So most of the really cool games and gaming platforms (Xbox, PS2, Gamecube) rely far more on realtime rendering for their wow factor. Personally, my favorite games are racing games (why this is true is probably a subject for a whole other post).

The latest crop of racing games try to make the experience as real as possible, raytracing the surrounding terrain in the reflection of a car's windows or polished surface, using sophisticated physics models. Gran Turismo 3 even uses actual recorded engine sound for each of their cars, and will alter the tire's gripping power over the course of a race to reflect how tires behave differently when they get hot.

So what I don't understand is actually pretty simple: Most (all?) of these games have lens flare, that diagonal line of circles that appear across the screenn when the sun is in direct view. Lens flare is an artifact of the multiple lenses used in sophisticated still and video cameras. Each lens (your pocket 35mm has a few, a telephoto lens can have between 4 and 10, etc.) creates a ghost image of the sun, usually on the opposite side of the frame from the sun, connected by an imaginary line cutting through the center of the frame.

Okay, great, cool. By simulating lens flare, these games are replicating even the imperfections of the experience, to make for a more realistic experience. Fantastic.

But what experience are they trying to replicate? When I'm driving a racing simulation (or flight simulator, Sonic 3D, or whoever else is being lens-flare-clever) I'm trying to suspend my disbelief and pretend I'm in the car and driving it, but the simulator, giving me lens flare, is trying to pretend I'm looking through a camera lens in a car.

Lens flare got put into these games because it was a cheap and easy way to make them look prettyer, and give them a little 'wow'. ("Hey, look at that, they even programmed in the lens flare. Those programmers got every detail! This is so cool!")

Now that everyone has it, and the lens flare isn't a hundredth as impressive as seeing the car in front of you reflected in the puddle on the ground, or driving through 3D fog, can we just lose the lens flare, so I can believe I'm a transparent eyeball, and not an 8-element Nikkor 28-210 telephoto lens?