i'm not sure why this is the thought i had as soon as i woke up today but since i've been talking about the FUTURE OF GAMES lately
what happens if games do get to the point where they're entirely realistic? like, you can complete immerse yourself in a VR game and everything looks, sounds, feels (tastes??? smells?????) real? do you really think you could play a war game or some game where you slice people's throats when your brain is being tricked to think it's a real experience? i mean in the back of your head you know it's just a game but fuck i can't play heavy rain without doing the right thing i don't think i could play a LOT of games if it was that level of realism.
The question for me at that point becomes "Where do we go from there?"
Actually, one of the reasons I think video games aren't really evolving is that a lot of game mechanics have been sort of cemented as standard, and changing them usually only pisses players off. This isn't an entirely bad thing. It means we've figured out some things about game design that should stay consistent. Game mechanics really are a science anyway, not an art, there should be some consistency.
That and of course no one wanting to take risks (the companies making the games nor the people buying them). but that reason has always been obvious.