I've never experienced motion sickness playing console or PC games.
So I've always felt sorry for those poor souls who feel too queasy to play first person shooters because it makes them 'car sick'.
But now I have my own game-sickness.
I get really and truly nauseous when using tilt/accelerometer controls on mobile games - rotating or shaking the screen I'm playing (as opposed to rotating or shaking a console's game controller).
Colliding inputs
I just can't play any game that solely uses tilt controls. I feel like I'm going to heave anytime an otherwise touch-controlled game springs a device-rotating, tilting or shaking action on me.
Year Walk, Space Team and The Room all recently caught me out like this.
The Room - enough to make you sick?
Some research into simulation sickness - the game version of motion sickness - reveals the explanation for this feeling is the dissonance between your senses.
Some of your senses - your eyes and ears - are telling you that you're moving, while others, like your inner ear and your backside - are telling you that, in fact, you're sat on your bum going nowhere.
And your brain doesn't like the confusion.
The root of simulation sickness is usually explained because the virtual world is sophisticated enough to trick the eyes and ears into taking it for real movement: the player is immersed enough in the game world to believe it's real.
Going deep
Immersion is a word that gets bandied about a lot in games, to the point that it can become meaningless.
People can be given to making big sweeping assumptions about it, and what makes players feel immersed. From experience though, like most game design, there's rarely a one-size-fits-all-solution.
One example. The producer and creative director on a survival horror title I worked on decided that the game should be in first person, because first person is more 'immersive' and therefore scarier.
With no character on screen, they reasoned, you the player must feel that you are in the game, and ergo you are in peril.
As logical as it sounds, I didn't agree. The games I've found the scariest are all third person.
Scary, for the perspective as well as the theme
I've never ever sat in front of the TV, forgotten I'm playing a game and assumed that I personally am in danger no matter how creepy the setting.
However, if I can see my third person character, frail and vulnerable, I feel responsible for them, and scared on their behalf.
We conducted a quick poll of the team, and found them split 50/50. Half considered first person more immersive because they could fill the role of the character, the other half found it less because they felt that they were essentially driving a camera.
Canny valley
Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli has recently been holding forth that graphics are the key to immersion.
Indeed, the idea that immersion is linked to realistic depictions of world is widely ingrained.
Yet, just after considering the graphic and audio capabilities of games to immerse the user, who would declare that "Nobody has ever felt a sense of immersion playing Tetris".
Of course, I'm sure many of us have had the most powerful 'Where did the last five hours go?' experiences when playing either this granddaddy of spatial puzzles or another similarly aesthetically unrealistic puzzler.
If being so lost in a game that you have no awareness of the real world - and I've sat right next to an oven pouring out black smoke merrily burning my dinner due to be completely lost in an utterly unrealistic game before - doesn't count as immersion, then I don't know what does.
Personal taste
But am I making a huge school girl error confusing immersion and engagement?
Immersion is where you believe in the game world, while engagement is where you're absorbed in the challenge of the game.
Perhaps I am, and some game designers helpfully split immersion into different types. I don't think I could ever feel immersed in a world I was not engaged in though.
It takes me about two minutes to stop being wowed by graphics - beautiful games with boring gameplay don't hold my attention long and certainly don't make me forget the real world exists.
Personal taste figures highly too. The most amazingly realistic super-high graphic quality football game in the world is very unlikely to immerse me because, I'm sorry to say, I don't like football.
Neither immersive or engaging for non-sports fans
Conversely, motorbike racing games don't have to be very graphically realistic to draw me in, because I like riding bikes.
Looking too deeply?
So has this discussion taught us anything?
We can theorise from my tilt-induced motion sickness that I personally find touchscreen worlds more persuasive to my senses than most console game environments. And, since I'm always talking about how immediate and intimate I find touchscreens, that this closeness to the game puts me more under its spell than the most gorgeous of graphical depictions.
I couldn't say if this applies many players, though, or if I'm unique - no-one I know has confessed up to similar tilt-sickness.
Yet I imagine we'll be reading a lot more statements and rumination about immersion with the consumer release of Oculus Rift in 2014.
But when that happens don't forget, you can't please all of the people all of the time. What immerses one player may leave another cold, and yet another ready to vomit all over the place.
