Abstract

The design of the game space is a major factor in shaping the player’s movement patterns and the player’s perception of movement (kinesthesia) in computer- and videogames, but very little research has been done into which aspects of the game world affect movement in what ways. Understanding the specifics of how space shapes movement is important in designing varied game worlds that affect the play experience in particular ways. This thesis analyses how different spatial structures give rise to different movement patterns in games with or without context-sensitive controls. The thesis analyses the dynamics between the game world, the controls, and the rules, and employs methods from user experience research to gather qualitative data about how players experience changes to each of these aspects of a game. The results demonstrate concrete relationships between different types of game space and different movement patterns and explain the player behaviour underlying these relationships, which will be especially valuable to those seeking to design environments for games where movement is a central part of the play experience.

Kinesthesia and Game Spaces is my Master’s thesis from the IT University of Copenhagen. It’s 70 of your regular human pages, which comes in just under 90 magic university pages (2400 characters per page). It was handed in on the 1st of November 2011, three months after the original deadline, and I defended it orally yesterday to the grade of 10, which translates into an A on the American scale or a B on the European scale. Not that the grade matters much to me right now, as I’m frankly just happy to have graduated with the least scientific Cand.Scient. in the country after 18 years of education.

I guess this marks a goodbye to this blog’s “University paper” tag.

You can download Kinesthesia and Game Spaces as a PDF weighing just under 2 MB.

That must be why we don’t have any in Denmark.

This weekend I flew to Oslo, rented a car with three of my class mates, and drove into the mountains to chill in a cottage with some board games and go for walks through the amazing landscape. With two days of travelling (Thursday for getting there and Sunday for getting back) and two days at the cottage, the cost/benefit of the trip in terms of my motion sickness was not brilliant, but the guys were remarkably accommodating and patient. Even with the sky overcast and the rain pouring down half the time, the spectacular Norwegian nature just about made up for the suffering.

The weather was all right on Friday, so that’s when most of my photos were taken. Saturday started out grey and quickly became very wet indeed, but we hiked undeterred (though drenched) up to a nearby mountain and back again in spite of it. I have no regrets. By the time we were leaving again on Sunday, the valley was partially flooded and we had to go off the highway and up through the mountains instead, where the roads are crooked and full of holes.

Here are some of the photos I took on the trip.

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Yesterday I handed in a 20-page paper on the topic of emergence vs. progression. I wrote the paper in April to get it out of the way so I could concentrate on my Master’s thesis, then proceeded to do fuck-all on the thesis for the entire month of May because I’m an idiot. The project was focused on the production of Archive X, which was meant to be an arcade-action game but turned out to be a puzzle game instead. In relation to the point of my paper, the game is quite a failure, but in and of itself it’s a pretty decent, if very short, puzzle game.

You might wonder how I could manage to work on two different Unity-based university games (Archive X and Broken Dimensions) at the same time. The answer is that I could not, and I did almost no real work on Archive X other than writing the original pitch document and putting the level geometry together in 3D Studio Max (a painful process which required me to first learn how to use 3D Studio Max). Most of the credit for the game should go to my class mate and programmer Isaac Dart (who is also not responsible for its failure to be properly emergent) and the rest is due to his partner in crime Juan Ortega and our artist Veselin Stoilov. They did most of the work while Ali and I were occupied with Broken Dimensions.

If you’re in the mood for a quick little puzzle game based on a very clever physics/chemistry simulation, feel free to download Archive X (111 MB). If you’re interested in the project and how it was used in my academic work, by all means grab the paper, Designing Emergent Gameplay (7 MB). I actually quite like it, it’s probably the first truly academic paper I’ve written at the IT University.

The exam is scheduled for June 16, and it’ll be my last exam before I defend my thesis.

