Games don't have to look like anything, right? You don't play an image. A piece of sculpture doesn't have "fail" states. A photograph doesn't tally a high score. Maybe I'm hung up on semantics here, but I don't think so, and if I'm reading 's chief creative office Eric Nofsinger right, neither is he.

, Nofsinger says he thinks the games industry's "become dazzled by the bling."

We've all got stars in our eyes for Hollywood, with twenty, thirty, forty million dollar budgets over night and hundred-person teams working for years on titles without ever running a P&L to see if anything could support that.

One of the biggest slices of a game's design budget is its art, from the fine synthetic weave on a futuristic body suit to the deeply detailed wounds on the side of a shell-scarred building to making sure stuff like the pores on Prophet's face in Crysis Warhead are sufficiently pocked and pitted.

To quote a reader :