‘Cyberpunk 2077’ reviewer suffered a seizure, then worked to make the game safer

“It took me a long time to recover speech and autonomy,” Ruppert said. “I couldn’t walk for the rest of the night.”

Some games and other forms of visual entertainment involving flashing lights or screen flickering are preceded by warnings for those who are sensitive to such effects. But “Cyberpunk 2077” lacked such a warning and did not include a way to turn off potential seizure-triggering scenes, garnering international media attention after Ruppert authored an article about her experience playing just before the game’s launch.

“Cyberpunk 2077′s” developer, CD Projekt Red, responded to the article with a statement on Twitter thanking Ruppert for surfacing the issue and noting the company was “working on adding a separate warning in the game, aside from the one that exists in the EULA [end user licensing agreement]” and that it would implement a “more permanent solution” as soon as possible. The company would do so with Ruppert’s help after reading her article.

“I honestly didn’t expect anybody to read it because I have written about epilepsy so many times, and I’m just kind of used to it being ignored,” Ruppert said.

In an email to The Washington Post, CD Projekt Red’s North American head of communications, Stephanie Bayer, said that the developers fielded suggestions from Ruppert and “adjusted the entire sequence” to no longer be a seizure trigger.

By release day, a seizure warning was added. A day later, the most problematic scenes, called “brain dance” sequences in the game, were adjusted via a software patch to be safe for epileptic and photosensitive players. These changes were implemented thanks to Ruppert’s article and subsequent consulting with developer CD Projekt Red, work she did on a pro bono basis and for which she was not compensated.

“For those that have been excitedly waiting for ‘Cyberpunk 2077,’ I didn’t want that anticipation to fizzle out because of [an] oversight,” Ruppert said of her motivation to volunteer her time.

“We absolutely did take this seriously and we thanked her for allowing us to correct this,” Bayer wrote in the email to The Post.

Epilepsy, a neurological disorder in which abnormal electrical activity in the brain can induce convulsions, impair the senses and result in a loss of consciousness, affects one in 26 Americans at some point in their lifetime, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. A smaller percentage (around three percent) of those are photosensitive, meaning lights at certain intensities or certain visual patterns can trigger a seizure. The condition can be present at birth, but people can develop epilepsy over the course of their lifetime, as Ruppert did. It affects individuals differently — Ruppert lists heat and stress as some of her other seizure triggers, for example — and seizures can vary in severity depending on the circumstance.

“That made everybody realize, ‘Oh, this is an issue that we have to pay attention to,’” French said.

The video game industry endured scrutiny on this subject earlier. Since 1991, multiple lawsuits have been brought against video game makers alleging that a game had triggered a seizure. And yet (aside from rare, highly specific exceptions, like a video game used in a federal setting) there is no regulation that requires gameplay to be tested for seizure-triggering content. Nor is there a legal requirement to administer a warning of potentially seizure-inducing content. Whether individual platforms, publishers and developers implement policies to design, test or warn for photosensitivity triggers is entirely voluntary.

A blanket statement about seizure triggers at the start of a game has become a norm for many video games. Ubisoft, for example, adds a warning in most of its video games and standardized testing to remove seizure-triggering scenes as of 2008. The company applied such measures after a 10-year-old had a seizure while playing “Rayman Raving Rabbids.” Ubisoft stated at the time that their testing “showed that no images posed a high risk for photosensitivity epilepsy.”

“Cyberpunk 2077,” during the prerelease review period for journalists, had no warning outside of a brief mention in the end-user license agreement (a primarily legal document that most players won’t read).

This isn’t the first time Ruppert, 33, experienced a seizure while playing a video game. In fact, she said she experienced a second seizure while playing “Cyberpunk 2077,” though not as severe as the first.

“It’s certainly not every flashing light,” French said regarding potential seizure triggers. “It has to be a certain frequency, a certain luminosity. It is much more likely to trigger a seizure if it covers your entire field of view.”

To remove the biggest seizure triggers in “Cyberpunk 2077,” CD Projekt Red, based in Warsaw, spent several days ahead of launch speaking with Ruppert,…