Broken Dimensions is my graduation game from DADIU, the Danish Academy for Digital, Interactive Entertainment. Ours was the last class to make two full game productions as part of the programme (last year I worked on Imachination) – starting this fall, DADIU will become a one-semester programme involving a curriculum and a small prototype-style project in addition to one big game production. Time will tell if that produces better games or not, but it certainly will fit better into the curriculum of IT University students. I didn’t get any ECTS credit for this production, but I’m using it in my MSc thesis, so at least it’ll get me a modest scope reduction there.

Broken Dimensions is a puzzle-adventure game. I could also call it a puzzle-platformer, but then you immediately think of side-scrollers about jumping accurately, and Broken Dimensions is more about… falling with style. I could also call it a horror game, but it’s more creepy-freaky than horrific. Puzzle-adventure it is.

You’ll find it reminds you a lot of Portal. This is down to several factors, the overriding cause of which is a combination of me really liking Portal and just happy circumstance:

1. Like Portal, Broken Dimensions was built entirely around a single core gameplay mechanic. Everything else, though also important in my opinion, came second.
2. Like Portal, this mechanic isn’t just a way to solve the puzzles, but also immediately becomes your primary way of navigating the levels.
3. Like Portal, you’re guided through the levels by a friendly woman (sometimes appearing only as a disembodied voice) with the promise of candy.

Reception has been pretty good. Though I fully expected to be cleft in twain by the panel at our evaluation, if nothing else then because the game is super hard if you’re not a bit of a puzzle game connoisseur, their feedback was overwhelmingly positive (none of them had actually finished the game, but they all enjoyed the parts they saw, and at least one of them would’ve definitely finished it if the final puzzle hadn’t glitched out on him). Likewise, IndieDB and Desura‘s users have given us a fairly good rating and many flattering reviews – amusingly, many of the comments there indicate that the game is too easy for hard core gamers.

Finally, the national newspaper Politiken has reviewed all the graduation games and gave Broken Dimensions 5 out of 6 stars with a special emphasis on the quality of the puzzles.

I’m not going to do a full post-mortem here, but I’d still like to go over what went right and what went wrong in my opinion. I think the best qualities of Broken Dimensions are its completeness, its consistency, and its intuitive controls. It may not seem so, but Broken Dimensions is a very long game for a 5 week production – though this meant our artists couldn’t spend nearly as much time as they’d have liked sprucing up the levels and making them look less boxy, it gave us room to let the game develop as you play through, including a complete story arc, a minor plot twist, gradual introduction of new mechanics, and most importantly a suitably gradual difficulty curve in the puzzles. We even managed to squeeze a little environmental storytelling into the levels, and the final level has an in my opinion genuinely startling aesthetic shift.

The consistency of the puzzles is another success, though bear in mind this is essentially me patting myself on the back for a job well done. I completely bent my brain over and folded it in on itself to design properly 3-dimensional puzzles for a fundamentally 3-dimensional game, and I’m quite pleased with how well the final set of puzzles that made it into the game explore and exploit the core game mechanic of rotating the world around you. We had many more types of obstacles and possible ideas for extra mechanics in mind while working on the game, but in the end we kept it pretty simple, and the game is all the better and less gimmicky for it. This is aided tremendously by the intuitive control system, for which I can only take half the credit – the other half must be given to the programmers who helped me plan it by pointing out problems with the initial design, implemented it, and made it work. I’m quite proud of the way the rotation keys change to match the orientation of the camera, everybody seems to find it very intuitive, and I personally find it incredibly satisfying to control.

All this is tainted by a few problems, primarily an annoying amount of glitches, some general difficulty issues, and several missing features. The PhysX system in Unity gave us quite a lot of grief throughout development – PhysX is probably the best physics engine on the market, but Unity doesn’t give you full control over it, making it hard to tweak it just right. Exacerbating this, the whole idea of physics-based puzzles in the first place is a little problematic, since puzzles (unlike problems) are essentially non-emergent, and the emergent nature of physics systems tends to do more harm than good when used for this sort of puzzle.

