Half-Life 2 is making me sick .... literally

Published by

Hi guys, I thought this piece of information would make interesting news, as it appears to be affecting a lot of gamers (myself included). Half-Life 2 is making me sick .... literally - it's giving me motion sickness.

I'm getting quite bad nausea, cold sweats, headaches, and a feeling in my stomach that makes me want to be sick. This is exactly the same feeling I have got on an extremely rough boat ride. Once I have these symptoms, it takes me a few hours to feel better again once stopped playing.

To justify this, I'm 24 yrs old, and I have played pretty much every decent FPS shooter for the past 10 years. There are two examples of games where this has happened to me before however - Halo affected me slightly (not as severe nausea, but still present), and the other being the original Half-Life. In that game, I made it to about the second level, as it was too difficult to play any longer with the symptoms, even though it was THE game at the time, and I was enjoying it thoroughly.

The quite strange thing about this all, is that I'm a big Counter-Strike fan. I have been playing since early beta's, and have spent many many hours in front of the PC on CS : Source, and I've felt perfectly fine! I have tried forecing refresh rates to 85hz and above, running in higher/lower resolutions, all to no avail.

Some gamers are starting to believe that the POV (Point Of View), which is the field of vision displayed on the screen, is the culprit. CS:Source's POV is set at 90, whilst HL2 runs at 75. Humans have a field of view of approx. 180 (degrees). This means that running around playing HL2 is like running around with tunnel vision.

I'm hoping that Valve will address this issue, as this utterly incredible game is not having the impact it should on me.

I might even experiment taking some motion sickness drugs, and see what the outcome is. You could then change the story from "Half-Life 2 making People Sick", to "Half-Life 2 making people drug-dependant".... ;-)

Here is a few links to other peoples posts about the problem.

Steampowered Forum Thread 1 Steampowered Forum Thread 2 HalfLife2.net

Cheers guys, keep up the good work.

Lee Jenkinson