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
KotOR (especially 2, which I played first) took Star Wars from a kind of series of “bubbles connected by plot threads” (how I saw the movies) to being able to see the various bits of media as “slices” taken out of a “real” universe, which I always loved it for - everything seemed more grounded