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
Friend, I think you sort of missed the forest for the trees, here.
Remember that Arthur has spent his entire life as an outlaw with a heart of...say, tarnished silver. His big concerns, at the stage of his life where the story takes place, are the disappearance of a place in the world for him and his family (the gang), the massive expansion of the power of the federal government, and his fears of losing his freedom and being locked away.
He thinks women voting is weird, but he ends up tacitly supporting those specific women because he ends up convinced they are trying to get their own "freedom". He gets angry at the former slave owner not because "muh negro rights", but because the man's entire fortune was based around robbing people of their freedom, and because the man is trapped in this rose-tinted vision of the past. He feels both disgust and pity for the man, but it's never because "muh racismus"; it's always because "slavery in general bad", which I don't think is a hot take.
Yeah, Sadie is...weird. On the one hand, her story comes off, at surface level, as very "yas kween slay" girl power fuck-nuggetry.
On the other hand, however, if you take the time to engage with the gang in between story missions and watch the (I think literal) hundreds of small storylets and interactions that play out in the camp, you actually see her go from near catatonic rape victim to asking for a gun and training on how to use it, to being one of the regular gun hands and guards for the camp, to slowly edging away form the gang as things start to fall apart later on.
It's absolutely the game's fault that this shit appears to come out of left field; if you don't watch Sadie's story play out, her sudden shifts seem like they're pulled out of someone's ass. But they do justify her involvement, and they never have her do the usual "small woman defeats big, burly men using spin kicks" bullshit you generally see in "girl power" moments. She just has her own heroic adventures and gains her own levels, all without Arthur's direct involvement.
I've got a 100% save file at this point; can you give me a point in the main plot about this? Because, outside of one or two interactions with Lenny early on, I cannot for the life of me recall any "DAE hate da hwites?" bullshit. And I've been through the game thrice to see the differences in character interactions between max, mid, and min honor.
It's a nuance for a character who was depicted as simple. There was never a moment in the game or in the story that explained why Arthur was fond of blacks in a time where everyone else was not. Nor did they ever explain why Arthur was fond of the Indians when everyone else was not. He just was. "Muh freedom" excuse doesn't hold water, because there are plenty of people in the real world who may share similar values to people they don't like, but don't magically side with those people over those similar values. I'm sure there are plenty of people who could find things in common with the sand pests invading the U.K., at the moment, but it won't mean that they're going to defend them or befriend them.
Just like in real life, there are plenty of criminals in prison who do not automatically see eye-to-eye with other races in the prison system just because they're in prison together and don't want to be there. The opposite is true, and that was the jarring part about Arthur in the game. There was nothing grounded about his depiction, especially during that era.
No it still comes out of left field. I played through and watched many/most(?) of the gang's little interactions, but nothing really made sense as to why she went from catatonic to "just as good a shot as the boys". She's stand-offish and curt with Arthur any time you tried talking or interacting with her before her side-story pops up, but the transition from slowly doing things around the camp to then arguing with the butcher that she wasn't going to do food prep because she did "equal" work to her husband at their homestead was outright eye-roll worthy. There was no equality back then because men had to build and hunt, and ranch cattle, and women had to tend to things they could physically do.
Her entire archetype and portrayal was all wrong. Even as she came out of her shell, taking charge of the gang still made no sense, and you can basically count on a hand how many notable female outlaws were around back then. Her being the one to mastermind and lead the breakout of Marston also made no sense; I could understand Dutch's part of the story, but having Sadie come up with that made no sense. They could have told her story about coming into her own and separating from the gang without the feminist angling, even though -- to your point -- she wasn't doing kung-fu on the bad guys like most female characters these days.
Oh yeah definitely, it goes in hard once you get to the two rival families. Every other reference out of the main character's mouths is "rednecks", "inbreds", "hillbillies", and all other kind of invectives. It's also apparent when you get to Saint Denis, and the guy in the mansion and others are constantly putting down whites (to be fair they also disparage Indians, but when done so Arthur kicks the one guy out of the party for being a bigot, which makes no sense during that time period).
Also the entire side/main story of Arthur helping the Indians is about how terrible the "White man" is. They try to balance it by saying the chief's son is consumed with rage and that rage is bad, but never once do they disparage the other races as much as they talk down on the whites. The only "racist" in the gang is Micah, and he's obviously treated as the main villain.
The problem, however, is that today's generation has been so coached to overlook certain tropes and sympathise with other tropes, that people are now programmed to defend Left-wing subversion because it's all this generation knows. When pointed out, people will continue to defend it because they've been taught to by every single major media outlet and social media platform.