Are you suffering from debilitating nausea when playing certain titles while your friends are leaving you in the dust? If you’re like me, you may be more susceptible to motion or ‘simulator’ sickness than your peers. Certain titles, like shooters with fast pans and head bobble built in can be particularly triggering. We’ve put together a few tips below on how to deal with this motion sickness and improve your gaming setup.
Table of Contents
1. Understand why Motion or Simulator Sickness occurs
Without getting into the scientific details, the nausea that some gamers experience, with certain games like FPS shooters, has to do with simulated motion on screen (the visual element) and the physical motion your body is feeling (the physical element). When these two are out of sync, e.g. you’re whipping your gun around and your camera is bobbing while spring but your body is completely stationary, you may experience a plethora of side effects, like nausea and fatigue.
2. Optimize your settings for reducing nausea
There are a couple technical changes that you can make to minimize unnecessary motion:
- Incrementally decrease your Field of View (FOV) so that sideways pans aren’t too rapid and blurred
- Increase your FPS so that graphics are smoother
- Reduce camera shake, movement, or bobbing settings
- Sit further from your screen (so that you have more of your physical surrounds in view in your periphery)
3. Train your body to overcome the nausea
Some players have found it effective to slowly ramp up their game time with titles that trigger their nausea. Start with a small amount, like 15 minute sessions and over the course of several days, bump up by a few minutes each time. Our bodies are quite adaptive and this may help players build up a stronger tolerance or resolve the issue completely. As with all gaming, it’s important to take breaks.
4. Try a few natural remedies
Ginger has been used to treat nausea and is a proven remedy. As with all foods, it’s important to consider moderation. Consult your doctor if you have questions about ginger consumption. The FDA suggests up to 4 grams daily is safe. You can get creative with your ginger intake — ginger chews, natural ginger ales, and sucking and chewing on raw ginger for the hardcore.
5. If all else fails, try another game
Sometimes the certain way the graphics are rendered for a game just can’t be adjusted to suit your needs in avoiding motion sickness. When this is the case it’s best to shelf the game and move on to exploring another title — it’s just not worth the hours and hours of debilitating nausea that is sure to ruin the rest of your day.
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