What is holding back the gaming industry from creating more affecting, innovative experiences? Why do most big publishers seem to keep a laser-like focus on by-the-numbers action and shooting games, rather than seeking out new genres that could allow for a more human-centered emotional core? Some might blame risk-averse policies at the massive corporations, or the vagaries of mass-market economics. But 2K Games Global President Christoph Hartmann has a different explanation for the problem: technology.

Speaking to GamesIndustry International recently, Hartmann said that we need hardware capable of true photorealism before gaming can really attempt to take on wider experiences.

Recreating a Mission Impossible experience in gaming is easy; recreating emotions in Brokeback Mountain is going to be tough, or at least very sensitive in this country… it will be very hard to create very deep emotions like sadness or love, things that drive the movies. Until games are photorealistic, it'll be very hard to open up to new genres. We can really only focus on action and shooter titles; those are suitable for consoles now. To dramatically change the industry to where we can insert a whole range of emotions, I feel it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photorealistic; then we will have reached an endpoint and that might be the final console.

It's true that many of the greatest advances in video game storytelling have been inextricably tied to technological progress. You don't get from a medium that produces games like Pong to one that produces games like Journey without some graphical and processor advances along the way. In that sense, adding true photorealism to a game to allow for new, compelling gaming experiences would require resources that just aren't available today.

But saying that such photorealism is necessary, or even especially helpful, in order to convey "deep emotions" is going too far. Games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus manage to convey very strong feelings of lonely, bittersweet sadness even when rendered in muddy 480i. Alyx Vance's smile in Half-Life 2 isn't any less disarming because you can't count the pores on her face or see every wrinkle on her lips. Heck, players forged deep, emotional memories of characters from Final Fantasy VI even though they only existed as pixelated sprites.

A game doesn't have to look like a photograph to convey emotion any more than a Pixar movie or a Picasso painting does. The real emotional storytelling moments that people remember aren't driven by the ability to see the acute detail in a character's eyes. They're driven a combination of strong world-building, compelling, believable writing, and most importantly, engaging scenarios that make the player's actions feel integral to the experience.

That these emotional moments are often couched in the "action or shooter" titles, which Hartmann says are "suitable for consoles now," is more a function of historical norms and business realities than any technological limits. Creating entirely new genres with original gameplay is a lot more difficult (and a lot riskier) than just cranking out another shooter with paper-thin characters and a cookie-cutter plot. But even without perfect technology, developers are managing to experiment with the medium in some very interesting (and occasionally very successful) ways.

The day when we reach the point where a "final system" can create games with graphics that perfectly mimic reality might be coming sooner than later. When that time arrives, it will still be up to developers and publishers like 2K to push the envelope and create more games that don't rely on the same old genres and tropes. In other words, the key to getting more human moments out of games isn't in the technology that powers those games, but in the humans that create them.