The same thing applies to Crysis, actually. You may not consciously realize how short a span of time it is that you spend really appreciating the revved-up graphics of the game before the demands of the actual gameplay focus your attention down to a laser point. Obviously I haven't made a study of this, but I'd wager that it's a much shorter duration that even the designers of the game would admit to. At some point, you have to take action; you don't have the time to stand around going "ooh, ahh" over the precise way that leaf glides to the ground. There's a famous Internet video that made the rounds a while back that made the point rather startlingly. The viewer is presented with a scene featuring a group of basketball players, and asked to count the number of times the ball is passed between them within a given number of minutes. During that time, a person in an animal costume walks into the scene from the right, passes between the players, and exits the scene to the left. Then the action stops, and the viewer is asked not how many times the ball was passed, but whether or not they noticed the person in the costume. And 99 times out of a hundred, the costumed person was missed completely.

The human brain is built in such a way that allows us to focus on things that we deem important, and to block out everything else. In many cases, this is beneficial. But the clever designer can exploit this by routing the player's attention around the on-screen action to get him to concentrate on the things he should. Link's oversized eyes is a very subtle way to do this, but there are many others. The point is that you're only going to spend so much time appreciating the visual aesthetic of a game, no matter how gorgeous it might be.

If I had to guess, I'd say that there's something more important to players than realism, and that would be novelty. Cartoony or realistic, what players come to a new game for is the promise of something they've never before seen. Whether it's a new environment, a new enemy type, a new weapon, a new gameplay mechanic, or any of a hundred different things, players want to be wowed by something new. It's ironic that so much attention is given to realism in games like the first-person shooter genre, when so very many of those games look virtually identical: a bland, monochrome color palette; enemy soldiers featuring armor of the weak designs; the same old rag-doll physics. Where is the novelty?

Rather than realism, I'd prefer to see more attention given to expression. It seems silly to design for realistic objects in a completely unreal world. Let's see more fantastical architecture that defies known physics -- you're only going to look at it, not drive it around, so why does it need to conform to reality? If we're creating alien or magical creatures, why not go completely non-Euclidean with them? We don't care how their biology works, as long as they blow up nicely. And we shouldn't be afraid of color -- you hear that, Diablo 3 haters? -- some of nature's most amazing specimens are simply incredible living canvases of hue and chroma, not to mention the vast vistas of the world's mountains, valleys, seas, forests, deserts, tundra, and myriad other wonderful landscapes. We could put it all into our games and go one step further, step up the saturation and skew the contours, and push the boundaries a bit. We get realism every day in our normal lives; let's really unshackle our games for a change.