John Carmack Reveals That High Performance Gaming Settings, Like 120 FPS, Can Cause Simulator Sickness [Video]

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 …