Consider this: you're a young author who wants to talk about how the current political/economic systems governing your life are awesome/terrible/the jews fault. You need a quick shorthand allegory that your reader's are intimately familiar with, because you don't want to spend forever doing hard boring things like worldbuilding and lore when you could be focusing on something more profitable like character design and power fantasy wish fulfillment.
Video games have clear rules (even if they are arbitrary) and are ostensibly meritocratic- things we attribute to life under neoliberal capitalism that isn't necessarily true. When the genre is played straight, it serves as an idealistic, escapist take on what life should be like, and when the genre is played subversive it serves as an ideological criticism (either left or right) of our current material conditions.
Why should we be surprised that many people, bereft of any ideological framework, grasp onto something easy to understand?
Consider this: you're a young author who wants to talk about how the current political/economic systems governing your life are awesome/terrible/the jews fault. You need a quick shorthand allegory that your reader's are intimately familiar with, because you don't want to spend forever doing hard boring things like worldbuilding and lore when you could be focusing on something more profitable like character design and power fantasy wish fulfillment.
Video games have clear rules (even if they are arbitrary) and are ostensibly meritocratic- things we attribute to life under neoliberal capitalism that isn't necessarily true. When the genre is played straight, it serves as an idealistic, escapist take on what life should be like, and when the genre is played subversive it serves as an ideological criticism (either left or right) of our current material conditions.
Why should we be surprised that many people, bereft of any ideological framework, grasp onto something easy to understand?