ARE YOU SICK OF GAMES?

The guest lecturer this week at the University Of Bolton was Nigel Kershaw, lead designer at Secret Sorcery. Nigel has worked recently on a VR game called Tethered (Secret Sorcery, 2016), designed from the ground up to be a Virtual Reality game for playstation VR. Throughout Nigels lecture, he mentioned different aspects of VR and how game design within a project must revolve around the point of being a VR platform game, with many normal paradigms of game design having to be changed. These changes are aspects such as technical, aesthetic and design methodologies.

Above: http://www.funnp.com/images-pics-photos/funny_sick_pictures.html

However, there is one key part of VR that can never truly be conquered, in terms of what a design team can put in place to eliminate the side effect all together. This is motion sickness within VR or Video Games. Sure there are ways to lower the likeliness of this happening to the person playing the game, but no definitive answer to motion-sickness.

Looking at what is deemed to cause motion-sickness in VR/Video Games, the list is extensive, aspects such as FPS (Frames per second), horizon in game moving constantly, quick cuts to different locations within game and taking control from the player. The list goes on however, with people reporting different situations of feeling motion sickness from playing VR or video games.

Nigel mentioned some of these aspects during his lecture giving ways to counter them, giving the player less discomfort while playing, especially during Tethered. Firstly the game must play at over 60 frames per second, lower would give the player discomfort, increasing the likeliness of motion-sickness. This is also a requirement by Sony on any VR game to be released on their PSVR platform (Hall, 2016), which reinforces how key FPS is on keeping the experience enjoyable and eliminating discomfort.

Another technical aspect would be mismatched motion such as field of view within the game, motion parallax and even the viewing angle (Groen, 2008). The way Tethered avoided these issues was to give the player specific areas of the map predetermined for their position to view the world from. Thus having a pre-determined FoV, anchored viewing angle and allowing the control of what motions would be in front of the player at anytime. This also solved a previously mentioned aspect of fading in and out whilst moving the player to new locations, as the player would gently move over time via a soft slow fade in and out.

There are many different ways appearing all the time to try to combat motion sickness in video games and VR, no doubt with the current trend of VR games appearing that new ways to combat this sickness will come to the fore also.

(Above) Playstation VR headset

References:

Groen, E.; Bos, J. (2008). "Simulator sickness depends on frequency of the simulator motion mismatch: An observation". Presence. 17 (6): 584–593. doi:10.1162/pres.17.6.584.

Hall, C. (2016, March 17th). Sony to devs: If you drop below 60 fps in VR we will not certify your game. Retrieved from Polygon: https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/17/11256142/sony-framerate-60fps-vr-certification [Accessed on 31/3/16]

Secret Sorcery. (2016). Tethered. St Helens, Merseyside, United Kingdom: Secret Sorcery.

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