Quote Originally Posted by gongo View Post
I mentioned lens flare earlier for a reason. It's an occular effect that is ONLY seen through the lens of a camera and NOT life-like because we never experience it in our own eyes (some of us who wear glasses may at time experience something similar, however we're talking about the unaided eye here). This effect doesn't make any sense yet it's hard to find a game that doesn't have lens flare anymore.

It's the same thing with this depth of field, motion blur, and light bloom craze. These are all things that do exist and do happen, but not in the way the videogame would have us believe. They're features a checklist that management puts together to make it look impressive and the marketing spins it as a good thing and sells it. This stuff isn't in there for our benefit, it's in there because someone with deep pockets who funded this decided that it was cool for everything to be blurry...
well it's not so mindless...in addition to making games 'lifelike' by giving them physical attributes like the eye would experience, there is also another trend which gamers enjoy very much which is MOVIE-LIKE effects. gamers sometimes want to feel like they are watching a movie, and as we all know movies are filmed with cameras and have these artifacts. so it's really some kind of combination of both eye and camera-effects, and it just depends on what the gamer thinks is fun.