Lens flare
The rings of light and ghost blobs produced when light bounces between the glass elements of a lens — a camera artifact that games imitate for mood.
A real lens is a stack of glass surfaces, and a bright light in frame reflects back and forth between them. The result is a row of bright blobs and rings strung along the line from the light source through the centre of the image, plus the occasional starburst streak. It is technically a defect, but the eye reads it as "a real camera pointed straight at the sun".
In games the effect is faked as a chain of sprites placed along that line, usually with an occlusion test so they wink out when the sun slips behind geometry. It has been overused so thoroughly that it is a standing joke about J.J. Abrams. Modern engines sometimes compute physically based flares instead of loosely scattered sprites.