Aug 1, 2016

Games That Give Me Motion Sickness

About four years ago I first noticed that scrolling screens that were not controlled by the player caused me motion sickness. This seems to be worsened by a need to read text on or near the scrolling image.

Terraria

The title screen of Terraria is a scrolling screen that is moving leftward. This moving background is the same that is within the game, but because the background only moves based on the character's actions, I've only been bothered by the title screen. Generally I can navigate the menu quickly enough to avoid much sickness.

Card City Nights

In deck editing screens, deck selection, and victory screens, the background scrolls diagonally. When I originally played this game, I wrote an email to the developer Friday night, and continued playing. The game was interesting enough to grin and bear it thought the sickness. Within a business day of receiving my email, the developer added a setting to their settings file that disables background movement.
In: C:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\LocalLow\Ludosity\CardCityNights\Profile.txt
DeactivateBackgroundScrolling|100

Cthulhu Realms

In July 2016, the title screen had a scrolling background. In September 2016 they upgraded the look of the title screen to be in a significantly decorated room. Alas, this room is navigated by a floating camera that moves from place to place in the room as a loop.

Magic 2014

I'm not certain which year of Magic, but at least one screen had a rotation around an object view which I think was a victory screen.

Bloodline Champions

The victory screen rotates around the playfield. (last tested in 2012 iirc)

Free Fall - Maleficent

In the Moors questline, level 200 (start of chapter 11) introduces a water character with flowing water around them. This is presented as a scrolling background. 

Star Trek: Bridge Crew

The main menu is inside of a pod orbiting a ship. While looking at the menu options, stars are moving in the background. 

Room Motion via VR

Room Motion is when a Virtual Reality (VR) room moves differently than the Real Life (RL) room does. This can be seen in elevators, games with vehicle movement (at least when the player is inside the vehicle, but not if the player is 3rd person controlling the vehicle), or forced movement. I have since gained much stronger VR legs, and have a Steam Curator VR Motion, with the goal of helping people understand the kinds of Room Motion a game has.

Rise to Ruins

The title screen is in motion. Much like Terraria. There is a hidden setting in /profiles/settings.properties called mainMenuDrift that can be set to false to disable it

Ziggurat by Milkstone

The post boss victory screen has a background in motion over text. I believe if this part of a room navigated by the player, it wouldn't give me motion sickness, but because it has text on it it does. Similar to Bloodline Champions.

Clash Royale

In March 2020, they released a new theme arena based on a cake being delivered somewhere. The top of the screen has constant movement as the cake moves upward. Within a few days, they disabled the scrolling background after feedback requested it.

Monster Train

This deckbuilder has gameplay that takes place on a train with a side view showing a traveling background. Andrew Krausnick notes that there is an option to disable the scrolling parallax.

Remember Me

The main menu has text that bounces around in a glitched style. Lots of small movements to things that shouldn't be moving.

Lost Ark

The server selctor is at sea, with the camera, ship and characters all bobbing up and down in front of a transparent menu.



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