One of the most overused words in the videogame writer’s lexicon is the word ‘realistic’. I’m as guilty of it as the next person, but I always feel slightly, um, guilty whenever I use it, especially in reference to graphics. Because even those titles which are widely seen as exemplars of game realism, be they Crysis or Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto, are themselves stylised in some way. So what is it that we mean when we say that a game is realistic? Are we talking about verisimilitude? Detail? Atmosphere? More interesting to me are the conventions that games have amassed over time – from double-jumps to infinite depth of field to lens flare – that end up creating a type of videogame reality that we rarely have reason to question. Until some development comes along that forces us to do so.

I had a moment like that when I first received my Xbox 360 review unit in 2005 along with a slew of launch titles from various publishers. From Perfect Dark Zero to Condemned, from Project Gotham Racing 3 to Need For Speed: Most Wanted, each game made me feel as though my eyes were being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of onscreen visual detail. It was as if I didn’t know where to look, or even how to look at what I was seeing, so different did those titles seem to me from their last-generation counterparts.

In hindsight, a good deal of this is probably due to overdone, poorly implemented effects like normal mapping and depth of field, and in fairness, it takes developers time to master their new tools. But what I blamed at the time on ‘too much realism’ had, in fact, been caused by the gap between what I’d come to understand as ‘videogame realism’ from the previous six years of games and what I was now playing. But after several months of playing Xbox 360 titles, followed by those that launched with PlayStation 3, I became accustomed to this generation’s adjusted standard for videogame verisimilitude and never looked back.

I shouldn’t have been surprised when Killzone 2 elicited a similar sense of visual disorientation. After all, when I went hands-on with the game’s opening mission at E3 2007, I distinctly remember feeling as though there were something oddly unnerving about the texture of Killzone 2’s imagery, only to have Guerilla’s leads explain how each of their post-processing techniques could help take what looked like a sunny mid-afternoon and transform it into an environment that looks as though all of the hope has been leached out of it. But at the events leading up to E3 as well as E3 itself, I all but ignored Killzone 2 to focus on other titles that were making their debut at the show. So it wasn’t until late last autumn and early this year, while playing the first 30-40 per cent of the game, that I had the chance to reflect on the various ways in which it calls into question our notions of what constitutes videogame realism.

Cliff Bleszinski described one of Gears Of War’s aesthetic premises as ‘destroyed beauty,’ the way that the environments combine the splendour of Seran architecture with the detritus of the planet’s ruins. Gears 1 and 2 have their share of slimy surfaces and gruesome killings, but the images themselves are by and large appealing to the eye. That’s because for all of the additional graphical details that Gears may have when compared to last generation’s titles, people still expect to derive a certain amount of visual pleasure from the games that they play, whether it’s Halo 3’s gleaming green-purple-chrome colour palette or the saturated deep blues and nightvision greens of COD4.

Killzone 2, by contrast, consistently denies us those pleasures. Yes, its graphics engine is unquestionably stellar. Yet based on the creative and technical art direction for Killzone 2, the guiding principle for Guerilla’s PS3 debut must have been ‘decrepit ugly’. Helghan’s grimy environments clearly weren’t much to look at before the Vektan invasion, but the way that the war has chewed them up further isn’t helping matters. All of this is subtly reinforced by Guerilla’s penchant for supplying a single hint of beauty – lapping waves on a beach; the barest glimmer of sunlight peeking through Helghan’s thick cloud cover – that only serves to augment the game’s overall gloom.

It might be churlish of me to say so, but I’ll do it anyway: Guerilla may have succeeded in its aesthetic aims a little too well. For while all of its visual effects are impeccably implemented, in contrast to the clumsy attempts at the start of this generation, I could have done with the suggestion of devastation instead of a meticulous recreation of it. I’d have preferred a more distanced, iconic representation of Helghan’s scorched surface rather than the flawlessly dismal illustration in the finished game. Four holidays into this generation’s titles, the last thing I expected was that I’d find myself clinging so hard to my long-held assumptions about what defines videogame reality. But if wanting a little more beauty in my games is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogames consultant. You can follow him at ncroal.tumblr.com.