I’m not necessarily talking about moment-to-moment gameplay or mechanics (though I could see some interesting points being made about, for example, RTS gameplay or RPG character building influence how you approached “strategy” in your own life).
What I’m trying to get at are the games you felt really had something to say.
For example, while I’m by no means the biggest fan (only ever played 2 and V), playing MGS V recently (and catching up on the background a bit) has created this sense in me, and I wondered where else one might have experienced that from vidya
I like it, but it falls into that "corporations and government bad, NGOs good" trap that a lot off similar media falls into. It never really stops to consider that NGOs and their employees have similar incentives to continue to justify their existence and are therefore vulnerable to subversion in the same ways corporations and governments are.
If you work for an NGO advocating for solving a problem, do you really want that problem to be solved if doing so means the doors close and you lose your job?
A lot of that was present in MGS5, but since you are playing as the super cool leader of that group you still end up mostly not seeing the full brunt of how bad it can be.
Playing as a super cool leader till you realized you're just a pawn for shadow organizations, which is pretty realistic.
Yeah, despite not playing 1,3, or 4 myself yet (plan to eventually) I feel confident saying that each game had a real message (and perhaps even more than one) which the game was used to convey. And the way V “wraps everything up” is just groundbreaking imo.
Kojima is truly the first strand-type artist.
MGS3 was the best of the bunch by far.
Metal Gear Solid could arguably be considered libertarian up until Peace Walker, where it goes full commie.