There's a very telling scene in the movie Galaxy Quest where Captain Nesmith (Tim Allen) calls on a young fan, Brandon for help:
Brandon: But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no beryllium sphere...
Nesmith: Hold it.
Brandon: no digital conveyor, no ship...
Nesmith: Stop for a second, stop. It's all real.
Brandon: Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it!
It's funny because it's true. We want to believe. We want verisimilitude.
And I don't just mean the hardcore fan. Too often verisimilitude is dismissed with smug statements like "the fans' expectations are too high." The irony is that it's the other way around. The fans' expectations are too low. The fans will watch vomit congealing if it's got the brand they love attached to it. I should know. I was in line for The Phantom Menace on opening day.
Expectations are higher, not lower, among mainstream consumers. Much higher. The reason Joe Superbowl doesn't like Star Trek or Fantastic Four or Halo isn't because those settings seem too real. It's because they don't seem real enough. For whatever reason, those settings can't immerse the average consumer enough; they can't overcome his skepticism; they can't make Joe Superbowl believe.
For a lot of American men, Tom Clancy's world of espionage and military drama is easier to believe in than Tolkien's high fantasy. For a lot of American women, it's Danielle Steele. Neither Clancy nor Steele ever let their audience stop and think, "That last chapter was so implausible that I can't believe another word in this entire damn novel." Both authors understand verisimilitude.
In every medium of story-telling, books to film to games, verisimilitude is prized by creators. The most masterful story-tellers are so good at it that the reality of their creations can break out of genre confines and capture the imagination of the unimaginative mainstream. Think Stephen King.
The problem comes when the creation is translated into a new medium. It's a process that's almost always handled by marketing executives - whether they market for Scholastic, Paramount, or EA. Or as Harry Knowles would put it, "when [movie adaptations] end up sucking the ass end out of a rotting donkey... it's usually the terrible decision of folks in the studio that just don't get the heroes they're dealing with."
Unfortunately, we can't completely blame the marketers, even though I want to. Especially not when it comes to games. There's a reason that games tend to have worse adaptations to other media than say, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or even Spiderman. And - it pains me to say this, you understand, pains me - that's because games don't deliver verisimilitude as much as other media.
All video game makers understand the importance of verisimilitude. You can see it in their ruthless pursuit of photorealistic graphics and real physics. And it's no coincidence that games have grown more popular as they've grown more believable. But even now - to be immersed in a game, you really, really have to have suspension of disbelief. You have to be able to accept that your hero has the prowess to take four 7.62mm rifle rounds to the chest and carry six different heavy weapons, but not enough strength to batter down a locked door or climb up a six-foot wall. And that's just the loopholes in the physics. We haven't even gotten started on the story. Valve is a brilliant studio, but Half-Life 2 lost its verisimilitude when Gordon Freeman sat through a ten minute tutorial on how to use a gravity gun and never asked the simple question of "hey, you know, where am I and WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"
