A while back Kevin and Rachel were in town for a visit. While they were here, Kevin and I took a look at the PC he helped me build last year. In particular, we were looking at the copy of Half Life 2 I’m running, which Kevin and Rachel (I think?) got me for Christmas last year.
Kevin helped me get past a spot in the game I was hung up on, and then the suggested I up my video settings. I’m running a graphics card that’s capable of running the game at pretty much max settings, so we turned everything up all the way. It looked awesome. We didn’t play it much at the time, and I didn’t have a chance to get back to it before they left town, but I did play some after they left.
The first time I sat down for a session after we’d changed the video settings, I got about 40 minutes into the game before I started feeling queasy. What’s this? I’d never encountered anything like this before. I thought maybe I was getting sick, so I kept playing. But the feelings got worse, and I was feeling like I was going to throw up. I shut down the game and the computer, went to the fridge and grabbed a New Glarus, and sat on the couch for a bit. After an hour I felt much better, but why had I felt that way in the first place?
Turns out I’m not alone. The graphics in Half Life are so good, and so immersive, that even people who’ve never suffered from motion sickness (like me) are getting ill at the keyboard. Luckily, there are solutions to the problem, which I’ll implement soon. What a weird thing, though.