Games

Every gimmick for verisimilitude gets abused to hell and back. We just gloss over the ones that are less frustrating to the goal of... lookin' at stuff.

Destiny and Warframe are awash in gold because physically-based shaders made metals look super good. Ambient occlusion was egregious after Crysis, but games without a little bit feel weird now, and even the Wii got coerced into doing it efficiently. HDR tone-mapping was part of the brown-and-bloom era, but it's still here and you'd never think twice about it.

Lens flare is more common than ever, but much better than its goofy line-of-sprites roots in the 90s, because you blur the whole screen and flip it. It doesn't have to be blinding to be obvious and... aesthetic.

"God rays" and participating media / volumetric fog have been admirably restrained, considering how stupidly pretty they look, and the fact PS3 launch titles figured out you can just do it badly and blur. Downright awful sampling works so long as it's different awful sampling from nearby pixels. Even Quake 3 did some sparse approximations on the CPU. I guess thick fog is just undesirable to developers, now that it's not disguising tiny worlds or keeping framerates tolerable.

Unfortunately we can probably expect shakycam to take off after Unrecord. That game does a ton to look shockingly realistic, but a lot of companies will overdo about half of its tricks, and not understand why their playtesters have such queasy stomachs.