Motion Sickness Accessibility in Video Games
48 comments
·January 31, 2025ziml77
jezzamon
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
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.
donatj
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.
fatnoah
> 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)
tomashubelbauer
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
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga22EthUCjA
You can add it to control center, either as its own toggle or via accessibility shortcuts menu
imzadi
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.
GuB-42
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.
foxyv
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.
nottorp
> 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.
Espressosaurus
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
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.
ismthetism
[dead]
bradbeattie
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.
recursive
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.
rfreiberger
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.
kmfrk
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
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
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.
o11c
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]
rob74
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...
Triphibian
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.
roywiggins
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_
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.
neilv
IIRC, Far Cry 6 had a surprising fleet of accessibility settings, including for motion sickness.
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.