Hitman 3 goes as far left as it can without specifically establishing any ideology, I assume because they weren’t trying to piss off chuds.

It’s literally a billionaire murder simulator, it’s very good.

the old microsoft maze screensaver was pretty good. and what a surprise ending!!

I don’t remember it being explicitly leftist, but Partisans 1941 is a neat isometric stealth game like Commandos or Shadow Tactics.

Umurangi Generation, which I haven’t played myself, but it seems to be pretty interesting - it’s a photography game made by a Maori developer, about a future dystopia under siege by kaiju

Hammer & Sickle, for which I’m just going to copy over a prior post on it

I also recently played through G String, a kind of awkwardly titled cyberpunk FPS. I wasn’t expecting anything special when I started it, I just thought the aesthetic looked cool, and then the intro cinematic was literally Martian anti-colonial resistance forces fighting NATO in space. The atmosphere’s amazingly evocative - everything’s decaying and falling apart, there’s trash everywhere (including in space), enviromental destruction has progressed to the point where you basically have to be wearing a hazmat suit at all times. It’s kind of jank at times, but it has good moments

Doesn’t exist outside of a few narrative one offs, even if they’re good games

The way that gaming is structured currently, especially the way that most people engage with the medium (outside of gatcha hell) is reactionary and promotes anti-social behavior (see: CSGO, MOBAs, battle royales, etc). There are no caps on how long someone can play these games each day, and there’s very rarely any in game tools to assist with the IRL player’s wellbeing (stretching tutorials, weight trackers, etc). These games promote a high-end that is the focus of promotional material and video content, instead of showcasing a variety of skill levels and presenting that competition as valid. If you want to be seen as someone worth talking about among your peers, you gotta get good, and because a lot of games now have a reduced amount of mechanics and decision making so that they’re “”“easier”“” to get into, every incentive pushes players into binge gaming at a young age instead of developing a deep set of skills and preferences over the course of years like a real sport. There is no minor scene that you can support yourself on (because these games also present the idea that you could support yourself off of playing a video game), you’re either joining a pro team, streaming (which is disposable content that the companies that run these games do not really feel the need to moderate, which leads to the faces of many of these games being rahowa weirdos), or feeling a deep sense of frustration that you suck, and you’re not good enough to be celebrated within this community, you’re an atomized nothing. Now, tack all of that onto a game where your individual success, unless you already have a team to play with, is tied to someone else’s loss (and that someone, with the tolerance of smurfs, might not even be someone you should be playing against in the first place and is only accepted because that’s another account for someone to buy shit on) and 4~ other random people, with their own flaws and day to day quirks, keeping their shit together. These games encourage a deep resentment of random people, and there’s no moderation that’s ever really going to get it to go away (although it would still be better than the jack shit these companies do already).

And if you do give yourself an RSI “getting gud” and get to be one of the success stories of these games, good fucking luck. Professional gaming labor organizing has been dead since the professional starcraft 1 union in korea was crushed after a ton of money was dumped into the scene. Sponsors collaborate to keep wages down, the pay’s already atrocious on average, and a million other people are gunning for your spot. There isn’t really an off season, you better keep queing up for 10+ hours a day because if you have a few bad weeks, that’s the end of your career. The average age of retirement in esports in 26, and it’s not because “Oh, they’re getting too old, they just aren’t fast enough to keep up with kids” (the sort of decay that would impact your play doesn’t happen until your mid 50’s, and that time can be delayed even further though intentional upkeep by playing these games). It’s because they scream whenever they move the joints in their bones, and they’ve been playing the same game straight for 10 years, 12 hours a day and made $50,000 within that time. The only respite you have is that you can be the most abusive monster on the planet to your teammates, fans, and other staff, as long as you’re drawing eyes on streams then Tencent/Valve/etc will not give a fuck.

These organizations, for the limited time that they still exist (I think the bubble’s gonna pop with the general media crunch and it’s telling there hasn’t really has been any breakout successes within the past few years outside of Tencent’s league spinoffs which were able to fall back on preexisting competitive infrastructure) need to be unionized and the professional scene should have an adversarial relationship to the developers who rely on them as advertisement. In the longer term, we should be pushing for games that seek to rectify these flaws. Games that are less disposable, ones that promote growth and the development of skill over individual wins and losses. I don’t even know to what extent there should be random queues in games, I genuinely believe requiring a social element would at the very least promote interaction between players and they might get a few friends out of looking for games, which is literally the only meaningful part about mulitplayer games.

(edit: to clarify, when I say it’s the only thing that matters in multiplayer games, I mean that in the most blunt, direct sense. Whatever skills you develop for these games do not meaningfully transfer into real life situations. Whatever accomplishment you pull off or legend you make for yourself will fade with enough time. Having another person in your life that cares about you, or even loves you is going to have a longer and more meaningful impact on how happy you are as a person than if you were the best AWPer of the late 2010’s. When the bottom falls out, you can’t crash on your trophy’s couch. I love games that have stiff competition and require hours of training and improvement, but there’ll be a day where I can’t game anymore and my only comfort is knowing that some people still hang around me when that happens).

You should have a daily cap on how much you can play the game, with at the most a minor amount of time allowed for training/warmup before or after. The game should show you how to prevent injury and generally leave you in a better place than when you came into the game. Something that can show gamers that helping out new players and cultivating a welcoming community isn’t just like, a thing you do to feel good about yourself, but a genuine source of strength that’s in your best interest to let bloom. Working out, touching grass, and “making” new players into actual competition will improve your quality of play. To me, a real “leftist” game isn’t one that just says “lol crapitalism amirite” again, even if those games are some of my favorites, but one that attempts to de-atomize someone in one of the most atomizing hobbies.

tl;dr: the only hope for gaming is if a co-op made a combination of Quake, Guilty Gear and Wii Fit that you could play for four hours a day tops and would permaban you for shit that would get you kicked out of a movie theater.