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What about you? Does motion sickness affect what and how you play video games?
Like some of you out there, I suffer from motion sickness, which a
lot of times doesn’t go well with my desired profession. Fast paced
shooters and other first person titles are usually the culprit, but
sometimes there’s a few other titles that have a major effect.
Recently, Ninja Gaiden II set me off in a bad way. With a
combination of the game’s very bad camera and choppy framerate, an hour
long play session had my dizzy and on the verge of vomiting for good
bit of time after playing. Ninja Gaiden Sigma on the PS3 gave me no
such problems. In fact, I played through half of that game in one
sitting. Then you have games like Call of Duty 4, which, although it’s
very fast paced, runs at a constant framerate and gives me no problems
whatsoever. I’ve had marathon sessions lasting six to seven hours or
more of Call of Duty or Halo 3 where I haven’t had a single issue with
motion sickness.
So what exactly causes this problem? In most cases, it’s a
combination of bad framerate and poor camera issues, which is why Ninja
Gaiden II caused such an effect. In many games where the framerate is
not locked, the rapid changes in screen updates can cause your mind to
get confused. And if the camera doesn’t control the way it should, your
perception of the world goes right out the window.
Many people suffer from motion sickness that play video games. Some
choose not to play games that affect them, such as first person
shooters or extremely fast racing titles. Others opt for very short
play sessions to keep things in check. Me? I go for the medicine route.
Sure, you can use Dramamine or other over the counter pills, but those
just end up making you woozy. A cheaper and, in my opinion, better
solution is ginger root capsules. The effects of ginger root are
similar to what you could get with Dramamine, but without getting you
all loopy. If none of these options work for you, there’s always
prescription drugs. But if you need to go that far, you might have to
go with option 1, which is avoiding the games that cause issues
altogether.
Motion sickness hinders what I play sometimes, but it’s nothing that
can stop me from any games that are great and that I really want to
play. It took me six months to pick of Call of Duty 4 because I was
afraid of how it would affect me, but I’m much happier knowing I’ve
played the game (and continue to play).
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