You can have high poly models in animation (which is mostly why I do that because I like insane amounts of detail, see my particle hair XD). Games yeh probably want to be as low as possible but even then game engines seem to be allowing for higher levels of detail these days (or so I've heard anyway as I stopped paying attention to game dev stuff centuries ago x_x).

My over the top perfectionism won't allow clipping x_x My current workaround for my skin tight stuff is an offset XD