Motion sickness hasn't gone away - stop ignoring it
Nausea in VR is still a problem. By taking these three steps, we can address the issue of motion sickness and keep more people playing in the long term.
In this column, MIXED guest writer Jamie Feltham regularly looks at current developments and shares his experiences from over 10 years in the XR industry.
Last week, upon my recommendation, my brother-in-law scooped up a Quest 3S, his first VR headset in 8 years. Like many, he was lured in by the bright lights of the virtual Bat-Signal. As a devout gamer that rarely misses a big release, I couldn’t wait to get his thoughts on how far the industry had come.
His initial thoughts were sobering: “That Batman game is cool but my god the motion sickness!”
Avoiding comfort complacency
We need to be much more forthcoming about the perils of VR motion sickness and what causes it.
Now, I mainly enjoy games that throw this caution to the wind. It’s worryingly easy for me – especially since moving on from regularly writing about VR – to forget that I’m one of the lucky ones that can play a racer or superhero game without my stomach turning in knots. But it’s tough to ignore the mass of Reddit threads bubbling up this past month proclaiming: “I just got VR, and now I’m motion sick!”
Batman: Arkham Shadow is one of the best, most immersive VR games of the year. But is it really the right fit for first-time VR users? | Image: Meta / Camouflaj
This shouldn’t surprise me, but it feels like a wake-up call. Headsets are lighter, clearer, and more powerful, but that doesn’t mean this issue has conveniently gone away. Games are bigger, better, and sold on more robust storefronts, but we aren’t doing enough to prevent newcomers from jumping head-first into comfort-intense experiences. In fact, we’re bundling them in for free (and, to be clear, Batman is my current frontrunner for VR Game of the Year).
In the ongoing fight to raise VR retention, this isn’t shooting ourselves in the foot so much as pulling the pin on a grenade and dropping it right where we stand. So what can we do about it?
Simple: Educate, Curate, and Persist.
Educate
In a faintly investigative mood and having not gone through the Quest setup process for a while, this week I made a new account and added it to my existing headset setup. I was surprised to see that it didn’t even mention comfort ratings. Then, when I was through onboarding and onto the store, the first apps I saw were for F1 racing and a Spider-Man web-slinging knock off.
Hardly the most comfort-savvy experiences for a first-time user. Now, from what I can tell, no platform is doing this well right now. But, with the lion’s share of the market, I’m using Meta as my prime example.
Even after a full headset reboot, the latest version of the onboarding has nothing to say for careful app selection. Instead, you’re left to pick your poison on the app store. Search hard enough, and you might locate a game’s comfort rating. Even then, the simplistic descriptions don’t tell you why a game has been given a certain rating, just what level it is.
I understand the hesitancy to warn users about VR sickness. You might scare them off and, hey, many people will probably ignore the warnings anyway. But for a medium in which the first impression is vital, leaving users to stumble upon the unwelcome gift of motion sickness for themselves seems like a bad idea.
So, to start with, let’s build a robust, user-friendly introduction to the subject. “Hey, we know you’re bursting to get into Batman, but this is very important… Not every app is going to cause this and not every user is going to experience this, but it’s important you get to know your limits.”
Comfort ratings should also be overhauled and re-prioritized. A game’s comfort rating should be as clearly visible as its price and trailer when you click on its store listing, not buried down below in smaller print. They should clearly list when a game uses artificial locomotion or forced camera movement and what options are available to mitigate any sickness.
Heavy hand-holding like this might sound exhausting but, when the alternative is another statistic against user retention, it’s essential. A user needs to know that VR can make them sick, how to avoid it, and not to give up if they do stumble into the dizzy world of nausea. Armed with that information, they can then make more informed choices about the type of content they want to play.
Curate
With good education in place, we don’t need to fundamentally change the VR content we enjoy today. The problem with the comfort debate is many core users fear you’re trying to spoil their fun, while some sickness-sensitive users think there shouldn’t even be any intense apps. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle.
There are plenty of great new comfort-centric games like Trombone Champ: Unflattened, Dimensional Double Shift, and Vendetta Forever, while comfort-intense games like Bonelabs and Blade and Sorcery are clearly in demand too.
Trombone Champ: Unflattened is a great VR game that isn’t going to make you sick. Why isn’t it one of the first titles you see in-headset? | Image: Flat2VR Studios
But we should be paying better attention to the apps players are starting out with. A simple starter questionnaire as people register their Meta accounts could gather information on the user’s past experience with VR, their favorite types of apps, and their overall comfort confidence.
That information could then be used to push the right apps to you to make sure your first experience is a positive one. Starter packs with games like Moss, Demeo, Superhot VR, I Expect You To Die and Beat Saber should be what new players see first, with a skip option for those that know their boundaries. And store categories could constantly feed you new sources of comfort-driven games.
There are more than enough robust, comfortable VR and MR games and apps out there to warrant a Quest purchase now, so it’s not something Meta should fear.
A check-in system could then help players progress. Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure is constantly asking players if they’re comfortable with the intensity of their workouts and offering incremental adjustments to encourage either pushing them further or not shaming them when they need to scale back. A similar approach here could let users test the waters of intense comfort in a much more regulated environment.
Sony also innovated with the PS5 with a feature that set games to automatically use the invert pitch option it preferred. It’d be great to see Meta do this at a systems level with features like teleportation, snap turning and vignetting so that players don’t have to constantly jump into settings when they pick up new games.
Persist
This issue isn’t going away. VR sickness is here to stay. Some people will get “VR legs”, some won’t. We as VR advocates shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Tempting as it may be, it isn’t constructive to tell someone to try and brute force their way through Batman or Gran Turismo 7. We need to be consistently vigilant in which games and apps we use to bring new people into VR, even if they’ve picked it up for Batman, Aliens, or Behemoth.
Fret not, Gorilla Tag fans, no one’s stopping you from arm-swinging away. Image: Another Axiom
Some handy ‘Best Of’ lists that only include games inclusive to everyone could help players more easily locate the games right for them. We need to be just as supportive of the games and apps that do make strides to accommodate first-time players because it’s a better long-term bet for VR.
Ultimately, it’s unrealistic to expect issues with motion sickness exposure to ever fully disappear. Maybe we can take some refuge in the fact there’s a young generation of Gorilla Tag players out there that are probably puzzled by the very idea of it. But, in an industry that needs all the wins it can get, there are some fast fixes we could apply here for a more educated, cared-for VR audience that aren’t returning headsets 5 minutes after trying a rollercoaster sim.
In any entertainment industry, content is king. Big games pull people to PlayStations and huge movies get Netflix subscribers. But VR shares its throne. Content is important, yes, but comfort remains king too. Long may it reign.
Jamie Feltham has 10+ years of experience working in VR, first covering the industry for a number of publications including UploadVR, where he created the UploadVR Showcase. After handling biz dev for HTC Vive and global PR & marketing for Fast Travel Games, Jamie founded the VR Games Showcase, the premiere digital showcase for VR game announcements and updates. You can follow @VRGamesShowcase on YouTube to get ready for the next VRGS events. Jamie can be reached at jamie@thevrshowcase.com.
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