Volumetric lighting
Light rendered as though it scatters in the air itself — visible shafts and haze rather than just a lit surface.
Ordinary lighting hits surfaces; volumetric lighting models the medium between them, so the dust, mist or smoke in a beam glows. The effect goes by many names — "god rays", crepuscular rays, light shafts — and the commonest method samples along each view ray (ray marching) and asks a shadow map whether each point sits in light or shadow, adding a little glow where it does.
Because it needs many samples per pixel it is classically expensive, often run at lower resolution and blurred up afterwards. Crytek and the Killzone series pushed the technique in the console generation around 2013; today it is standard, sometimes helped by light probes or global illumination for scattered light. Overdone, it turns quickly into murky soup.