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.

No Man's Sky - Finally lifting off the planet into space for the first time reignited my love of space and the cosmos. Made me feel awe and wonder

The Stanley Parable - never had a game make me laugh till I had tears in my eyes before. This game really fucks with your perception of what is real and just how common / predictable some gaming tropes have become

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

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.

For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

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!

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.

Spec Ops: The Line

It's story is based on Heart of Darkness, the same book Apocalypse Now was based on, so they share some commonalities.

Gameplay wise it's a pretty standard 3rd person cover shooter, nothing really memorable.

But man that game fucks with your head and expectations of a shooter. While you mow down hordes of fellow American soldiers who have gone AWOL with their commander, the tone of the game constantly shifts ever so slightly. You lose people from your team, you get to be more and more vengeful and violent. And at first you think nothing of it, because that's almost every shooter I've played.

But they let you see yourself in a mirror, so to say.

I think the first time it really hit me was when on one of the loading screen tooltips, that usually said stuff like "You can throw grenades back." or "Flank your enemies." it just said "Do you feel like a hero yet?". Felt like I'd been punched in the gut. It gets more and more intense from there and I can't really describe it all, because it's been a decade or so and it was mostly the sum of a lot of smaller things.

I know some people called it corny and pretentious but it really stuck with me.

This will date me, Missile Commander. When you lose the game doesn't reset, you had to reset it. So if you don't you just see dead cities on a screen, with silence. This was right about the same time I saw War Game. The only wining more is not to play.

Nothing as profound as what you described there...
But... The Last Of Us was an experience for me...

I hadn't played a "new" game in about 8-10 years at that point, so the huge increase in development was mind blowing to me.
But really, the intensity of the story is what really did it for me. I legit got teary eyed in the intro, and then the burning restaurant scene made me ball my eyes out..

Phenomenal fucking game

Or, to bring it back to my youth... The Illusion of Gaia was probably the first game I played that made me feel things. That was so long ago, and I was so young when that came out that being specific about it is hard. But I think I really related with the main character, and I remember really feeling things during the lost-at-sea raft scene.

I might need to go find the ROM now...

**Or, to go a bit further back, Dragon Warrior.
That was the first game I ever played that really captivated me. It was the first RPG I ever played, and even tho the storyline is incredibly basic and cliche, it was the first time I experienced a story at all in a video game. It's definitely the reason that I prefer fantasy RPGs over every other type of game

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.

Three pretty stereotypical ones.

1. I played diablo 1 when I was 6 years old. And you already know where this is going, but that butcher room caused me some intense fear.
2. That moment in fallout 3 when you first leave the vault and there’s a semi cinematic experience. I was in complete awe at how beautiful the post apocalyptic wasteland looked.
3. That first time logging into WoW original back when it first released. So much to explore and experience it felt absolutely amazing to be a part of

Many years ago, my 2 kids an me playing multiplayer COD 2, I had 3 networked PCs we went in the map and worked together, I was in the first floor laying down with my sniper rifle, the kids were covering the stairs behind me, we owned that map, working together it was an amazing and thrilling experience for all of us, we talked about it for ages afterwards and was the started of many great COD multiplayer sessions for us.

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.

I get very into games so it's really hard to pick. But the longest lasting impact IRL was when Mass Effect 2 gave me a revelation on human relationships.

I never understood cheating on your partner. I just didn't get it. I mean if you want to be with someone else, just leave. Shitty people who just don't care, I get that, but normal people, not at all. I could kinda wrap my head around it if alcohol was involved, or staying because of kids. Other than that nah.

Now I play RPGs as if I was actually going to make those decisions. So I get even more into them than others. Liara wasn't a love interest and she was who I originally went with in the first one. I was bored without the cute interactions with her, so I started talking to the other females on the ship. But they weren't Liara. Each one had something I found similar to her. It got to the point where Jack asked me if I was talking to anyone else. I didn't want to hurt her so I said no. And then Tali asked me the same thing. But better her and Jack, I wanted her. So I said no.

I honestly didn't realize I was seriously leading them on until I messed it up and they both were mad at me. Then it clicked. Cheating is impulsive because you are looking for someone else. Sometimes you don't realize you've set yourself up until it's too late. 🤯

Outer Wilds, like all of it. Falling into the black hole made me actually scream in terror, then shiver for how small being away from the solar system makes you feel. Also the quantum moon, and that ending holy fuck

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.

X-COM (from the 90's, not the remake):

I totally sucked at playing X-COM and died a lot, until I learned about real world squad tactics.

In X-COM, the members of your team can get scared/lose it, and behave in random ways like throwing away their weapons/fleeing the fight or just going berserk and shooting around.

