Either playing Beat saber on acid or finishing MGS4.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura still remains my favourite to this day.

The world's setting is centred around how capitalism and industry affects society, how it pushed aside feudalism, how racism remains endemic and easily seen as normal, how history is swept away to hide attitudes, all sorts of complex things. Early on in the story, you get involved with a strike by exploited half-orcs and the wealthy factory owner who would rather they all died. Thinking back, it was a big part of how young me started to realise industrial relations are fucked up in capitalism.

One moment (of the many cool things) that really hit me, is that there's an entire sub-plot across the whole continent that's never explicitly mentioned, but is entirely noticeable if you actually pay attention and listen, not to the quest-givers or the industrial leaders, but to the servants of the powerful men you meet. If you're lucky, near the end, you suddenly realise you just.. swept all these weird characters and remarks under the rug as you had 'important' people to talk to. I had relegated servants and whole in-game races to an 'unimportant' role, when actually their stories are key to a whole second sub-plot of their own that affects everything in the world.

I know a lot of that behaviour is because I'm playing to typical game design, but, I dunno, having a real moment where you think back and realise you've been ignoring what should have been an obvious pattern of so many exploited people, and I just glossed over it 'til that moment, it affected me.

OneShot. The main story does something interesting early on to draw you in, then with the post game content I have just never felt so connected to a game. it's hard to describe without spoilers. I started the game in the evening then there I was at like 2am "I can't sleep until this world is free". you just really feel like you personally have a part in the story.

Probably different to most people but I remember the first year of Uni summer holidays I spent playing Fable 3… which ended up being the entire 3mth holiday. I realised in real terms I just moved from one part of the cd to another and hadn’t accomplished anything else with my life in that time, no hobbies, friends or shared experiences.

I packed up my Xbox and refused to play another game for about 10yrs. Now I have a much better balance with games and my life

Night in the Woods. Start to finish. It has so many moments where you just pause and go "....shit." It's the most perfect game ever made.

Also FF7. White teenage boy complex with Aeris for sure, but also blowing up oil facilities, killing CEOs, and Red XIII's story. It's wild to me the themes that this game gets across in Discs 1-2.

It was meeting the other players in real life. One lives in Europe.

I encountered a rogue AI in Starfield that was kind of a trip. I ended up letting it go to be its own person.

Showing my age here, but I'd pick Ocarina of Time as the first game I feel like I had a profound reaction to. At the end of the game, when you defeat Ganon and save the princess, how does she reward you? by sending you back in time to be a kid again. I mean, I understand that it was supposed to be a gift, but it just felt like it was erasing the heroics that you had done for her and the entire kingdom of Hyrule.

Second, I would pick God of War (2018). As a father, that game knew exactly what to do to reel me in and make me care about the characters.

During the game awards last year, there was a virtual concert announced in the game Sky: Children of the Light. It started immediately after the awards ended. I'd never played this game before that night. I loaded it up and joined something like 1000 other people in a virtual stadium around the artist in the center. It then teleported you outside where you followed her around, floating through landscapes, the clouds, etc while the concert continued. It was a surreal moment and I've experienced nothing like it before or since. It was way different from an IRL concert or a simple video streamed to my computer. It's hard to describe.

Modern Warfare 2 (the first one). When you're climbing the ice wall and you fall and get caught, the level of detail on the face was astounding to kid me. It was like watching something in real life to me.

Probably helped that it was off of my sister's high def TV.

When I started playing Horizon zero dawn, for first dozen hours I was in the state that fears the machines and sneaks everywhere.

Aloy's voice still terrifies me, I wish there was an option to turn off her random monologues.

I think it was playing Golden Sun 2, when it is revealed that the world is slowly ending and that Saturas and Menardi were trying to save it.

It made me realise that real villains are just people doing what they believe to be right, whose priorities are different than your own. We're all trying to live a "good" life in the end, and a lot of things are more easily forgiven in that light, but that doesn't mean we'll all get along either, because we're all the villain in someone's story!

Two come to mind. The first was when I was about 6 years old and walked in on my older brother playing Sim City 2000 on our family computer. It was the first time I had seen a video game of any kind. Before that, I thought computers were just boring machines for doing adult work. Seeing him playing a game on there changed my life, I've been a PC gamer ever since.

The second was when I beat Super Mario Bros on GameBoy. It was the first game I've ever beat fully and it was an incredible feeling. Took me almost a year to do, incredible grind at that age.

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 ^^

Genshin Impact had an event where you had to deliver food to customers. The customers would be in the most out of the way places, and if you managed to find them, they would reject the food for the stupidest reasons. Many players complained about the difficulty, but maybe it was a commentary on how delivery ~~boys~~ partners are treated.

Destiny 2, the death of Caide-6. I was pissed and wanted to avenge him so much.

He was such a beloved character by the whole community that Bungie is bringing him back from the dead (somehow) for the final chapter of the game story.

Any round of Space Station 13 or 14

Tackling a hard Souls' boss is always a roller coaster of emotion. Usually it's a bunch of anger, some despair, some hope, and ultimately victory. So cathartic.

For me, that moment was in Kingdom Hearts 2. I hadn't played the first game (or the second game) and didn't really understand the concept of sequels that continued a story. My parents had gotten me the game probably because it had Disney characters in it. But this moment stuck with me nonetheless.

It was the game's first boss fight, the Twilight Thorn. Everything leading up to it and the fight itself was just utter cinematography to my young eyes. I wasn't even able to actually beat the fight (and I was the older brother, so I didn't have anyone to help). But it stuck with me for years. I ended up getting a PS4, the first console I bought with my own money, for the sole reason of playing the Kingdom Hearts collections.