The Devil's in the Details

Here is something that should be pretty obvious, but which I have not heard anyone else comment on. So I am going to comment on it. This is an incidental advantage of all the advances that have been made in digital photography and digital video. Specifically, the vast increase in resolution the typical cameras owned and used by people today, combined with the ubiquity of the internet.
I first noticed it after my wife and I had been watching the new Dr. Who series for a while (after the series was (re)started in 2005). I noticed that I "felt" like I had visited London, to some degree, because of all the on-location Dr. Who footage I had been watching. It hit me that background details are so much more visible in HD than they were in NTSC*.

So I imagine this is true for any current show which shoots on location somewhere. I generally don't watch TV besides The Walking Dead (Hello, downtown, deserted Atlanta). And after looking at so many high-definition still pictures of downtown Boston (after the unfortunate Boston Marathon bombings recently), I have a feel for what downtown Boston looks like.

And this isn't even getting into locations included in a modern video game. Most are fabricated, but some locations are modeled to some degree after real locations, with varying degrees of accuracy. How many gamers feel like they have actually been aboard the Normandy from Mass Effect, or the Pillar of Autumn from Halo? What is your favorite place to "visit," which doesn't really exist? The island in "Far Cry?" Not being a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool gamer, I imagine there are lots of places in games that I have never experienced which would rate far better than the ones that I have mentioned.

Anyway, to you young whipper-snappers, back in my day, it took some darned good game programming to make someone feel like they had really been inside your game. You guys have it lucky!

*Yes, I imagine the older Dr. Who was shot and broadcast in PAL standard, but by the time I watched the older Dr. Who episodes, they had been converted to NTSC, because I lived (and still do) in the US, and my only access to the older episodes was via PBS (which was only broadcast in NTSC, like the rest of US over-the-air programs).