So, first person games are supposed to make the player "feel" like the character, whereas your average movie or third person game is basically a "view" of what is happening. That being said, there are certain things that make the use of the first person perspective more engaging.

1) [Lack of] motion blur. Motion blur is a purely cinematic effect. It only occurs due to the limitations of viewing/recording devices like cameras. In a true first-person view, motion blur is extremely subtle unless someone is having vision problems for some reason (either as a result of medical problems or being drunk or whatever). In fact, the human brain shuts off your optic nerve many times a day during periods of high motion because it simply does not like blurriness. This is called saccadic masking. Therefore, in order for a game to provide a good first-person experience as opposed to a cinematic one, shouldn't this be used much, much less? Think about it. If there is a lot of motion on screen anyway, your vision is automatically going to focus on certain parts and blur others. Doing it in game **for the purposes of providing a first-person experience** is actually less realistic and wastes processing and other hardware resources which would be better used elsewhere.

2) HUD bobbing: This isn't really very realistic in many implementations. There aren't really a lot of HUDs in real life, but as a proof of concept take a pair of cheap work goggles. Draw a little ammo counter, health meter, whatever on it. Put the goggles on and make sure they fit reasonable well. Now shake your head around. The images on the goggles shouldn't move much relative to your view. If they do that means your goggles aren't tight enough. At the most they should only move like a few millimeters. In games where super soldiers have power armors, etc. that explain the ammo counter, etc. then wouldn't you think that their helmet would be fitted reasonably well since it is used in combat scenarios? For first person games where the HUD is just there to assist the player and there isn't an in-game reason for it then the HUD bobbing is completely pointless and just makes it harder for the player to see the extra information that the HUD exists solely to show them.

3) Six degrees of freedom: In most games with a first person perspective, there are only 4 degrees of freedom. You can look up, down, to the left (turn to the left), to the right (turn to the right). However, in real-life there are two other ways in which you can look: to the left (*rotate* to the left) and to the right (*rotate* to the right). This is in games like ARMA, flight sims, and vehicles in games like Battlefield, but wouldn't it be more immersive if this was present in more games. For example, in an FPS, you are running towards a certain area. However, just to be safe, you turn around every so often to make sure nobody is following you. With 4 degrees of freedom, you have to stop running, and turn to the left or the right and backpedal. Then you turn around again and start running in that direction. Instead, what if there was a button to hold that would allow you to only rotate your view left or right? In the scenario above, this would allow you to look behind you or to the side but still keep you running forward and have your weapon/item pointing forward. In most scenarios turning your view is just as fast as rotating your view, but it would be more immersive and, in very specific scenarios like above be useful. I don't know about you, but it annoys me to have to quit running, turn around and backpedal, then turn around and start running again, especially if you are playing a game where this kind of cautious behavior is needed.

4) Minor view obstructions

So, in games with a first-person view, the view often contains no obstructions. For example, if you are playing a game where the main character wears glasses, the only way you would ever know that is if there was a cutscene.. they do not appear in your view of the game world.

In real-life, most everyone "sees" their nose all the time, but their brain sort of tunes it out. That would explain why you don't see first person views with a nose obstructing the field of vision.

However, I noticed while playing Halo 4 at the end of 2012 that you could actually see Master Chief's helmet in your field of vision. You could see the "bill" of it as well as the sides, etc.

See here: http://www.gamertheory.com/uploads/games/halo4campaign5.jpg

I remember thinking this was pretty cool, especially when running or looking up, etc.you could see more of the "bill" in your field of vision. It didn't obstruct your view too much so it wasn't annoying.

Wouldn't it be cool if more games did this? What if the Half-Life games had had Gordon Freeman's glasses in the field of vision like this:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/10/01/article-0-154A31EE000005DC-185_634x423.jpg

If there was an explosion, or you fell from a high distance or some other jarring event, the character might automatically reach up and adjust them. Looking up or down would make more or less of them come into your field of vision (looking left and right would not, in first person games you never actually turn your head, just rotate your body.. unless you're playing a game like ARMA or a flight sim where you get 6 degrees of freedom where you can hold a button down to look around). Or, say your character was wearing googles for some reason. Maybe he is skiing or going scuba diving. Having them visible in your field of vision would be more immersive.

Thoughts?

Wouldn't it be cool if more games did this?

