With each new piece of hardware (Wii excluded), console manufacturers focus on improving their system's graphical horsepower and producing more realistic graphics than ever before. Ironically, this has led to a graphical dumbing down of epic proportions. Certainly the new systems' detail and textures are spectacular, but most genres now have a certain look to them. The graphical detail may increase, but most games' visual diversity has gone almost extinct. Look at the Unreal Engine and the graphical "me too's" that Epic Games has enabled. Sure, the middleware makes development easier and more streamlined; doesn't it also mean the games created with it will look similar? Do you know why games like Okami, Viewtiful Joe, Psychonauts and The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker stand out? Because they're not the graphical clones we're used to seeing on our TV screens.

Improved graphics haven't just hampered developers' creativity; they've also made gamers' creative side grow lazy. In the dark arcades of yore, even on the first home videogame consoles, the graphics were so simplistic that we "filled in the blanks" with animations and detail. Gamers in those days were actively engaged from a visual standpoint, because without a little imagination the 200 pixels on screen failed to reveal much information at all.