This is most often done with text, but here we run afoul of the gamer's insistence on sensational graphics in games. Pure text games are rejected by most game players as inferior to graphically intensive games. Such games have been abandoned by the industry. I suggest the face because human faces occupy an exalted place in the human visual universe. A portion of the human brain appears to be hard-wired with algorithms for recognizing facial expressions, and many of the basic human facial expressions are universally recognized across all cultures.
Faces are important to people.
A measure of their importance to us comes from their use in other visual media such as the cinema. The human face is the most important element of the cinema. More movie frames are expended on human faces than on any other visual element. Leave one running until the Death Star blows up. Use the other to time the shots that focus on human faces.