So, after I improved my game with my newly acquainted knowledge of real world squad tactics, I had a terror mission. Terror missions are missions, where the aliens attack and which are harder than the other missions.

I managed to survive the load out from the helicopter and kill nearly every alien on first contact, thanks to very careful and orchestrated movement of my squad.

There was one alien left, I tried to shoot it several times from a distance, and of course (this being X-COM after all), all of my shoots missed...

... THE ALIEN STRESSED OUT AND BERSERKED...

I didn't even know that it was possible. After weeks of loosing and frustration, this one moment is the most satisfying moment of my entire gaming history (more than 30 years now).

Haven't found any modern game, where this would be even possible!

Mandatory link to OpenXcom

Far cry 5. Spoilers ahead and if you have yet to play it I highly recommend you experience this firsthand rather than reading it here.

So each zone had its own gimmick. The zone lead by the super militant guy had a trippy segment where you basically ran an obstacle course while shooting people. He yelled at you to go faster and every iteration started the same as the last ones but got longer. They were also actually timed. Hallucinations were a big part of the game, and this was clearly one, so I didn't really think much of it. I started breezing though it trying to get good times. At the very end of the last run was a lone person standing in a room. I snapped off the quickest headshot on him and was pretty happy about it, only to have the following scene reveal that I just fucking domed the leader of the resistance that I was helping. I didn't even know if I could've discerned who it was during the sequence because I didn't even look before shooting.

It tripped me out so hard because generally when games take away player agency, there's a disconnect between the player and character. Like "welp my character is brainwashed so I gotta do bad things now." But in this case, they genuinely got me, the player, to willfully do their bidding by pushing all the right buttons in my head. I had to pause to appreciate his hard I got got.

My number 2 would be project wingman. Wasn't expecting much from the story but I nearly cried at the end.

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

I killed an ODST for his sniper. Then I realized he probably had a family and reloaded the checkpoint. Never hurt a human npc in Halo ever again.

SOMA left me questioning my own consciousness, what it is to be human, and loneliness.

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...

Red dead redemption 2 for sure. It's hard to pick because there are a lot of profound experiences in that game. The part where Arthur is riding back after Guarma when d'angelo starts playing definitely stands out. It just made me think about how some people just get trapped in these shitty situations that are just tragic. It's easy to say what you would / wouldn't do in that situation but the gang were Arthur's family and it's not that easy to just walk away from the only community you have and the only life you've ever known.

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 was 13 a friend of mine and I spent the whole summer after swimming at the trailer park pool playing Super Mario 3 until we beat it. We did a deep study of the game together and beat it together. First platform I ever beat and first gay sex I ever had to help me out in the orientation department. 1988 was a nice year for me. I haven't lived in a trailer park ever since, but the community swimming pool was nice.

For me, it was the surprise song in Dragon Age Inquisition, when they performed "The Dawn Will Come."

You'd just had a huge battle, the hero was a low point, and they break out into this... thing. It's stunning and so well done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsxE0dwLICU

WoW: ill never forget it. This was BC expansion and as a Druid I had just recently unlocked flight as part of a huge questline. I was hopping around mining nodes farming for my Jeweler profession when I encountered a Druid nightelf. They had the upgraded bird form (320% speed vs 60%). I must have pissed this guy off or he was bored but he was just stalking me. Eventually he starts fighting me and we had a substantial level difference. I think he was 70 and I was 60. He was going to kill me but eventually I escaped out of combat into bird form. Of course he's several times faster than I am. I had a sliver of health and a single moonfire would've killed me. I am just holding down space bar.. Climbing into the sky. He fires off his moon fire. It should have killed me, but as luck would have it my headpiece gem had a 1% chance to reflect a spell. I had to read the combat logs to figure out what happened, but the spell hit him. The damage caused him to lose bird form and as he was now in combat he plummeted to his death. I landed. Danced around his corpse and went on my way. I could not believe what had just happened.

0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.

I had to stare at the window for an hour afterwards.

Dark Souls

Not a specific moment but there's been plenty of essays written on how that game has enabled people to lift themselves out of dark places in their lives. There's a catharsis in the repetitive nature of the game and perseverance to "git gud".

I remember the first mission of hotline Miami. You take the phone call and learn that you are supposed to kill some people. You learn how to use your guns. You kill a bunch of baddies, quite badass. Then at the end of the mission, the screen starts swaying more than usually, and the protagonist vomits in an alley. Of course, he just killed for the first time, overwhelming. Makes him quite human, more than many other protagonists, despite the pixel art style.

