Yeah my girlfriend actually gets motion sick watching me play games sometimes. It seems first person games are the worst culprit for her. Tried showing her Firewatch and she could only handle 20 minutes before she had to go lay down. I don't know if I could play video games if it effected me that way.
From what I've heard it has something to do with your mind interpreting the detached movement of your vision from your body as being poisoned. Or that's one theory anyways.
Have you tried sitting further away from the tv?
That interpretation is actually pretty close to how I've been thinking about it, yeah - the brain starts to panic that control is being taken away from it. It's also a pretty similar feeling to what happens if you force your own eyes to vibrate inside your skull, which is to say that the human brain isn't really equipped to process that degree of micro-eye-movement and some people are more vulnerable to that than others.
And unfortunately, the room my TV is in is not super big, so I don't really have the option to sit too much further back from the screen. But yeah, like your girlfriend, first person tends to be the worst offender, followed by heavily "camera-immersive" third person games. Movies do it to me as well sometimes, but only when I forget to bring my glasses, so I imagine eye focus has something to do with it as well.
