Some of the best games I've played in my life were the text based and pixel art games in MS DOS. Your imagination then had to render or enhance the visuals, and it was pretty cool to come up with the pictures in your head.

I realize the thread started about graphics, but I didn't only mean realistic graphics when I referred to realism, because the comment I was replying to just said "realism in games". I do expect there's some degree of realism in your favorite text-based or pixel-art games as well. As you say, it's clear that a game doesn't need photorealistic graphics to be good, because most games do not.

I mean yes, but, ultimately we want to be able to simulate ourselves to the truest to be able to understand our origins, which are likely simulated as well, right.