"I may only be able to sit through 30 minutes": Gaming Sickness and Its Impact on Players' Experiences With Games

Gaming sickness, where players experience dizziness, nausea, or even vomiting while playing video games, is typically viewed through a quantitative lens, limiting our insights into the lived experience of the phenomenon and thus concealing mitigation strategies. To gain a more nuanced understanding of gaming sickness, and to explore possible lanes of future research, we conducted twelve semi-structured interviews with people affected by gaming sickness. Our results show that the experience of gaming sickness is highly individual, with a wide spectrum of symptoms and varying severity. Environmental factors can influence gaming sickness, and many participants have developed individual contextual and game-related coping strategies, which they apply with varying degrees of success. For games to be more accessible to everyone, future work should focus on studying specific triggers, and needs to explore different forms of adjustments so players can tailor games to their individual needs.