The Plight of the Motion Sick

I can't play first-person shooters.  It's not that I don't like them, or that the game titles don't appeal to me; it's that they make me motion sick.  I nearly puked the first time I tried to play Portal -- the second I made an infinite loop and jumped in, I had to turn it off -- and Bishop tried for almost an hour to teach me how to play Half-Life 2, but to no avail.

I don't get motion sick normally.  Cars don't bother me, and planes only make me nauseous when I'm travelling with certain family members.  The only time I can recall a vehicle making me sick was when I went on a cruise during high school, wherein the ship spent approximately two days in the midst of a crazy storm that made it swing from side to side like a teeter-totter.  I spent most of that trip lying in my bed, unable to stand up without vomiting.

But nothing else really upsets my stomach.  Until I crank up a first-person video game, that is, and then I'm sick in minutes and down for the count for the rest of the night.

This has never really bothered me: sure, I would love to enjoy Portal or Half-Life, but I understand their stories enough to participate in discussions about them. But so many first-person games are ones I have no interest in, like Call of Duty or Left for Dead (to be fair, I'm not interested in Left for Dead partially because the witch music scares the shit out of me, but that's a different point).  Bishop desperately wants me to play Battlefield 4, his current obsession, but I figure, hey, WWII is over and I don't want to live it.  Other than me holding out hope that someday this affliction might abate so I can play Bioshock, getting motion sick from games has never bothered me too much.

Then three days ago, I started Alan Wake.

I didn't get very far when I first booted it up.  After about 30 minutes -- enough time to make it through the first nightmare -- I had to shut it down to go do adult stuff like laundry.  Game play is a little clunky: the way you're supposed to fight/duck isn't exactly intuitive and while changing weapons just takes the tap of a button, firing said weapon is luck of the draw; there's no aiming or anything, just pulling the trigger and assuming the gun will fire at the bad guy ahead of you.  The story, though, is really cool, especially for a Stephen King fan like myself.  Alan Wake is a novelist (who quotes King in the opening lines of the game!), vacationing in Bright Falls with his wife, who is trying to help him overcome his writer's block.  However, his wife vanishes, and he starts discovering novel pages credited to him but with no memory of writing them.  The whole game, thus far, has a dark, mysterious tone enhanced by the isolated forest setting and the battles against 'the darkness,' a force from the opening nightmare that hasn't yet been fully explained.

Fighting the forces of darkness takes pistols, flare guns, and apparently, lots and lots of flashlight batteries.  

I'm not very far into it, so I don't know what's coming or really any more than that.  I'm enjoying it -- it has the thriller atmosphere of many King novels without the jump-out-and-scare-you factor that I hate about scary movies.

The problem is this: this game makes me feel like throwing up.  It's third person, like so many other games I love, so I wasn't expecting a problem; when I started feeling nauseous after about 45 minutes of playing, I assumed it was something I'd eaten for dinner and ignored it.  When it didn't get better with some Tums, I wondered if maybe it was the camera movement -- I normally turn the camera sensitivity down on games so I don't feel like I'm being whipped around all the time -- so I turned this one's down as far as it would go.  No luck.

After that, it didn't take long for me to realize that this game was making me motion sick.

I still don't totally get it, even after figuring out the cause.  Sure, the weapons handling is clunky and there's this odd 'focus' feature that zooms the camera off to some far away action without warning, but that shouldn't that big of a deal.

The main character being off-center might be the culprit.  Sure, lots of games have this; Resident Evil 5 and Mass Effect both keep your character slightly off to the left when armed, a body movement that feels natural for me, since I'm right-handed.  But Wake stands waaaaay off to the right, more peripheral than merely off-center, and that's hard to get used to.  He's difficult to control as a result; I'm constantly walking him into things or having to turn him around.

You can see his location during play here. And really, I think this image is with the camera rotated toward him, because he always seems even further to the right from my perspective.  

And even with the sensitivity turned all the way down, the camera movement in this game is really fast, both horizontally and vertically.  All I have to do is barely tap my mouse and the camera goes flying all over the place. Combined, these two features are too much for my brain, and I had to turn the game off.

I did some research. Apparently, game play is a common complaint for fans of this game, and plenty of others seem to get motion sick too.  A lot complain about the movement speed, and there is even a mod for adjusting the "blur effect" of this freaking game to try to make it more palatable:

I might need to download it if I want to continue playing... which, at least right now, I really do. 

Maybe that's what the creators wanted this game to do: disorient you so badly that you feel sick so you can truly empathize with Wake's mindset in the game.  If that's the case, then bravo! Mission Accomplished.

It seems silly that motion sickness should be so restrictive, that it should be a deterrent to game play when it affects basically nothing else in my life.  I really like the game, and I want to continue playing it, but for now... I'm not sure I can handle it.