Wow

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Monday, May 27, 2013, 19:42 (4207 days ago) @ ZackDark

Must feel amazing to have that kind of immersion. I mean, aside from feeling sick.

Actually, I don't think it's immersive at all! If I was actually that character, running around those buildings, I think I'd be fine...except of course, I'd be horribly mangled from my first jump. Well, actually I can't even touch my toes, so I'd be moaning just trying to step over some vent.

It's just the fast motions of the graphics, not what's 'really' happening, especially when in first-person. It's like I'm trying to keep my eye on everything on the screen, but the sides are moving much faster than the center and then bam, I'm sick. When I'm the Monitor in Forge Mode and I start zooming around really fast it hits really quickly. Marathon's quick-turns also bleh-ed me almost instantaneously (which made me quite sad).

Apparently the wiki article even mentions Halo in this section:

Simulation sickness, or simulator sickness, is a condition where a person exhibits symptoms similar to motion sickness caused by playing computer/simulation/video games.

The most common theory for the cause of simulation sickness is that the illusion of motion created by the virtual world, combined with the absence of motion detected by the inner ear, causes the area postrema in the human brain to infer that one is hallucinating and further conclude that the hallucination is due to poison ingestion. The brain responds by inducing nausea and mass vomiting, to clear the supposed toxin.[7] According to this theory, simulation sickness is just another form of motion sickness.

The symptoms are often described as quite similar to that of motion sickness, and can range from headache, drowsiness, nausea, dizziness, vomiting and sweating. Research done at the University of Minnesota had students play Halo for less than an hour, and found that up to 50 percent felt sick afterwards.

But I can play standard Halo fine, for days at a time! And most games for that matter. Forge, Mirror's Edge, and sometimes Portal is about all that hits me like that, that I know of at least.