One other factor that I think is an issue with motion blur: the modeling of shifting gaze in video games often isn’t fantastic, due to input and output device limitations.

So, say you’re just looking straight ahead in a game. Then motion blur might be fine – only moving objects are blurred.

But one very prominent place where motion blur shows up is when the direction of your view is changing.

In a video game, especially if you’re using a gamepad, it takes a while to turn around. And during that time, if the game is modeling motion blur, your view of the scene is blurred.

Try moving your eyeballs from side to side for a bit. You will get a motion-blurred scene. So that much is right.

But the problem is that if you look to the side in real life, it’s pretty quick. You can maybe snap your eyes there, or maybe do a head turn plus an eye movement. It doesn’t take a long time for your eyes to reach their destination.

So you aren’t getting motion blur of the whole surrounding environment for long.

That is, humans have eyes that can turn rapidly and independently of our heads to track things, and heads that can turn independently of our torsos. So we often can keep our eyes facing in one direction or snap to another direction, and so we have limited periods of motion blur.

Then on top of that, many first person shooters or other games have a crosshair centered on the view. So aiming involves moving the view too. That is, the twin-stick video game character is basically an owl, with eyes that look in a fixed position relative to their head, additionally with their head fixed relative to their torso (at least in terms of yaw), and additionally with a gun strapped to their face, and additionally, with a limited rate of turn. A real life person like that would probably find motion blur more prominent too, since a lot of time, they’d be having to be moving their view relative to what they want to be looking at.

Might be that it’d be better if you’re playing a game with a VR rig, since then you can have – given appropriate hardware – eyetracking and head tracking and aiming all separate, just like a human.