I really want to take this same approach but so many websites and apps that I use for shopping for things like groceries now just cease working unless I either manually force cycle through them, or just temporarily disable them. I really hate it.
Any time I run in to one of the genuine fascist types in Helldivers, I literally will merc them until they kick me or they run out of lives. I will drop all my samples, and blast them when they are literally in the ship waiting for extraction. Fascism is only fun when it's by Paul Verhoeven (i.e. Starship Troopers), or in a game where it's satire. If you genuinely believe in it, I don't miss out on anything by ruining their fun and dropping from a mission, since I'm already maxed out at Lvl 150.
Agreed on the "shifting focus" part for vignetting specifically - but everything else... outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular "aesthetic" I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like "Bodycam..."
...use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you're emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.
Why? It's literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you're simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren't quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more "real."
Our brains process simple symbols objectively faster than words - it’s why when you see a stop sign they all are 🛑s.
Your 🧠 maps the shape 🛑 more rapidly than the word “STOP” which is made up of several letters that you have to first understand, combine, and then remap in your mind internally.
If they made some stop signs purple triangles, there would be more accidents and traffic violations in relation to stop signs. “STOP” is secondary and takes relatively more time to process than “🛑.”
Symbols that represent objects or entire words are a more direct mapping than words composed of multiple letters.
If you’ll permit me to dust off my old game design hat… similar to the principle as to why it was easier to move Mario in any of his 3D games than it was to move your character in the original PS1 versions of Resident Evil…
…Less layers of “mapping.”
In Super Mario 64, you just angle the stick relative to YOUR view to make Mario go “that” way.
Meanwhile in the original Resident Evil games (and other earlier “3D” perspective games pre-Super Mario 64), tilting “up” on the Dual-Shock L-stick made your character go “forward” from THEIR perspective, not yours.
Part of the challenge was being able to quickly “translate” that layer of mapping in your mind.
This is yet another one of the many reasons Steam is amazing. Not only do they have an abstracted layer that allows devs to insert control mappings that adapt to show your controller preference… but even BETTER, they have an option for “Universal” controller button iconography where they just show the relative position of the face buttons in a diamond layout ❖ where the button indicated is a filled circle ● and the others are outlined ○ - rather than letters like ABXY.
So like this :
…instead of “× or A or B” from PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo (respectively).
...And so the tired meme continues to be relevant :