I’m overall pretty satisfied with the way the difficulty ramps up gradually throughout the game, but the general difficulty of the game seems to suit very few people. A lot of players find it excruciatingly hard to even navigate the game, many others find the puzzles to be trivially easy. I’ve talked to just a handful of people who thought the difficulty suited them. Puzzle games, at least of this kind, are extremely hard to balance, and next to impossible to implement different difficulty options for. You can’t just raise the player’s health like in combat games, and there are no opponents to be made weaker or less accurate. The only real option would be some sort of hint system, and that tends to ruin the play experience entirely.

There are certain other features I miss, however – most importantly, the game really needs a level selection menu. This is on the list for our lead programmer Elvis to implement when he has time, but I think its absence hurts our chances at the various competitions and festivals where we’ve submitted Broken Dimensions. Another problem is that you can’t access and change the options from inside the game, meaning if you play it for a while and then realise that you’re constantly rotating the wrong way, you have to start over if you want to invert the rotation controls. As an advocate of accessibility, it also saddens me that we didn’t have time to implement closed captioning: subtitles for sound effects as well as dialogue audio.

Overall I’m extremely proud of Broken Dimensions, both of my own contribution and of the overall quality of the game. Everybody on the team did a bang-up job in the face of our own far too high ambitions, and though I flinch at the thought of the glitches people have encountered, I’m astounded that the game works at all considering how little time we had to develop it. As I mentioned, the game has been submitted to several festivals, including PAX, IGF, and Indiecade. I really hope we get to go to at least one of them, as I think we deserve it for having made a super engaging and satisfying little puzzle game.

You can play Broken Dimensions in your browser at BrokenDimensions.com, but I recommend downloading the Windows or Mac client, available from the same website, as it looks a whole lot better.

I have three projects this semester. Due on the 15th of December is a group project where we’re attempting to make a highly emergent game in the Unity engine. For December 8, I need to create a game level for Gamewords as Fields of Expression – I’ve decided to use the UDK because it has good CSG tools so I can produce something relatively good-looking without doing any real modelling. Also for December 8, I’m working on a game prototype with my mother as a target audience for User Experience and Prototyping. This, I’ve chosen to use XNA for, because I’m a masochist.

There are two reasons I chose to go with XNA. The weak reason is that my target audience (mom) prefers to play games on her Xbox 360 than on her PC, primarily because the gamepad is more ergonomic and its buttons are better structured semantically. XNA already has all the gamepad stuff taken care of so I can concentrate on translating the input into useful output rather than figuring out what the input is in the first place. However, the real reason for choosing XNA is that I’ve been wanting to learn C# for ages.

C# is a proper programming language, unlike eg. LUA or Uscript or NWscript (which is the language that taught me about programming), but at the same time it’s a very tidy and approachable language. Everything I’ve heard about C++ indicates that it will destroy your soul if it’s the first language you attempt to learn, which is why I didn’t opt for that despite it being far more popular for game programming. I’d heard C# was supposed to be a lot easier, and since it’s derived from Java the same way NWscript was, I’m more or less familiar with the syntax already.

It’s not been easy to pick it up though. I tried going by some Internet tutorials first, and while I did manage to set up a game with a movable avatar, it didn’t really help me understand what I was doing or how it worked. I took out a couple of XNA books from the university library and one of them (Grootjans, Riemer: XNA 3.0 Game Programming Recipes) proved incredibly useful for setting up the basics of a 2D game and writing a general-purpose menu system.

Ultimately I’ve learned the most from my friends. My class mate Prakash was generous enough to give me a whole day’s worth of his time to walk me through setting up a hex grid with some code I’d found on the Internet and figuring out the player movement scheme. Shane, Jim, Mads, Mike, and Nick have all been tremendous help in answering specific questions, mostly pertaining to where I should put certain code or what particular errors mean. I’m very grateful that I know so many skilful programmers.

