucial.

Choice and Options should rule supreme.

 

[happyninja42]

I can't really specify any games that did well/bad that I can think of. First Person is a perfectly normal way to view a game in my opinion. I have zero issues with it. Though the artificial head wobble with movement can be a little tiresome in some games, but nothing to make me stop playing.

I've never experienced the motion sickness problems others have mentioned.

Depending on the game, I think 3rd person is a better format. For example, games that are very flashy, and are about close quarters combat with lots of really elaborate attacks, being able to see the entire combat area is very handy, and also more enjoyable. I like watching my combat attacks go off and be spectacular, for example in games like God of War, or similar ones. But games that involve precision and timing, like stealth games, or shooter/sniper games, First Person is definitely the way to go.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

I never understood how first person games give people nausea....while in reality are own vision is first person?

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I never understood how first person games give people nausea....while in reality are own vision is first person?

For the same reason that reading a book in a moving car can bother some people: Your eyes and your inner ears- which are responsible for your sense of balance- are giving your brain conflicting messages (one is saying you're moving, the other says you're not); the brain begins to believe that this is the effect of some poison or sickness, and responds with dizziness (to get you to lie down) and nausea (to get you to expel any ingested poison). As with many things involving the human body, some people suffer from this more than others, while some go completely unbothered.

I've found that a number of things can help simulation sickness: Turning on/off motion blur, adjusting field of view, increasing/decreasing resolution, playing in a window rather than fullscreen, having something visible between you and the screen.

Personally, I don't get simulation sickness myself, but I do suffer from a mild form of vertigo, which can be set off by quickly inverting the view in an FPS game. (Games that involve flight from a first-person perspective most often do this.)

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

My girlfriend has a lot of issues with nausea, sadly bad enough that it's not even worth playing most first person games.

It's kind of weird which games tend to trigger it, she was more or less fine with Oblivion, but Skyrim absolutely floored her. I suspect it has to do with the field of view. Skyrim's default is 65, while Oblivion's is 75.

Another game that was absolutely horrible for her (and for me too after a half an hour) was Flower by That Game Company. That game is absolutely nausea inducing, and it seems to be common among other people too.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I don't find it any more immersive. That said, I gauge my immersion by how engaged I am, and I've been equally engaged by both first-person and third-person games. It's more a matter of how everything else is presented, where the camera view only affects it potentially by informing how that stuff should be presented.

I never understood how first person games give people nausea....while in reality are own vision is first person?

Along with what The Rogue Wolf said, there's the issue that first-person games sometimes don't emulate how we perceive movement accurately. It's closer to our own experience otherwise, so such failures at emulation can be very jarring.

 

[Bad Jim]

I never understood how first person games give people nausea....while in reality are own vision is first person?

Probably because your eyes and ears tell you you're running down a corridor shooting bad guys when your other senses tell you you're sitting down and moving only your fingers. There is a disconnect there, and some people can't handle it very well.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Never experienced nausea really, I'm pretty resistent to that kind of thing.

One game sequence that had a lot of my friends gettings nauseous was the title screen to the original Unreal (link [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26I-Pw-yPJ4]). Which was the camera floating around this castle thing. I have to admit you could get fairly dizzy from that.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

The only FPS game that ever gave me nausea was the original "Turok: Dinosaur Hunter" It was a combination of the pea soup fogging and Turok having a REALLY over-exaggerated weapon bob that just sort of made me queasy, I guess because the movement just felt so unnatural.

Not quite a FPS, but played from a first-person perspective, but also the original Descent was totally vomit inducing.

 

[Something Amyss]

First-Person doesn't immerse me at all. People seem to cross "immersion" and "thing I like."

They also don't make me sick.

Well, let me rephrase: Black Ops 3's beta lagged enough on me that the constant stuttering (higher than the frame rate, lol) actually did make me sick. But that has nothing to do with it being a first person point of view.

 

[Gray-Philosophy]

I'm loving the contributions so far. The many different points of view sure brings a lot of perspective to the subject.

*ba-dum tch*

First-Person doesn't immerse me at all. People seem to cross "immersion" and "thing I like."

They also don't make me sick.

Well, let me rephrase: Black Ops 3's beta lagged enough on me that the constant stuttering (higher than the frame rate, lol) actually did make me sick. But that has nothing to do with it being a first person point of view.

I could very well have used the word immersion wrong in this context, my apologies if I did!

What I mean is the way it puts the player in the actual place of the character you're playing, letting you "see" the game world through the character's eyes, from their perspective, more so than a third person or isometric perspective.

 

[freaper]

The only time I've ever been nauseous while playing games was when I played Minecraft on a laptop. Turning the head-bobbing off and taking breaks every 30 minutes helped a lot.

 

[Kwak]

I recently wanted to give Bioshock 2 a play-through, but just kind of lost interest because the FOV was so narrow, plus I could never seem to get the aiming sensitivity right on the controller. Maybe I got a mild sense of nausea from it but not too much, it was really just because I never really felt properly in control and always had the sense of being restricted in some way that I stopped playing.

Some games definitely have made me sick in the past, maybe the lower frame rates of older games?
I think Rayman 3 gave me that nauseous feeling, I have no idea why, and that was third person.

 

[IceForce]

COD Modern Warfare 2 was the one that got me, more than any other game I've ever played. I always get terrible headaches and nausea from playing that.

I read somewhere that that game has the narrowest FOV of all the CODs, so that might have something to do with it.

 

[Poetic Nova]

FOV has to be atleast 90 for me. Which is why it baffled me that the standard FOV for L4D2 is 65 on PC.
Too low of a FOV leads to tunnel vision, or something similar to that, and since I already have problems with registring everything if I cannot see enough of my surrounding area (gaming and non-gaming) it kills the whole game for me if I cannot change the field of view.

 

[Timeless Lavender]

Not a fan of First Person View because it makes me feel sick. I also have horrible perception since I played quite poorly in these type of games compared to games that have third person view. Which is sad because I would love to play Metro series, Spec ops the line and Stalker series but the First person view is a major turn off.

 

[CrystalShadow]

I've n
never had that problem with FPS, but get it very badly with VR.
VR is essentially the extreme case of 'first person' games, and I assume the root cause of nausea in both is the same.

Nausea in VR is caused by two things. latency, and movements in virtual space that aren't happening in real space, or vice versa.

Basically, it comes down to a mismatch between what you actually see, and what your other senses are saying you should expect to see.

The worst nausea in VR tends to be caused by head tracking delays and errors.
If your head moves but what you see doesn't change to match precisely and quickly, you end up feeling sick.

If the the ingame view moves when you do not, that can also cause sickness, but not as easily.

Now, obviously a regular fps doesn't even have headtracking, but the same basic logic would apply.
but, in VR it's been noted sickness is reduced if it seems as though you're in a vehicle. (lots of stuff around you that's stationary even if soem things are moving. - like a cockpit environment)

The monitor (or monitors) on which you play games don't move. So you have an entire environment of non-moving objects that correctly follow your head movements.
So there is less likelyhood of head movement related sickness.

However, I would assume if your monitor is large enough, and occupies enough of your vision, the other kind of movement issues could crop up.

Head bobbing in VR for instance is a rather bad thing for nausea.
The more complex and faster the motion, and the less it resembles what your own head is doing, the more likely it seems to be that people will get nauseous.