Apparently motion sickness caused from playing games is reasonably common. It had never happened to me though… until Resident Evil 5.
A friend and I have been dipping in and out of the co-operative campaign for the past few weeks. We were playing again on Sunday night, finally getting pretty close to the end. Right at the climax of chapter 5, we took a break as my friend grabbed some food.
I stood up. I felt dizzy.
I went to walk across the room. The room was spinning.
I made it to my bed and lay down. Looking up, I could’ve sworn the bedroom light was moving across the ceiling while paint blotches were racing each other round in circles. My whole sense of balance was out of whack. I contemplated throwing up, but somehow persuaded my stomach against it. In the end, I lay there for an hour or so before I was able to get up again, although I was still reeling when I did and decided to try to sleep it off instead.
If you’ve finished Resident Evil 5, you probably know which section of the game did this to me. For those who haven’t, there’s a sequence on a rotating elevator that sees the platform spinning around at various speeds while you’re trying to shoot. We’d just been through this part about 15 minutes before we stopped playing. It didn’t hit me at the time, but as soon as I took my eyes off the screen I was churning.
As I said, I’ve never been hit by motion sickness via a video game before. But now I’m curious to find out how common it really is. Do you suffer from motion sickness? And what types of games are the worst for it?
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