Zara's geek secret

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By Zara Baxter
10:30 Sep 19, 2008 | 11 Comments

I have a confession to make, oh Atomicans. My revelation will damage my geek cred severely, and you may even snicker – everyone in the office did – but I need your help.

See, a while back, a friend invited me to co-op with him on Natural Selection, the Half-Life mod. He thought it’d be my kind of thing, and what could be better than geeking out together, right?

Except that games make me want to vomit. Not in a that-game-is-garbage way, but in a the-world-is-spinning-uncontrollably-which-way-to-the-toilet way. It happens with first person perspective – I also get nausea with limited third person, but if you get the camera high enough so that yea verily, I am like unto a God to those game minions, I’m fine. Score one for megalomania.

The reason is proprioception – our body’s sense of position and motion. We get information about position from stretch receptors in our inner ears, muscles, tendons and joints and our brains put together the whole picture. We normally rely on visual cues for a lot of positional information, but not all – try writing ‘proprioception’ on a lined piece of paper with your eyes closed, and you’ll quickly spot that forming the word doesn’t need vision, but hitting the line accurately does. When our body and vision have different ideas about position and movement, nausea can result.

My brain is fine when my body is moving but the horizon isn’t, but switch things around and the poor thing gets a little confuzzled.

It all began with Descent, which I started playing on an Amiga 2000, back in the day. And I stopped about three minutes later, clutching my stomach. Three minutes of play caused 40 minutes of extreme nausea.

I’ve dipped into first person games now and then, to see whether the nausea-triggering had gone away of its own accord. But alas, I couldn’t play Quake, Tomb Raider, Half-Life or Far Cry. I was left with only turn-based games that didn’t trigger me too badly. And Diablo – I’m looking forward to Diablo III, even if it is a total point-and-clickfest, just because it’s one of the few real-time third person perspective games I can play without problem.

It’s not all bad news, though. More recent game engines have better motion handling, graphics cards now render faster relative to your mouse or keyboard input, and more recent monitors smooth motion, all of which reduce the in-game nausea. I can play Crysis, and I can play Call of Duty – which is fortunate, because they’re PC Authority’s benchmark games. I also loved Portal, but I had to play it in 20 minute chunks (no pun intended).

My problem seems to be, if not common, at least relatively frequent among other geeks. Some estimates are that one in four people suffer from game-related nausea. And because it’s a frequent problem, there are a few proffered solutions including:

Increase your monitor’s refresh rate.
Play in a room with lights on, rather than a dark room.
Ensure you get more than 30fps to reduce flicker, which can increase nausea.
Move your head around (My ex used to do this compulsively, which was pretty amusing to watch. He also stuck his tongue out while battling the big boss critters).
Motion sickness pills.
Get a smaller monitor (HAH!).

But there’s still a bunch of games I can barely look at, much less play. So here’s what I need from you all: suggestions to fix the nausea. My plan is to use Half-Life – the most nausea-inducing game to track and graph the length of nausea vs gametime for each potential cure. It’s practically made of science!

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11 Comments

SceptreCore Sep 19, 2008 12:02 PM	Get yourself some ginger tablets... or what you probably better know as travel calm... take 2 and after about 5 or ten minutes have a play. Ginger relieves motion sickness and other nausea symptoms. So other then the tablets... as well as your suggestions above, have a chest of cold Bundaberg Ginger Beers by the computer. I have never had the symptoms you get there, but I do get bad motion sickness. Mainly driving long distances in cars.
charonis Sep 19, 2008 12:18 PM	Dark Forces = Instant vomit.
Hawkeye Sep 19, 2008 12:45 PM	But... but... Dark Forces was the best game ever!!! - DH
daleyboy79 Sep 19, 2008 1:57 PM	Raw steak milkshake 15 mins before game time should do the trick
charonis Sep 19, 2008 3:21 PM	I didn't say DF wasn't... but man.... motion sickness was instant. Even watching flash videos of DF makes me start feeling queasy...
Sparky Sep 19, 2008 6:31 PM	Yep I have to agree there, I dont have any problem with modern equiptment but before if a crt refresh was less than 75 it hurt me badly, and to play for any length my crt was runing at 90 to 120hz deppending on the res. The only game that ever gave me the fealings you speak of was Descent, It was just so alian in the gaming world, it think my body attempted to vomit out my brain. so I guess that once all the numbers are in you will have to run them through the 'Chunkulator' to see which is most effective.
strifus Sep 20, 2008 7:07 PM	I had game induced nausea when I first played CS. I quicly discovered that if I just concentrated on one spot on the monitor, namely the crosshair, the nausea didnt occur. Dont know if it will work for you though.
Predatory Kangaroo Sep 21, 2008 2:24 PM	One thing that should be added to that list is changing the Field of View in the game. This is particularly important with Natural Selection (each class on the alien side uses a different field of view, it can get disconcerting even for those who don't normally suffer from this problem. There are several threads on the Natural Selection forums explaining how to adjust the FOV, and suggesting less nauseating values, but generally speaking there are plenty of sites out there (they're normally dedicated to widescreen gaming) with instructions on changing FOV. Have a fiddle till you find something that you're comfortable!
atomicdvds Nov 4, 2008 6:10 PM	Which is better? How I met your mother and Two and Half a Man? Which is funnier? My friend recommends me both of them. But I don’t enough money to pay for the two items although www.dvdsetshop.com has give a 10% discount…… So I have to choose one.
NiNJAHAX Nov 16, 2008 9:27 AM	RTS. They are the only real games anyways, go buy CoH:OF, or DoW anything but the age games (bleah! I'd rather eat my own shit -ed). FPS is good but if you can't play them you aren't really missing out on much; cod4 is full of lvl55 hacked toons with p90s, barrettes and martyrdom, css is full of awpers who scream that it's a legitimate strategy. Fps is full of the notion of winning. In RTS winning is a part of the battle, but the battle itself is the reward (esp in games like CoH). But if you are grounded that you want to fps, those things are a good idea, I'd probably try ginger too, but i believe someone would have said this by now. But generally the nausea is a mix of relative screen brightness, refresh rate, and optic nerve strain, these can be eliminated fairly easily.
Athlonite Jul 12, 2010 12:28 PM	I can safely say the only game that even comes close to making me hurl is Colin McRay rally and then only when doing the Ausie outback races where you go over the massive downhill jumps

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