I just want to float through existence as a pure essence, interacting with other pure essences.
That's basically what Human Instrumentality was, and the point about why that was bad was that you may not actually like who you "really are", or who other people are, and they still may not actually like you.
All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view.
This explains why I'm terrible at writing anything, or coming up with good overarching plots whenever I want to run a TTRPG. Because I don't really understand other people very well.
You're not wrong, the entire point of Marxist Internationalism & Solidarity is precisely to combat that tendency. In short, this is not really a counter-argument to Marxism, precisely because the vast majority of Marxist theory (that written between the Revolutions of 1848, and the revolutions in Russia & China) are written in exactly that context, and exists to address & make the argument to workers why that's a bad idea for them to do.
Of course getting people to accept & understand that is harder than just saying it; but the point is that this isn't something Marxists are unawares of. If you are interested in further (digestable) info on the topic I would suggest the youtube channels Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy, Hakim, Yugopnik & Second Thought.
That's a bit of a non-sequitur in this instance don't you think? We're not talking about what the name of a place is, but rather how the two countries' citizenry feel about their respective governments.
My issue with going back to old TW, is that while I will agree that there are certain things that feel better about how it plays, and settlements feel like actual places instead of just production hubs; almost every faction feels basically identical in how they play with only the most marginal possible variations in roster. This is less true in Rome 1 of course, but it's especially so in Med2, and Shogun 2, even though I do still like both those games.
TWWH, I believe, is for all it's flaws a genuine advancement in design, because it gave CA license to experiment with hard asymmetries between faction rosters & campaign mechanics.
The first time I played a half-life game was back when The Orange Box came out & I had the same opinion back then as I do now.
I mean, my understanding is that that's deliberate. You're not really supposed to be able to just sweep bad inputs under the rug with cancels & stuff. Sometimes, you just make the wrong call & get your ass kicked because of it.
Why do you have to jiggle the control stick in order to detach parts from constructs.
Because 
TBH, BoTW is probably the first Zelda game I didn't finish just because I got bored of it, more than because of getting stuck on something & not wanting to look up a guide.
I appreciate the desire to want to replicate the experience of exploring your local town/countryside as a kid in a videogame, but maybe that's something kids should just be allowed to do IRL, and you should instead make interesting videogames as videogames.
I get your point about warfare being incredibly simplified in HoI4 v HoI3, however, I think that virtually everything else about HoI3 is borderline unplayable due to how many factors of high-level industrial economy it is trying to simulate. And I say it's unplayable, mainly because it's unreadable. I, as a new player, have no real way to figure out at a glance what effect any given action I take is going to have. And that makes it both harder to learn at all, and makes me not want to bother trying.
I don't like Half-Life in general, because I think the gamefeel is floaty & wrong.
I shave most days out of the week, but I am probably spiritually a neckbeard, yeah.