The question I have is whether the messenger is ultimately all that important. To demonstrate, an anecdote:
I was recently reviewing the new point and click adventure game, Ankh, for a U.K. magazine. In many ways, it was traditional, clearly inspired by the adventure's heyday in the 1990s. While playing, I began to notice a number of similarities with the classic LucasArts adventure, The Secret of Monkey Island, and decided to go back and play to see if my 15-year-old memories were accurate. Running through SCUMMVM, I was able to whirr up an ancient copy of the game on my super-fly modern PC, capable of all those mapped bumps and blooming lights, and it blinked into bleeping, chunky existence.
The tiniest palette and the fewest pixels painted crude backdrops and even cruder characters, barely animated as they slid sideways about the 2-D world. Compare and contrast with Ankh, a sweet game of no great import, that managed to keep the common sense of point and click in line with the modernity of a third dimension, animated in tens of thousands of shades and polygons into convincing, cartoon existence. There was no contest.
And so it was, until I spent the better part of an hour trying to find the jail cell in Ankh's ancient Egyptian streets.
I knew what it looked like, the shape of the room - I would go down the stairs at the right, give the object I'd just found to the prisoner and he'd help me. I just couldn't find it, no matter how hard I searched.
The moment of realization was first embarrassing, but then apocalyptic. The truth was revealed. I saw the light. And it wasn't bump mapped. My mental image of Monkey Island's jail was every bit as sophisticated as the textured surfaces before me. In fact, it had to be about 10 minutes into playing Monkey Island that I'd stopped noticing the graphics at all. Even now, two months later, I still picture the cell in the same way. I went back there in Monkey Island and saw its reality, but it wasn't enough to replace the elaborated version my own engine developed.
Imagine the person who sits and reads a book, looks up in horror and shouts, "This word 'tree' looks nothing like a tree! It looks like some letters on a piece of paper!" and throws the book at the wall, disgusted. He's either a fool or reading a Dan Brown novel. We simply don't work that way. The semiotic power of a word is enough for our beautiful minds to conjure the very best tree imaginable. Literally. We have excellent brains that will always be capable of better graphics than the most exceptional technology (until The Future, obviously, when we'll plug our brains into the machines and then just spend the whole time playing Space Minesweeper in Extra-Realism Graphics 5.6). What powers these mental chips is narrative.
Graphics are hugely significant to many people - that can't be ignored. Find the review of a crappy game that doesn't give it a good kick in the pixels. Bad graphics do tend to be a sign of a lack of care in production. But I challenge you to find the review that says, "This game would be excellent and worth your time, if only the graphics were better. But since they're so poor, don't bother." It doesn't happen. If every other factor of a "good" game is present, the poverty of the pictures will be forgiven. We don't need them - we've already got them fixed upstairs.
But don't believe my witterings. What about games as mindless action? Why would narrative be of any importance if all I wanted to do was run into a room filled with monsters and pummel them with bullets? To this I say, take on the Old Graphics Challenge.
Dig out a favorite single player shooter of five or so years ago that specifically didn't use a strong narrative. So no, you can't have Half-Life. And indeed, you're a thousand miles from being allowed to reinstall Deus Ex. Put it on, and see how long you stay playing.
