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

I have a lot of these moments but I’ll pick my top ones.

Crystalis on the NES. When the town of Shyron gets destroyed and characters you know and care about are killed. Left me in shock as a 10 year old kid. And the temple music when you enter the pyramid is hauntingly beautiful too. I hum that tune to my kids as a lullaby.

Mass Effect 1. Exploring the planets left me in awe. For the time, the atmosphere and lore was detailed, rich, and very well thought out. Then facing down a reaper in the third game, it all made me feel so small.

FF7. Aerith getting killed took me by complete surprise. My brother and I were stunned for a while. Just sat there pondering wether it was real or not.

Minecraft back in beta. The world was just so impossibly huge and you’re all alone with your creations. Left me feeling very small. The more I built, the emptier it felt.

Finally, Mad Max on the PS4. The first time I got hit by a storm I was in awe. The world is just so well built and detailed. The whole game/movie universe is filled with amazing culture that’s just done really, really well.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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…

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.

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.

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.

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

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