Modern AAA games strive to be as realistic as current technology allows, with the biggest publishers and devs going so far as to invent newer and newer tech to make their games ever more immersive and life-like.
The focus in the endeavor to create realistic games is usually placed on the visuals. As time goes on, games feature greater and greater graphical fidelity, with higher resolution textures, more polygons, and better animation. Another big factor is immersion, and the given game's physics engine is a key factor here, because if the character falls in the opposite direction of the push, no level of graphical fidelity will make it look realistic!
That said though, software can do only so much. No matter how many individual strands of hair are animated on the hero's head, no matter how smoothly the blades of grass sway in the breeze, no matter how closely the blood spurting from the neck of the hundredth orc adheres to liquid physics, you're still just sitting on a couch with a controller in your hands.