Yesterday I experienced a bit of a personal triumph when I managed to set up a follower selection menu for the player to choose which people to have in her expedition when the game starts. It involved two lists that the player needed to be able to scroll through and switch between at will, and it was quite complicated for me as an absolute newbie programmer to set up, but I managed it almost without help (mainly needed Shane to tell me if I had to add a certain variable to keep track of the current scroll progress or if I could infer it from the existing variables – he told me to just add the new variable). It’s nothing even close to the most impressive code ever, but the fact that I managed it shows that I actually understand how my menu system works, which is good because I’ll be using it a lot.

I’m sure any real programmer unfortunate enough to look at my code would, depending on their inclination, either cry tears of blood or just start laughing and never stop. For one thing, I know there are lots of more advanced functions I don’t really know about – I bet a lot of the more laborious if’s and switches I have could be replaced with arrays or other far more elegant solutions for example, but I’m sticking to what I understand for now. Make it work, then make it fast, as they say. Another thing is that I don’t understand encapsulation and I only half-understand inheritance. I have a feeling 90% of my public variables ought to be private or protected, but I don’t know how to move the necessary information between game objects in the proper way so I use whatever ill-advised shortcuts will get me the results I need.

So that was a bit about my troubles with getting into programming. Diving head-first into it with a fairly complicated system-based game project is not the least painful way to learn to program, but it’s the only way I can stay motivated (knowing I’ll have an awesome product to show for it when I’m done). Now the skill and expedition selection menus are done, the next hurdle is to set up a system for reading tile properties from a CSV file and apply them to the grid, and a system for calling individual event scripts when the player lands on certain tiles. Once that’s done, it should be downhill the rest of the way towards the hand-in date.

Once I have a bit more of the game to show off, I’ll probably post again with more information about the actual game, and eventually there will be an installer for you to download so you can try it out yourself. It’s going to be fun! I promise.

As far as possible, the photos fit the text of the posts, but I chose to put the photos from my arrival at Winnipeg into the Winnipeg post even though that post actually starts the next day and my arrival is described in the second Peterborough post.

When I was done, I had a few photos left over that I didn’t want not to post (pardon the double negative), so I’ve included them here instead. They are pretty random. Feel free to use this entry to send me your comments pertaining to any of my Canada photos

I’m in Valby, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Back in the Old Country.

I’m trying to debrief myself onto this blog before the last part of my head comes with me back from Canada. I should probably skip Thursday and Friday and go straight to Saturday, which I remember as the best day of my vacation because it was packed with activities.

Friday evening, Lawrence drove me up to Winter’s family cottage on Falcon Lake to meet with her uncle and cousins. It was about a 2 hour drive from St. Malo, and the night was spent playing Cranium and drinking with the neighbours. I may be generalising too much in either direction, but it seems to me that the Canadians use their cottages for the opposite purpose cottages are used over here: we leave the cities and go to our cottages to get away from people, whereas it seems like the Canadians come to their cottages to be around other people with cottages.

In the morning, we were joined by Winter and went swimming off a tiny, almost private beach. Then we went horse-back riding. Winter used to work at the nearby ranch, so we got a private ride for the price of a normal one, meaning the four of us went alone with a guide. The trail was really beautiful, taking us through coniferous forest, down into an old gravel pit, into deciduous forest, through the water of a marsh area, and over the rocky ground of the Canadian Shield. It was later brought to my attention that I looked quite amusing whenever we went into a trot, but at least I had no problem staying on the horse, so I suppose I’ll just have to learn proper trot technique next time I get a chance to ride.

After the ride, we went down to the lake again to go swimming off a rock outcropping (covered in seagull shit and bits of dead crab – all the more incentive to go into the water). For reasons of squeamishness, I’m not a fan of swimming in the sea, so I really appreciated this chance to frolic in a nice, clean fresh-water lake. As we’d returned to the cottage and dinner was being prepared, a friend of the family came by in his flashy new speed boat and took us for a sail around the lake at unreasonable velocity.

That, my dear friends, is how you enjoy your vacation.

