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
As a kid, I thought Star Wars was stuffy and self righteous writing like a second Star Trek, inaccessable goop. Then I discovered it was a deeply woven action pulp series through the Battlefront series (PS2).
I loved Star Wars. I'd think about how two jedi could fight in my own mind, I'd draw out meaning from little scenes, I saw RLM say why OT was so much better than PT, rewrites of PT from perspectives of love, YTPs of it were sprinkled in my other viewings, it wasn't an obsession (especially on the merch side I think the most I own is one poster of hoth and a single darth maul toy from when I was a kid), when Prequel Memes became a thing my friends and I would share a few and we all raced out to see Force Awakens during finals.
I wasn't a stranger to bad videogames, I wasn't a stranger to gay movies. But it was the way that Star Wars became bad very fast that signaled to me media isn't what I thought media was supposed to be. It was a deliberate destruction and replacement, a shot fired across fans faces casualties be damned to signal a new era.
Last Jedi was the last Star War I consumed, maybe Dice Battlefront I or II but it was a very quick awakening.
“There’s only one (or two, or three) Superman / Matrix / Alien / Indian Jones movies” - I didn’t really understand why people cared so much when I was younger, but when you see it happening right in front of you, and you’ve grown up a bit, it really is disgusting what gets done to some of these great stories like you mention - but at least we can draw a line and say “I don’t care how much money you parasites spent for this skin suit, the original story is still ours”