Oculus Rift Games, Virtual Porn May Cause Simulation Sickness
Oculus Rift games may have an unfortunate side effect for some gamers, especially if those games happen to be of the erotic variety. We’re not talking about the endless pop-up ads you get from visiting porn sites on the internet, or the malware that tends to accompany them. The device may cause simulation sickness.
Simulation sickness is like motion sickness, in that what you’re seeing as you play virtual reality games or even interact with virtual porn doesn’t match up to what your body is actually experiencing. Your eyes are telling you in a racing game that you’re barreling down the highway at insane speeds, but your brain is telling you it’s not really happening, and it triggers a kind of negative backlash.
At the end of a day of these kinds of experiences, Nate Mitchell of Oculus VR stated about the effect, “Although the two are inverses of each other, they really do have the same consequences at the end of the day, which is dizziness, nausea, fatigue, all the things that you want to avoid as game developers.”
In other words, Oculus Rift games could literally leave you feeling ill. Combine that with virtual porn and you may end up with an experience that changes other aspects of your life. One such game, Wicked Paradise, is said to potentially connect two events in your brain which otherwise never connect.
The effect could be compared to Pavlov’s dog, which connected food to a certain unrelated event, such as a bell ringing. The end result was that the dog ended up drooling when the bell rang, even if there was no food involved.
Tomshardware News: Oculus VR Working on Simulation Sickness Issues: Oculus VR is working on keeping your face… http://t.co/zaFVPzA3kC
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Psychologist Elisabeth Blagrove also made the connection to a method of treating alcoholism:
“Where an individual has a problem with alcohol addiction, they can be given a drug which reacts with the alcohol to produce extreme sickness. In a similar way to Pavlov’s dogs, over time the individual will learn to associate drinking alcohol with a really unpleasant reaction, which hopefully reduces their inclination to drink. Here, you could be talking about the idea of pairing the nausea that you’re experiencing with the virtual reality kit to the feelings of arousal that you’re getting with the input of what you’re seeing.”
In other words, you could eventually become nauseated just thinking about sex, all because of erotic Oculus Rift games. It could be similar to what happened to Malcolm McDowell’s character in A Clockwork Orange, in which a boy was forced to watch scenes of absolute horror and violence and ended up equating the idea of hurting anyone with being violently ill.
The dangers of the connection are expected to be a result of long-term repetition, so it could be a while before the nausea connects in the brain with pleasurable experiences. The adverse effects of Oculus Rift games and virtual porn could take a long time to happen, but the possibility is there.
