Clive Thompson has written a very interesting article for Slate criticizing the use of realistic faces in video games. Our upbringing turns us into experts in reading emotions in human faces and this makes the accurate reproduction of a human face in any artistic medium particularly challenging. This is especially difficult for animators, who have the task of conveying realistic emotions through time. Clive argues that the best results obtained so far, based on our current inability to perfectly mimic human emotions, has been achieved by stylized characters.
Regarding video games and abstraction, it is also interesting to note how previous limitations in graphic resolutions stimulated the creation of many games that were based on non-photorealistic representation, like Qix, Breakout (the same concept that later brought Arkanoid) and Tetris, among many others.
The possibilities of abstraction
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