Japan loves the FPS (just not this one).
Among my FPS-playing Japanese chums, most of whom are male and in their 20s (Japanese girls don’t really seem to dig the FPS genre), only one has experienced mid-game motion sickness. He was playing Crysis on his PC. The rest of them just give me funny looks when I explain the gaijin (mis?)conception that Japanese gamers puke at the mere sight of a first-person perspective. And for a genre that they reportedly “can’t get on with”, an awful lot of Japanese players have been buying Halo and other FPSes in recent years.
So maybe it’s a generational thing. Perhaps the FPS of the late 1990s (which seems to be when this myth was first propagated) was not compatible with the majority of Japanese gamers from that era, or perhaps the poor sales of GoldenEye in Japan can be attributed, not to its first-person-ness, but to its “Why is the screen smeared with Vaseline?” visual quality.
Other evidence suggests that the phenomenon is more to do with specific types of in-game movement rather than the FPS genre itself. I.e., my (Japanese) wife was playing GTi Club yesterday when she suddenly quit the game and complained that she felt dizzy because of the undulation in the game’s hilly cityscape. This isn’t the first time this has happened: Katamari Damacy and Super Mario Galaxy also made her feel physically sick. The cause of the recurring problem, she reckons, is something to do with 3D environments and the scope of being able to move in all directions. Which is why she generally sticks to playing 2D and simple 3D games – as do several of her friends, for the same reasons.
Non-scientific but probably accurate conclusion: Japan has no real problem with FPSes, yet some players are affected by extreme game environments.
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Kaz Hirai Video Interview - the first of Kikizo's interviews with the man who went on to become global head of Sony.
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Yu Suzuki, the Kikizo Interview - we spend time with one of gaming's most revered creators.
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The History of First-Person Shooters - a retrospective, from Maze War to Modern Warfare
Goldeneye looks pretty pasty now, but at the time it was visually stunning. Don’t blame the vaseline! I remember feeling quite sick when I played FIFA 98, but that had nothing to do with ‘extreme game environments’.
There have been some serious scientific/medical studies though where they concluded this. That Asian people did get this a bit more often than some others. Not much much more but still a bit. Even Kojima mentioned this in some interview and apparently companies like Sony test games for things like camera motion to reduce as much as possible of this.