To me it's at the end of MGS snake eater, when the boss explains the purpose of a soldier, and their disposable nature, and how war is nothing but one big crime against humanity that everyone waves away as necessary to complete a selfish goal.

Also that scene in MGS 2 where the A.I psychologically tortures Raiden and essentially predicts where we're at now in 2023 with a.i, the internet, social media, war and propaganda fueled divisions.

Journey for PS3 and PS4. Love. Peaceful. Serenity.

It wasn't exactly profound so much as it was a sudden appreciation for just how deep the game had gotten its hooks in me.

The end of Persona 5.

I was sad because it was over, but not just because I liked the game, I've experienced that before with plenty of others. What I felt at the end of that game was something I'd never felt playing a video game before, and that was a sense of loss. I didn't just want to play more of the game, I wanted to spend more time with these characters. I'd gotten so attached to them, and so into the life sim aspect, that when the credits rolled, it felt a little like I lost my friends.

Now granted this was during covid, and I was quarantined alone, having not been able to see my actual friends in months. Burning through Persona 5 became my primary unwinding activity for a few months, and as I got deeper into it, I spent solid days with it. So it's fair to say I was in a very susceptible state of mind to attach myself to some characters.

But even without that, I think that game really hit something special for me that made me temporarily forget these weren't real people, and for a fleeting moment, I felt a profound sadness at their absence

At least two very different for me:

Myst: I was very small when I played it so maybe I missed some slightly hidden warnings or foreshadowing. But basically during the whole game two brothers that are trapped in two magical books claims that the other brother is evil and trapper him in this books.

It looks like the only way to progress in the game is to trust one of them and go do the quests they are asking in order to free them.

I thought I was smart and did everytime both quests for each of them, my plan was to save before the final quest of one and check if is the "good" one, otherwise reload and finish the last quest of the other.

I finish one guy. cue evil laughter I finish trapped in the book and the evil brother laugh that he managed to lie to me for this whole time. Fine, let's reload 5 minutes ago and free the other one. another evil laughter basically same thing happen with the other ... wtf ? There is no good ending to this game ??

Turned out there was the dad of this two also trapped in another book that was hidden somewhere else, he was the real good guy and lead to the good ending.

So: don't trust anyone, always look for more options than the two obvious choices that are only an illusion of free will. Lesson learned at a young age.

Other one that is more coming from the community than the game itself: world of Warcraft (vanilla, when it get out), more specifically beating the end boss of the latest raid for the first time. Especially when you are the raid leader. It give such a satisfaction and sensation of fulfilment.

There are a lot of games that require a lot more personnal skill than WoW to beat a boss. But getting 40 people to be ready, prepared, have to good class and good equipment, and play together for hours in order to achieve this common goal is incredible.

I think I can honestly say that Mass Effect changed my life.

Before Mass Effect, I used to be more of a casual gamer; The Sims games and some old school platformers, but nothing really significant.

Mass Effect was the first time I became wholly immersed in a game’s story and characters that I learned everything there was to actually playing the game well. Post-Mass Effect, I feel like an actual gamer. Through it, I started to appreciate shooters and full RPGs, and I really dove into the gaming industry as a whole.

If I had to pinpoint some specific moments, I think those would have been the ability to move from friends to lovers for my Shepard and Garrus in ME2 and my Shepard standing tall and fighting hard in her last moments with the Destroy ending in ME3. I literally cry multiple times throughout ME3 even though I’ve played it a million times, and I enjoy the whole story so much that I’m recording my gameplay and editing into a sort of Mass Effect “show” so I can enjoy the story while I’m just lounging or hop in quickly even if I’m in the midst of playing something else.

Before ME, I would never have considered myself a gaming fan at all, and now there’s ME gear, fanart, cosplay items, and such every few feet in my house. 😅

I’ll add that the “big reveal” in KotOR made me put down the controller and stand outside on the patio for a moment because I was so shocked, but Mass Effect is like amped up KotOR, so I’ll lump them all together.

The kaitco of today is definitely a different person than the kaitco who hadn’t played Mass Effect, and I love the series for that.

… 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.

The final ending of Nier: Automata.

That game was all about a lonely world and then turned it around at very end. It’s not exactly hard to ask for help, but sometimes someone turns to you to ask if you need it. And even in a lonely time, it’s very nice, touching even, to think about someone reaching out to help.

Of course then, after accepting the help, I made the choice to offer myself to someone’s aid.

My realization came from DDLC. I learned about what other people can feel after you've left

Homeworld mission three. Adagio for Strings still gives me chills because of that game. That was when teenage me realized videogames could be art.