No, I am talking about verisimilitude. I'm talking about consistent levels of realism. A steak jumping out of a realistic-looking cow could be done, but it would look downright surreal.

: I mentioned in another comment
: - you certainly could have a photorealistic Minecraft. Real-world
: feasibility would be out the window (what world is made of blocks where
: steaks jump out of cows when you kill them by swinging a block axe in the
: air?). But wow it looks like a realistic block world!

There would be no point in it whatsoever.

: Agreed. If you aim to go photorealistic, you basically set up an expectation
: that people think they will see. You lead yourself into an uncanny valley
: situation, where expectations don't match up with presentation. We never
: really had that problem in the past (low-poly Doom-era realism) where
: photorealism was an impossibility anyway. Imagination was still a heavy,
: heavy component in games where the game world was clearly representative
: of a real world.

Exactly. And it goes beyond the characters in an imaginary world. Go play Marathon and Doom; they have the same wall textures span large segments of the map, more like wallpaper than natural rock or purposefully-designed spaceship interior. But because the world was so clearly abstracted, it didn't matter. It also didn't matter that the world was seemingly created to be fun to run around and shoot aliens and demons in.

Now go to your Xbox and pop in the first Mass Effect game. Find a random planet, and go down to the surface in the Mako. Because of Mass Effect's closer approach to photorealism, it's more noticeable when the distant ground textures tessellate. It goes beyond noticeable and into the realm of game-breaking lack of verisimilitude that every colony has the same outpost building and/or subterranean mine, and the only difference is that the same three tons of crates are stacked differently.

Then there's the sequels, and their abundance of rooms with bulletproof waist-high cover. It's a necessary weasel for the kind of game Mass Effect is, but the close approach to photorealism makes blatant gameplay devices stand out.

Tangent: I've seen a similar indictment of motion and gesture controls. Humans are just good abstract thinkers; we understand that ramming a stick into a log gives us tasty grubs to eat, we understand that turning a wheel a few degrees to either side steers a car, and we intuitively grasp that fiddling with these little sticks on a controller moves a character in an imaginary world that's converted into a 2-dimensional image on the screen before us.

Motion and gesture controls feel like they ought to do something specific, and our brains have trouble adjusting when they actually control something else.

: Well, it seems you typed well. So that's good :P

I loose my ability to coherently string together thoughts after half a liter, but the moment where spelling mistakes start creeping into my posts is the time when you need to call an ambulance for me.