Now… the problem with travelling is that so much time is spent getting around. Flying is fast and convenient, but it’s not fast enough, and it’s not very pleasant. If there’s a less interesting way to spend a whole day than sitting on a transatlantic flight for 9 hours, I have yet to discover it. When the flight takes you towards the east and the hours almost literally fly right past you such that you arrive at an 8 am that feels exactly like 2 am, you know you’ll enjoy the after-effects of your trip for another 2 or 3 days at least.

Jetlag aside, this trip was just what I needed. I return blonder than I left, and with much healthier skin for some reason (I guess sunlight doesn’t just give you skin cancer, it can benefit you a lot in moderation). After several summers idled away in front of my PC monitor at home or at work, it feels great to finally get out of the country and do something genuinely worth-while. It was my first vacation of more than 2 weeks, and it was my first time ever out of the European Union. I know this vacation is going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

Canada, in very short, as seen through the eyes of a Dane, is: huge and mostly empty, American but friendlier, wealthy but modest, beautiful and varied, and has truly awful infrastructure – seriously, even if you find a home where you’re blessed with both Internet access and a cell phone signal, you’ll be truly lucky if any buses go there, and you can count trains right out. I would love to get a job at BioWare and live in Edmonton, but I suspect I will miss my dark rye bread and my bicycle. Hopefully next year, I’ll be able to come back and attend Lawrence and Winter’s wedding. And maybe I’ll continue on to British Columbia afterwards, and see some of those Canadian Rockies that everybody pictures when they think of Canada.

Tuesday, Lawrence took me back to Winnipeg for a bit of a tour. We started at the Manitoba museum, which had some pretty nice dioramas including a full-sized replica of the 1600′s ship Nonsuch that you could walk around on (the whole thing reminded me of Thief: Deadly Shadows). Then we went to the Forks, the slightly touristy area where the two major rivers of Winnipeg meet, and walked along the partially flooded bank of Red River to Manitoba’s ridiculously extravagant legislative building.

Unfortunately we missed a guided tour about all the masonic traits of the building, but we took a quick walk around by ourselves and found a painted star on the floor where if you stand there and speak, every surface of the room is designed to reflect the sound right back at you to sinister effect.

From there, we went back to the Forks, bought some candy at a store inside an old train car(!), I bought some stuff for my parents, and we had mediocre dinner at a pub because the great Italian place downstairs was full of people. After a trip to a burned-down cathedral where a new church has been built inside the old stone walls (which looked quite striking, photos will be added later), we took a short walk around the French quarter, and then picked up some stuff for the house on the way home.

If it’s acceptable to pass judgment on the town based on a one day trip, I’d say that Winnipeg is a very nice city. It seems not a lot larger than Peterborough, but it has a bit more of a large city mentality because it’s a provincial capital – ie. it actually has a few skyscrapers. Compared to Toronto, it’s a tiny and far less interesting town, but it has more space and much more pleasant air – it’s actually a nicer place to be.

The city tour set me up nicely for a more nature-oriented Wednesday. After a nice breakfast and a few hours of feeble attempts to help Larry’s family around the house in preparation for his mother-in-law’s wake tomorrow (I really want to help, but I’m terrified of all the spiders in the old boxes), Larry and I took the canoe out on the river that runs right past his house. We went about half an hour up the river and then back again, with the intention of going in the other direction across the lake to the beach. Unfortunately the wind on the lake was pretty bad, so we returned to the house after around an hour out. It was super fun to get to canoe again though, which I haven’t done in 8-9 years by my estimation, and it was great to get some sun and some exercise.

Instead of taking the canoe up the river to the beach, we jumped into the car with Lawrence’s fiance Winter and her cousin Jennifer and drove there. Another first-in-a-while for me, as it’s been far too long since I’ve had a good swim. Around Copenhagen, we have a nice selection of beaches, but it’s all salt water, and I’m not a fan of swimming in the sea. This was my first chance in quite a while to dip into a beautiful clean fresh water lake, and there was much water-based frolicking.

