John Carmack is one of the video game industry’s true stalwarts, who seems to have outgrown it. Today, he no longer works on Oculus, but heads his own company, an artificial general intelligence company named Keen Technologies. But that doesn’t mean he has lost all interest in video games.
A few days ago, he shared an interesting, and really surprising insight about game development, on Twitter:
“Last night, Trista was playing a third person 3D platformer game (Pumpkin Jack) and started to feel a little sick. I suggested cutting the max frame rate from 120 to 60 in settings, and that made it better.
Simulator sickness tends to come from high quality rendering of smooth angle changes that you aren’t directly controlling. Skillfully playing an FPS yourself has your brain expecting every angle change, but a third person camera that is only loosely coupled to your actions can be a problem. Closely watching other people play can also be a problem.
We first saw this after I got glQuake running on SGI hardware, and SGI invited us to their Dallas headquarters to try it out on a high end Infinite Reality system. A 3DFX could run 640×480 30 fps, but this system could run 1280×1024 60 fps. The room was dark, and I was playing the game on a big monitor at a quality we had never seen. Michael Abrash, watching behind me, got so sick he had to go sit down.”
So let’s unpack this. What is simulator sickness? This was a form of motion sickness was first found in pilots using plane simulators, from as far back as the 1950s. The kind of simulator sickness observed in video games usually come from an incorrectly defined field of vision.
Carmack is saying that high video game performance settings can also create that simulator sickness. He says his wife Trista experienced it playing Pumpkin Jack, a modern 3D Platformer with a cartoony Halloween theme, set at high framerates. For reference, you can watch Pumpkin Jack ‘s DLSS and Ray Tracing trailer below.
More incredibly, Carmack says he learned that this could happen because he saw it happen on glQuake. That was an early version of Quake running on OpenGL. How early was it? The SGI that he is referring to is the computer company that made the CG dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park movies.
So, those very expensive computers from the late 1990s that could run high performance glQuake, could also create simulator sickness. And that hasn’t changed in 30 years, in spite of all the advancements we have made, not only in computer performance, but optical and display technologies.
But this is why modern gaming now pays closer attention to QOL features. On a personal level, we gamers should be mindful that getting high performance hardware, whether those are consoles or PCs, might not be the best way for us to game. This is, of course, a case-by-case basis sort of thing, but it’s certainly something even people who can afford to splurge should be paying attention to.
Are you getting sick just playing your game for a few hours? If so, maybe you should reconsider the conditions where you are gaming. Because this is an industry veteran warning us that gaming is not a one size fits all experience.