Plenty already do. See Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, mods for Fallout: New Vegas, the STALKER series (gas masks are so Russian!), and dozens of others. It is cool, I guess. I don't know if it is an improvement. I can't see for SQUAT in real-life without my glasses. I'm not sure that counts as groundbreaking gameplay: Play as a near-sighted geezer who's glasses fall off his head when he looks down! Thrill at the bluriness of it all!

Wouldn't it be cool? I give it a resounding "Eh." Would this improve modern first-person perspective games? I would say "Nope."

EDIT: The original post was edited to add about 1,000,000 other things, making my reply seem like I ignored everything but the "Wouldn't it be cool" part. I'm not this glib in reality.

I don't think removing motion blur would be an improvement. Motion blur is not a purely cinematic effect, It is not just a result from limitations, or "eye candy" it is used to help your brain see motion better. In real life, the brain has a lot more input, from your inner ear and muscle feedback among other things, which is lacking when you just are presented with a series of still images on a screen in 30-60 frames per second.

If you add motion blur to those still images, the brain has an easier time "stiching it together", and can reduce motion sickness and makes it easier to see how objects move and make the motions feel more fluid.

I wear glasses too, although I don't need them all the time. I was talking more about having the glasses be visible in your field of vision if you are playing as a character that wears them. The game wouldn't be switching between blurriness and crisp focus all the time, the player adjusting them would be just more of a cinematic thing reserved for single player games/modes. I would say at the very most it might blur the view for a split second while the character does the animation. Also, you obviously wouldn't want the character to be doing this every 30 seconds.

Olof: I guess your experience differs from mine, but motion blur in games just gives me headaches. If I turn it off parts of my view are blurry based on what I am focusing on anyway so for me motion blur seems like adding more of what I already have.

Something else I didn't remember, but I've thought before:

You should definitely be able to see your feet, legs, etc. when looking down. I remember watching the pre-release interviews for Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway back in the day where they had you being able to do this, and this was actually the way that you checked how many grenades and magazines that you had left if you opted to turn off the HUD for a more realistic experience (something I did in the two preceding it... no suppression indicators, health, crosshair, etc.. made the game much more fun). Again, none of this is going to take a mediocre game and make it life-altering or anything but, at least to me, they seem like they would provide a better experience. When I was in high school and some in college more subtle kind of features like this would get me a lot more excited than they do now.. I've got much more, realistic? expectations of games these days and realize that a lot of features only provide a small amount of improvment for a small amount of time before you/people in general just get used to them.

3) Six degrees of freedom:
...
This is in games like ARMA, flight sims, and vehicles in games like Battlefield, but wouldn't it be more immersive if this was present in more games.
...

I think the primary issue with that is a lack of easy to use controls that players can make use of intuitively. Most realism-sims have very difficult to master control schemes - gameplay should be difficult to master, but not controls ("Achievement unlocked! You managed to turn your head slightly.")

Holding a key while using other keys that are held down gets confusing in the midst of battle. If it was one of the shoulder-mounted trigger keys? Maybe. But if it's one of the A, B, X, Y keys? That'd be hard. Especially since you have to remove your thumb from the joystick to reach those.

With the increasing likelihood that VR devices like the Occulus Rift will become mainstream, this will become natural and commonplace in games. To move forward, strafe, or turn around, continue to use your joysticks. To rotate your head, you can actually just rotate your head in real life.

Speaking of strafing - strafing is unrealistic if it's anything more than a single sidestep or two (same with running backwards - one or two steps? Fine. Running backwards continuously? Not really.). But it's easy for players to do, tactically important, and fun, so games should continue to allow it.

However, just to be safe, you turn around every so often to make sure nobody is following you. With 4 degrees of freedom, you have to stop running, and turn to the left or the right and backpedal.

I can pull that off semi-easily with existing controls. Imagine I'm using the arrow keys: Holding the up arrow, I begin to hold the right arrow key to start turning around, then I swap my middle finger from the up arrow to the down arrow, so half-way through the turn I'm running backwards instead of running forward.

I continue moving in one general direction, while flipping around 180 to run backwards while facing my enemies. It takes a few attempts to get it right, but it's pretty easy to learn.

Wouldn't it be cool if more games did this? What if the Half-Life games had had Gordon Freeman's glasses in the field of vision like this:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/10/01/article-0-154A31EE000005DC-185_634x423.jpg

I'm wearing glasses. I don't want to look through my own glasses, look past my nose, look into my monitor (ignoring all the stuff around the monitor), then look through the HUD, then look through another pair of glasses. I want to remove visual clutter, not add it.