To finish off the day, we got changed and went directly from the beach out to a farm near Larry’s house to have dinner with some friends of the family. The farm is roughly 35,000 acres, and I got an introduction to one of the enormous combine harvesters, feeling a little like a small boy in awe of all the massive farm equipment. The barbeque dinner was great, and we stayed for a while for drinks and conversation.

I gotta say I wasn’t expecting a proper country vacation when I decided to come over here, but that was mostly from lack of research. It’s pretty clear that Manitoba is mainly farm country, and I’m easily getting the dose of nature that I was hoping to get out of Canada. It may not make for very interesting reading, but it sure has been very pleasant so far. Here’s hoping I won’t feel like too much of an interloper at the wake tomorrow.

I’m in St. Malo, near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. More importantly I am writing this from within the house of Lawrence Jonathan Laxdal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In terms of getting out and seeing things, Warsaw Caves turned out to be the high point of the Peterborough chapter of my vacation. I was hoping we could go to Burleigh Falls, but due to our dependency on finding a driver, as well as the need for spectacular weather in which to go swimming, our plans never panned out. Instead, we consumed more alcohol than I suspect I have ever consumed in my entire life.

Peterborough isn’t actually that small a town; if you count its outlying areas, it apparently has somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 inhabitants, which is alledgedly the amount of people living in Copenhagen proper. The difference being the greater Copenhagen area has a million people, most of whom work or study in Copenhagen and have most of their social life there. Peterborough definitely feels like a small town, and when you go out, it seems impossible not to run into somebody you know – at least when you’re in the company of an old local party animal.

There’s a certain sort of pre-establishment 20-something social circle that you occasionally encounter in North American fiction, for my part most recently in the (Canadian, as it just so happens) Scott Pilgrim books, which I haven’t had any personal experience with. I’m not sure if this is because circles like that don’t exist in Denmark, or if it’s simply that I fail to get out enough to become part of one. Either way I got a fairly solid idea of what it’s like after meeting what must be every 20-something in Peterborough and even living with a couple of them for a week. It’s fun, and it’s interesting, but it’s also kind of taxing – I’m just not that social; I managed it because I’m on vacation, but I doubt I’d be able to keep it up all the time.

Thursday we went out to a cabin owned by one of Alex’s old friends. It was by the lake and very pleasant all around, and we spent most of the time playing Ping-Pong or Talisman, watching Burn Notice, drinking heavily, and roasting things over a campfire. Sadly there was no swimming, as the water was a little icky and the weather kind of bland a lot of the time. We went home on Saturday in time to help our Peterborough hosts build a trebuchet out of the remains of an old staircase.

Sunday brought about some shopping (I found a very nice second-hand book shop where I traded War of the Flowers in for Red Storm Rising – kind of random, I know), some more work on the siege weapon, and a nice calm barbeque with some more of Alex’s old friends at a really nice apartment with a roof deck overlooking the whole downtown. I went home soon after midnight so I wouldn’t feel too bad when I had to get up to catch the bus back to Toronto the next morning.

The voyage from Peterborough to Winnipeg via Toronto took the whole day and was distributed across bus, taxi, airplane, and car, but I made it without throwing up, so that’s a good trip as far as I’m concerned. At first glance, Winnipeg looks about the size of Peterborough, which came as quite a surprise seeing how it’s the capital of the province, but apparently Manitoba is extremely thinly populated – even by Canadian standards. After dinner and my first ever, somewhat traumatic, visit to Wal-Mart, Lawrence drove us out to his house way out in hillbilly country.

I won’t hesitate to say it was the best drive I’ve ever taken. In fact it was probably the only good car ride I’ve ever taken. It was like the shortest road trip ever, just under an hour along completely straight country roads, through the flattest terrain I’ve ever seen – and I’m Danish, so that’s saying a lot. Honestly, I’d been told that Manitoba was mostly prairie, but I’d kind of written that off. How much prairie should I really expect in this modern age of thorough agricultural exploitation?

