Whenever I see a computer game, I can instantly tell that it’s a computer game. Whether it’s the Sims 2 running on a Geforce2 or the latest Half Life running on the best PCI-X 512mb card, they always have “that computer look.”
Why? Home systems like the Playstation 2 and X-box never have the look, even though the Xbox is essentially a PC tweaked to just play games.
What’s “the look?”
The X-Box and Playstation are played on your TV, which has less lines, obscuring the details, essentially hiding some of the harsher edges and cleaner surfaces. Whereas on a PC, you’ve got very sharp and clear images, a warts-and-all view of the simplicity of the detail level.
I’m guessing anti-alising, aka the “blurry edges”. You don’t get that on a TV screen because the TV screen is at a much lower resolution.
NOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooooo!! Pipped by a few seconds!
At least I had the technical term. 
The “look” is a high resolution display.
A console hooked up to an NTSC display doesn’t show as much detail. It’s fuzzier. Rendered gradients and lighting effects are more noticibly unnatural, because there’s more room to notice differences.
A standard television breaks the image up into larger scanlines (or arrangements of dots, arranged via the shadow mask) so a lot of detail that distinguishes a 3D rendered image from a photographed image simply isn’t there.
[previews]
Crap.
Anti-Aliasing is kind of fudged in the TV. True anti-aliasing on a PC can be achieved by a good video card, but that doesn’t eliminate the ‘computery look’.
Another thing could be the speed of the player’s POV. In a computer the POV moves very quickly and smoothly because of the mouse, while a console’s is a bit slower and more “robotic” (very pronounced vertical and horizontal motions) because of the two little joysticks on the controller.
Nuh uh. “Resolution” v “fewer lines”.
Do I win a cookie?
Depth of field; many computer games render the scenes so that everything is in sharp focus, regardless of its distance from the camera/viewpoint. The human eye doesn’t do this, neither do ordinary cameras, so a scene that is entirely in pin-sharp focus all the time just looks unnatural.
Hook your console up to your monitor some time.
A semi-related question, will the future of video games have the same sharp images that we currently see in films that use CGI? It seems like the next natural step from that video game look to a realistic look. Although, it would be missing that video game feel, so perhaps not.
Computers.
I tried out an X-Box 360 hooked up to a little high-res TV at CompUSA a few days ago.
I’d say we’re pretty damn close.