Inducing motion sickness in your customers is not a good business model

I saw mention of a juicy-looking rant, but when I got there the page had been taken down, so I stayed for a bit to check out the rest of the site.

What I found was this:

A New Zero by Cryptic Sea

I've played thousands of hours of first and third person 3-D games without experiencing motion sickness, but I always turn head bob off.

Watching even this short clip was distinctly unpleasant. The camera is bouncing around way too much for comfort. There was nothing subtle about the head movement.

There's a reason why most FPS games act like stable gun platforms—they don't want to make a large percentage of their customers too ill to play.

This Siggraph piece on simulator sickness has some very interesting information:

20% to 40% of fighter pilots suffer from these symptoms when using simulators and the symptoms may last for several hours. It should be noted that fighter pilots are specially selected for resistance to motion sickness and are used to simulators. [my emphasis]

Fighter pilots, wow!

And there's this:

...in motion systems, motion at 0.2 hz is particularly nauscogenic.

I didn't time it, but it appeared that some of the modelled head oscillation wasn't far off from 0.2 hz.

Finally, under recommendations for preventing sickness in virtual environments:

don't move your head too much.

Unless there's an option for a completely stable head, this developer's innovation will amount to suicide as the game will acquire a reputation for inducing motion sickness.

I left a comment at the blog. Let's hope the developer switches to spending time implementing innovations that everyone can enjoy.

The End is in Sight

Perfectly timed for my last post on rat pellets is an extensive interview with legendary developer John Carmack in Eurogamer where he says:

...the better games get the harder you have to go to give a delta people care about. That's going to be a challenge for the next-generation of consoles, to show that the pack-in title is going to look more awesome than what you get on the current ones that people will want to go spend $300 on a new console.

They'll be able to do it on the next generation, but it's going to be much harder. And whether it's even possible another generation after that is an open question.

And in an interview with CNET, Carmack says:

I can recognize the knee in the curve where I can do things that make the graphics better than what they are right now, but not as much better as if we put all that engineering effort into things that make it more fun.

This is huge.

Of course he's likely known this forever but it's nice to hear someone like John Carmack say that better graphics don't make games more fun, echoing what Chris Crawford said twenty years ago.

But more importantly, Carmack sees the end of the line for the improved graphics train that the industry has been riding all these years. He's saying the next generation of consoles will probably be the last to show obviously better graphics. For years improved graphics have been a major driver of sales for consoles and PC graphics cards, so this has huge implications for hardware vendors such as nVidia, AMD, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.

It's been awhile now that I've been unable to see much (if any) difference in the side-by-side comparison images that purport to show the graphic improvements offered by the new offerings from nVidia and AMD. Since frame rates are decent, my main focus has been on power consumption as high-end graphics cards tend to be undesirably hot and noisy.

One of my pet peeves is draw distance. I always want to see further away, and for performance reasons most FPS and small scale tactical games have very short draw distances. So while improved hardware could offer longer draw distances, seeing tiny objects better in the far distance isn't going to offer a compelling reason for people to upgrade.

It's not just hardware -- as Carmack notes, the end of the improved graphics cycle will have a big effect on marketing games, too. Since so many games now are just old games redone with better graphics, publishers will have to find other reasons for people to buy new games.

The era of good enough graphics is almost upon us.

Don't get all excited by the rat pellets

Many years ago, while it was still known as the CGDC, Chris Crawford gave a talk (no, not the The Dragon Speech) in which he brought up the concept of rat pellets.

Crawford has long maintained that a game's interactivity as expressed by its algorithms, systems, and play mechanics are what's important. I'm paraphrasing from an ancient memory here, but I recall Crawford saying that he'd work on a game to the point where it was fun to play, and at that point he considered it to be done. But then he'd have to add the rat pellets: the graphics and cutscenes and eye candy that the publisher required for a shippable game.

Subsequently the industry ignored Crawford and went on a twenty-year binge of emphasizing graphics over everything else. Well, most of the industry, anyway. Blizzard emphasizes gameplay, and Chris Hecker is taking that approach as well:

Make the deep and hardcore game first, and make it accessible later in development. I’m ripping this off directly from a 2006 speech by Rob Pardo, the Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard, about how they design games for the long term.  Here’s a great quote from the Gamasutra writeup:  “First we try to come up with what are really cool things, things that will get people to play for two to three years. Then we actually start talking about accessibility, how to make the content approachable and easy to learn. But it starts with depth first.”

One of the greatest achievements of Minecraft has been to allow gamers to see that graphics don't make a great game. It's always entertaining to read another admission by someone saying that after initially being turned off by Minecraft's simple graphics, they found the gameplay to be compelling.

I'd been thinking about bringing up this recollection of rat pellets and was moved to action by a recent posting over at Bio Break, where Syp posted 8 thoughts on the new Old Republic cinematic. Take it easy there Syp, I know there's not much else to go on at this point, but it's just a cinematic that nobody will care about once the game launches and folks can actually play it. Don't get all excited by the rat pellets!