Well, I was partially right, every inch of land has been converted to farmland, but the whole countryside still emanates prairie. Especially since I picked a particularly fortuitous time to arrive, just as thunderstorms were rolling around the most dramatic sky I’ve ever seen, a spectacular light show flashing across the clouds throughout the drive. It genuinely felt like how America should feel, and it was very easy to imagine hard men on horseback herding cattle across the fields. With unobstructed views for miles in all directions, the sky has never seemed higher than it is in Manitoba.

You may think I’m making this whole thing out to be worse than it really is, but frankly my motion sickness is one of two problems I suffer from so badly I don’t believe it is possible for me to exaggerate them (the other being arachnophobia).

• Drink cola. Cola has a life-savingly soothing effect on your stomach, which really helps to settle it down when it’s going “OMG OMG WHAT IS GOING ON JETTISON EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY”.
• Do not drink orange juice. It’s very acidic, which has the complete opposite effect on your stomach than cola, and it tastes absolutely dreadful when it comes back up again.
• Bring a bottle of water. Mineral water helps because it has that slightly crisp, healthy taste. Hydrating is always good, especially to counteract the clammy, sweaty feeling you get when your motion sickness is getting really bad. Most of all, you will need the water to get the taste out of your mouth if your zen is too weak to avert disaster.
• Bring at least one opague plastic bag to throw up in. Aside from the obvious damage control purpose, it actually has some significant preventive qualities because the last thing you want is to be worrying about how long you can hold out before you have to ask the driver to pull over. If you have a plan in case you need to puke, it’s much easier to think about something other than how sick you are.
• Sit in the front seat. If there is somebody else in the front seat, threaten to sit in the seat behind them and aim for the back of their head when you inevitably have to vomit because they wouldn’t give you the front seat.
• Look straight ahead and focus on the horizon. Do not look at anything too close to the vehicle. Do not look out the side windows for more than a few seconds at a time.
• Do not talk to anybody. When you get into the vehicle, warn any of your friends or acquaintances with whom you are travelling that you are going to be the most boring roadtrip companion ever because conversation will bring about disaster.
• Open a window if possible. Fresh air is a life-saver.
• Try not to breathe through your nose. If you’ve suffered from motion sickness for a while, the smell of a car or a bus is hard-wired into your brain in such a way that just walking past a bus with its door open is often enough to make you queasy. If you don’t smell the inside of the vehicle, you remove a large part of the problem.
• Regulate your breathing. If you’re not breathing through your nose, this becomes slightly easier. You want to breathe in during acceleration or deceleration and try not to breathe out until your speed is level. Long, slow intakes are good for this, but if you have to choose, breathe in during deceleration and out during acceleration, since deceleration is usually worse.
• If your situation allows it, ask the driver to stick to country roads or highways, and plan your route to take you out of the city as fast as possible. Stop-lights and heavy traffic are the banes of your existence if you have motion sickness.
• Listen to music. Headphones are good because they make the music more intimate so it’s easier to focus on, but a car radio will usually do the trick. The point is to use the music to distract yourself from how terrible you feel and how close you are to upchucking. Try to find new instrumental patterns that you hadn’t noticed before in familiar songs. Mouth the lyrics if you have to.

By adhering to these rules, I’ve managed to endure several car rides while I’ve been in Canada without throwing up. In North America where all of society appears to have been designed around everybody driving everywhere, motion sickness seems like a far worse handicap than it is in Denmark, where the trains can take you anywhere your bicycle can’t (modes of transportation in order of relatively unproblematic to apocalyptically bad: planes, trains, ships, boats, cars, buses).

Fighting motion sickness tends to feel like you’re locked in mental combat against your own body, but I guess it’s the price you have to pay if you want to see a bit of the world, so you may as well take your precautions and accept that you probably will feel terrible a lot of the time while you’re on vacation. There are far worse things in life than motion sickness, it just doesn’t feel that way while it’s kicking your ass.