Greentext

Chromatic aberration is also one of the few effects that actually happens with our eyes instead of being an effect designed to replicate a camera sensor.

I feel like depth of field and motion blur have their place, yeah. I worked on a horror game one time, and we used a dynamic depth of field- anything you were looking at was in focus, but things nearer/farther than that were slightly blurred out, and when you moved where you were looking, it would take a moment (less than half a second) to 'refocus' if it was a different distance from the previous thing. Combined with light motion blur, it created a very subtle effect that ratcheted up anxiety when poking around. When combined with objects in the game being capable of casting non-euclidean shadows for things you aren't looking at, it created a very pervasive unsettling feeling.

Except I hate not being able to see my entire field of view clearly, why did we fight so hard for graphics only to blur that shit out past 50 feet?

Most "film grain" is just additive noise akin to digital camera noise. I've modded a bunch of games for HDR (RenoDX creator) and I strip it from almost every game because it's unbearable. I have a custom film grain that mimic real film and at low levels it's imperceptible and acts as a dithering tool to improve gradients (remove banding). For some games that emulate a film look sometimes the (proper) film grain lends to the the look.

I feel like bloom depends on how intense it is, and if it makes sense to reasonably play the game.

Like, if it's the sun, yeah, bloom is OK.

If it's anything else? Pass.

It could be a twelve year old capture.

It is unnatural. The focus follows where you are looking at. Having that fixed based on the mouse/center of the screen instead of what my eyes are doing feels so wrong to me.

I bet with good eye tracking it would feel different.

Different mediums. Different perception. Games are a different kind of immersion.

I like lense flare for a bit if I'm just enjoying the scenery or whatever. If I'm actually playing the game though, turn that shit off so I can actually see

Wait, I've been turning it off to prevent motion sickness. 🤔

On Motion blur, our eye's motion blur, and camera's shutter speed motion blur are not the same. Eyes don't have a shutter speed. Whatever smearing we see is the result of relaxed processing on the brain side. Under adrenaline with heavy focus, our motion blur disappears as our brain goes full power trying to keep us alive. If you are sleep deprived and physically tired, then everything is blurred, even with little motion from head or eyes.

Over 99% of eye movement (e.g. saccadic eye movement) is ignored by the brain and won't produce a blurred impression. It's more common to notice vehicular fast movement, like when sitting in a car, as having some blur. But it can be easily overcome by focused attention and compensatory eye tracking or ocular stabilization. In the end, most of these graphical effects emulate camera behavior rather than natural experience, and thus are perceived as more artificial than the same games without the effects. When our brain sees motion blur it thinks movie theater, not natural everyday vision.