An environment this rich with detail will affect senses other than sight. The smells, temperature, ambient sounds and things all contribute to making it real. Peripheral vision and the combination of all these other senses make the experience.
Seeing the whole thing on 2D screen, i feel, makes it less realistic as the graphics improve. The difference between reality and the screen becomes more stark.
If it were liken cartoon, i think I'd suspend reality better just to be in it. This leaps away from artificial into reality and doesn't get there thereby raising my expectations and then disappointing me.
Human mind doesn’t (can’t) process the entirety of perceivable space-time in all of its detail, far from that. Rather we treat it more as a symbolic interface, superfluous accidental detail is simplified away whenever possible (sometimes excessively so: the Invisible Gorilla effect, optical illusions, and so on).
This is why I don’t see inherent value in increasing realism of film and videogame visuals (I do think contrasting degrees of realism could be used to achieve an artistic effect, but am yet to see this technique employed) and incidentally why I start to find unstaged photography frustrating and consider learning to draw (the technique employed by many illustrators, where a photo of an actual scene is taken as a reference and then traced over to leave out unnecessary detail and focus on shapes and colors of interest, is appealing).
I agree. I consider games as a modern form of art and simply trying to get them photorealistic doesn't seem to be the most interesting thing that can be done with the medium.
Seeing the whole thing on 2D screen, i feel, makes it less realistic as the graphics improve. The difference between reality and the screen becomes more stark.
If it were liken cartoon, i think I'd suspend reality better just to be in it. This leaps away from artificial into reality and doesn't get there thereby raising my expectations and then disappointing me.
Great technological achievements though.