Asklemmy

This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.

But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.

So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I'm naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they're part of my family and dynasty--so I'm giving them names that have a lot of personal "worth" to me.

Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn't white, and I couldn't figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt "right" for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none "fit".

And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was "high worth" to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn't get the name of this other character I really liked.

Now, if I was doing that in a frickin' video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are "high worth" to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.

And it wasn't like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this "gut feeling" that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow "weren't right" for her, even though that frickin' inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.

So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.

Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it's difficult to really make this experience another way:

I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.

Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.

Some of them were sending me "hello :)" messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you're going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.

All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.

Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.

That moment in Papers, Please where they say they're reassigning the guards, and issue you a rifle with three shots in a locked drawer in your desk. And you're doing your paperwork, and there's a siren, you look up and a guy is hopping the fence. You scramble to get the gun out and shoot him but he already threw the bomb.

It's kind of amazing how immersive that moment was. The panicked scramble to take in what was going on, know what to do, scramble for the key, line up and shoot someone.

Look I've shot a lot of people in video games. Mowing down nazis, taking the gluon gun to HECU marines, I've probably shot Heavy Weapons Guy in the face 900,000 times over the decades, just him.

But that one got me. In that deliberately low res game about border crossing paperwork, that one made me feel like I actually just killed someone.

When i first killed someone in DayZ back in the day, when it was just the ArmA 2 mod and all the hype.

I finally found a gun and started to learn my way around the zombies, when i heard a player in a bush nearby the hospital in Elektrozavodsk. I thought he was probably out to get me, so i emptied my Makarov clip at the bush and shortly after heard the fly noise they had put to mark dead players.

As i searched his body with my heart pumping like crazy i found him to have nothing but a can of beans. I felt profoundly shitty in that moment because he was just like me at the time. Some new guy playing a tough sandbox multiplayer-game, where everything and everyone can kill you. He probably didnt even hear or see, where he got killed from, just like it happened half a dozen times to me before.

I showed cruelty to someone in whose shoes i'd had demanded mercy.

Fuck everyone pitching people to fight each other

Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here's one:

You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it'll chime in when you're having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it'll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day's events and trying to make sense of the reality you've woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it'll say the following line:

"No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it's still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You're still alive."

This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.

Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I'm describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!

Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It's the most empathetic game I've ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people's shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He's a genius. He's also an idiot. And he's a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It's what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.

Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.

Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I'll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.

It's kinda cheating but The Beginners Guide is a game I think about all the time. As someone who makes things, the themes it explores about validation and the purpose for creating art really hit home.

For just a profound moment, the sun station in Outer Wilds.

Subnautica; at the beginning your pod drops into the surface of the ocean, then you open the hatch and you climb out... to see an infinite expanse of blue sea under a blue sky.

That triggered so many memories for me, I had to take a minute. The color grading on that scene was on point.

One of the Quake games has a section where you get captured, then put on a conveyor belt where you see other people in front of you get mutilated, then that happens to you. That scene almost triggered a dissociative episode.

The original ending of Mass Effect 3 brought me to tears because the Clint Mansell music meshed so well with the on-screen segments, it really moved me. That said I also like the remastered ending; the latter is like the last few chapters of Lord Of The Rings, the former is like an American movie ending.

Doki Doki literature club. The first play through when you visit Sayori at home. If you know you know.

Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn't study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked "up" during the parts of the gameplay that I've seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.

So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. "You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!" I mean...

… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.

I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.

I hate to say it, but I think it's more likely the developers just didn't want sociopathic players to be able to profit from the human loot themselves.

Basically the whole premise of Paradise Killer. Who ought to seek justice? Can a government be irredeemable? Is justice even possible?

"I need sleep and should stop mining"

Undertale: You've progressed through most of the game. You didn't strike out at the monsters. You've done everything you could to avoid hurting those around you and yet strive for escape. Over and over You've been put up against a wall with your enemies striving to end you. You could fight back, you could react to this world of monsters and become like them, a monster.

But you didn't. You stand before a mirror in a house very similar to the one you were in at the start of the game. Looking into the mirror, you are affirmed.

"Despite everything. It's still you."

Despite everything I've gone through. Despite the hunger and gnawing to give in. To respond to the hatred and harm that has been inflicted on me with fury and bloodlust equal to the twisted delight others have taken in my suffering. I didn't give in. I didn't lose my joy in making others smile. I didn't give up my interests and the rare and disparate moments of joy.

Despite everything. It's still me. I'm still here. I'm not a monster.

There was nothing quite as intense as a ServerSmash in Planetside 2. Which means ~800 people doing joint ops on a single map and everything is highly coordinated.
I think blob fights in EVE are even larger, but this was a first person shooter and also rather arcadey, not a thousand spreadsheets fighting at a server tick rate of 1 ^^

Outer Wilds. The universe is, and we are.

One of those games where it's better to play absolutely blind. For the experience of discovery is the gameplay. You can never play it for the first time again.