I games like Fallout, or Cyberpunk, movies like V for Vendetta, you always have common dystopia tropes. Superficially you may look at these and think of them as social commentary messaging.

In Fallout, nuclear war aside, the pre-war world is full of remnants of messages that depict a highly corporocratic world. I don't think there's a single damn message terminal you can find in the ruins of any given corporation that doesn't have some kind of Monty Burns 'Bwahaha' message of corporations doing cruel and psychotic things to their employees.

In all these types of games or movies, you always have some kind of 'the media lies' message too. Some talking head on a TV starts saying ridiculous things that everyone can identify as being ridiculous. Silly, over-the-top personalities. Frequently, even though it generally makes no sense, they depict some kind of media personality exploiting or taking advantage of some unwilling sap with another ridiculous message In Cyberpunk, they have this TV personality 'Ziggy' who throughout the gameplay, has good-natured "good guy" guests on who play the part of unwitting saps who say reasonable things and then he does some ridiculous stunt to humiliate the guest with their ridiculous biased message. Like why would anyone go on his show when they know that's going to happen?

The part I thought was most ridiculous that I came across in Cyberpunk was a debate between the two mayoral candidates who you later work for in the game. One of them is going on and on about how 'the corporations only pay 0.7%!' and the other guy goes 'Well what about your Cayman Islands accounts!' leaving the first guy stammering and looking like a fool.

In reality, neither candidate would be saying a fucking word about either of those, because both would be paid off by corporations and both would be hiding money in the Caymans, because that's what they do RIGHT NOW.

In every single fucking one of these games or movies, there's always the reasonable voice of good, and it's almost always some kind of reporter figure. There's a reporter in Fallout 4, there's a reporter in V for Vendetta, there's always a goddamn reporter. And this reporter is always the same archetype - scrappy, possibly disillusioned, who wants to speak TRUTH TO POWER! and we need to SHOW THE PEOPLE THE TRUTH!

Yeah no reporters are like that. Reporters are money-grubbing ideological whores. Nearly any reporter who presents themselves as that, you only notice because they're fighting on behalf of their own bias that they refuse to speak the truth about.

And in every game, you team up with this reporter and something happens and you bring the scoop of the century at everyone wakes up and there's riots in the street! Or some shit like that.

And that's what actually makes these games pro-dystopia propaganda.

Instead of looking at these games and seeing cautionary tales about the real world, people see ridiculous caricatures.

The only game that ever presented actual true data about corporations was Deus Ex when the black-haired bald man in the Statue of Liberty in the first twenty minutes of the game spits pure facts about consolidation.

People look at the real world, and they don't see these caricatures. So they think the real world is actually just fine. They don't see the media becoming laughable overt stooges, so they think 'the media can't be that bad, after all, it's not like this!'. They don't see corporations doing stupid evil shit like in Fallout 4, where the water reclamation center intentionally used bottled water to fake all their water quality tests while knowingly pumping sewage into people's homes, so they think things aren't as bad. They don't see the government driving around in silly vans listening to everybody in their homes like in V for Vendetta, so they build their illusion of privacy. In these games there's always tons of drugs, but they only are depicted as helpful gameplay elements.

So when something like climate change comes up, well, besides always being presented as factual in the games ("must be true in the real world if it was even true in this clownish depiction of dystopia! See, even they knew!"), never, not once, does the player end up exploring how something like that can be used to control people.

Maybe the concepts are just too big and difficult to portray?

You know what you've never seen a game or movie bring up? How a company like ABInBev (Bud Light) can suffer catastrophic financial damage, yet, never is affected by it. Why a company like Disney can just churn out box office bombs, yet act like their money is endless. Why nobody goes out of business anymore. Why companies like Twitter could run for ten years losing billions of dollars, never once turning a profit, and yet still remain in business... because they never talk about things like hedge funds, and how companies like BlackRock functionally make all their revenue utterly fake.

How does the media in real life reflect their bias? Almost entirely by simply choosing to never report things. Now this could be difficult to portray in game and movies, because it's not like we spend significant time in either simply watching the news, such that we can see they aren't doing their job.

Furthermore, you never ever actually run into anyone who is brainwashed by the media. It just never comes up. Any time your character has some kind of earth-shattering news, everyone actually just... believes you? Has there ever been depicted a game where 'redpilling' exists, and is depicted frequently how it plays out in reality, where people who you had good relationships with will suddenly never want to talk to you and they just belittle and insult the player, and never reconcile?

So that's it. These games don't actually help fight these problems, they make people love it. Notice how in games like Cyberpunk, you don't have to pay rent on your apartment? You don't have licensing fees on your cyberware, that has to phone home every few hours or else it shuts down? Where the company that makes your eyes isn't recording everything you're doing and exploiting it somehow? Instead, these games (even in Shadowrun) just make cyberware basically faultless and incredible. Deus Ex: Human Revolution at least had the firmware update which is the closest any game ever got.