I wouldn't mind if the game started with them there each time you boot up the game, but then as you played they faded out gradually over the next five minutes.

One 'Pro' these would have though, is a visual indicator of whether you can currently control your character or not. If all cutscenes happened in third person (or better yet, if there were no cutscenes and every event happened 'in-game' with you never losing control of your character), then every time you see the glasses, you intuitively know that you can move the character again.

Some games do this by using letterboxing for cutscenes, so the change in aspect ration cues to player instead.

I do in-general think games should try darkening the edges of the screen around what you are seeing, but I don't think I'd like more visual clutter.

Metroid Prime was interesting the first time I saw it (especially when looking up and seeing raindrops fall on your visor), but I don't think that that's the direction every first-person game should go.

Overall, props for thinking this kind of things through. I enjoy thinking about these design elements, and have mentally thought through most of them in the past. Most designers probably do. Heck, most gamers probably do. But it's important that it does get thought about and re-analyzed.

I agree about the motion blur. That will likely solve itself though - just like with HDR bloom, when the designers got a new tool they way overused it. Motion blur, reflections, and color bleeding will be overused (and bloom will continue to be overused) for at least a few more years before it looses it's 'newness' and designers reign it in and relegate it to where it's supposed to be: As subtle barely-visible polish that doesn't attract attention but adds quality to the overall whole.

Being able to see your legs? That kind of thing I feel would make more sense when we have full on head-tracking through VR devices. Until then, it feels very... uncanny valley-esqe, where your brain tells you that you didn't move your head and that you aren't really looking at your legs, but you are also pretending (via immersion) that you are looking at your legs, and it just kinda feels weird. Not really-distractingly-weird, just kinda-subtly-in-the-background weird, as two separate lines of conflicting thought have to resolve themselves.

Ultimately, the goal of games isn't to be realistic. It's to be entertaining (including entertainment through hair-ripping difficulty) and immersive. Realism can help us reach better immersion, but only if we don't run into the Uncanny Valley, the Pisa Effect, and other such problems. We need to be able to jump the Uncanny Valley, without straying too far down into it.

The Pisa Effect, I can't find a link to. Named after the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the idea is that even though some things are possible in real life, they are so odd to our senses that if you see it in a game you can't help but think that it's "unrealistic", even though it is. So designers have to tone down some things, because it breaks immersion instead of adding to it.

Ever walk around in real life and see something where you think, "That can't be real!", or "That looks like it's from a videogame.". If the same thing occurs inside a game, it reminds you that you're in a game, and breaks immersion.

You want to preserve immersion in games far more than you want to preserve 'realism'. Reality is weird.

I wear glasses too, although I don't need them all the time. I was talking more about having the glasses be visible in your field of vision if you are playing as a character that wears them. The game wouldn't be switching between blurriness and crisp focus all the time, the player adjusting them would be just more of a cinematic thing reserved for single player games/modes. I would say at the very most it might blur the view for a split second while the character does the animation. Also, you obviously wouldn't want the character to be doing this every 30 seconds.

Again, some games already do this. Please look up the Fallout: New Vegas mod that adds glasses (that can get dirty or cracked) to see how much fun this idea isn't.

You edited your original post to add a bunch of other topics. I'm not sure what you really want to discuss here. None of these things are "improvements" -- they are simply components of some games.

Games should not be hyper-realistic. If they were players would complain that they don't shoot like elite snipers, they can't carry 100 kilos without breakin' a sweat, and that walking speed is PAINFULLY slow.

An improvement on many modern FPP games would be to add some element of fun. Or deisgn creativity. Yes, I'm looking at you CoD: Ghosts.

Maybe if you there was an option in the gameplay settings to turn this kind of thing on or off? [In reference to view obstructions like glasses] I can definitely understand where you are coming from though looking through glasses, at a monitor with a bezel and then through a pair of virtual glasses haha.

Metroid Prime was interesting the first time I saw it (especially when looking up and seeing raindrops fall on your visor), but I don't think that that's the direction every first-person game should go.

I agree. That's what Metroid Prime was *about*, in a sense: being inside that helmet, using its functions, upgrading it, etc. There were a ton of little details to remind you that you were seeing the world through a visor (like seeing Samus's face reflected whenever the lighting conditions are right).

But if a game *isn't* about that, that same level of helmet fetishism would get in the way of whatever the game *is* about.