Kids Get Sick Too: A Proposed Child Simulator Sickness Questionnaire

The increasing use of video games and virtual reality for education, as well as entertainment, warrants a method of assessing the degree to which these modalities of presentation may adversely affect the viewers. For adults, this tool currently exists in the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ; Kennedy, Lane, Berbaum, & Lilienthal, 1993). However, for children, who are more exposed to these technologies and who are more prone to these adverse effects, there is no appropriate method of attaining this important information. Often, researchers will attempt to adapt some of the questions on the SSQ to fit their purposes; however this creates a completely unstandardized method of assessing the amount of simulator sickness experienced. This paper introduces a Child Simulator Sickness Questionnaire as a simple, short, standardized method of collecting simulator sickness symptom data for children.