"MY HEAD IS SPINNING"

DIZZY

No tennis today.

No golf either.

I should go out walking but haven't been bothered so far. I've been reading - A Country Practice by Patrick Taylor. This is a series of books set in the 1960's in Ulster, Northern Ireland about a couple of village GPs. It's kind of like All Creatures Great and Small - James Herriot's vet series. It's gentle and whimsical, just the thing for lockdown.

I've kept away from the news so far but no doubt will get a lot of it from 4PM onwards.

I just checked the mailbox. The PS4 game I bought on-line hasn't turned up yet. Red Dead Redemption II. Bummer.

The games that came free with the PS4 I bought on Trade Me - Battleground, The Division and another are first person shooter games that make me dizzy and nauseous. This never used to happen with the Medal of Honour-type games I used to play on PS2 and PS3 and I wondered if it has something to do with the stroke I had.

I checked on-line and, apparently it is a thing. There is a syndrome called 'Gaming Sickness'.

WHY VIDEO GAMES MAKE YOU SICK

Adults who play or watch their kids play video games have been increasingly reporting motion sickness symptoms—headache, nausea, dizziness, sweating and more. Even people who have been playing video games since they were a kid can experience nausea, dizziness and other symptoms, especially with some of the newer games.

The solutions suggested are to:

• Watch or play in a well-lit and well-ventilated room.
• Sit farther back from the screen.
• Take breaks and get fresh air or a glass of water.
• Ease yourself into new games, staying active for only 5 minutes at first, then slowly increasing the time you play or watch.
• Adjust game settings regarding field of view or sensitivity of movement.
• Choose games that are in third-person perspective.
• Try medications or other methods of relieving movement-caused nausea.

It's the last solution that interests me. The gaming industry, worth billions, won't just sit back and do nothing. I'm sure that it will be heavily lobbying the medical and pharmaceutical industries to come up with a quick-fix solution - Gaming drugs. The industry stands to lose a lot of income unless a solution is found. Watch this space.

While more pharmaceuticals, particularly if promoted towards young people is a worry, there may be some positive spins off this. The symptoms of vertigo, motion sickness and other ailments including maybe anxiety, headaches and strokes may be helped by any advancements in this field. The Old Girl suffers from an inner ear problem that can cause vertigo and motion sickness. I get the odd migraine and a couple of years ago had a vertigo-like stroke.There hasn't been, to date, a lot of advancement in pharmaceuticals for these. With billions of dollars of video games at stake maybe, at last we'll see some improvements.