In the modern era, it is extremely important to, at the very least, understand what you’re watching or listening to though not many people are able to effectively demonstrate this skill, or they completely ignore it like gamers. This results in the chronic misunderstanding of politics in video games. For the sake of expediency, we’ll limit our discussion to Halo and Metal Gear Solid. Before getting into these titles, the first thing to establish is the current stance gamers take towards politics in their games, and what they define as something political within said game. Gamers have a very well documented dislike of political topics within their games, being very outspoken about how modern game companies try to “push an agenda” on them. This line of thinking immediately falls flat when you look at what they consider to be politics within a game. Most of the time when gamers scream and shout about not wanting politics in their video games it is when a minority receives representation in said title or when it acknowledges one. These same kinds of gamers will then turn around and praise games from the past before everything was “woke”. All of which have political subtext or messaging within them

         The Metal Gear Solid (MGS) games, created by Hideo Kojima, are a very good example of how this “don’t make video games political” movement fails almost immediately. There is almost always something actually political the MGS games have to comment on, in MGS: PeaceWalker, you work alongside one of the leaders of the sandinistas to fight against the main antagonist, Hot Coldman who is a CIA agent. There is also the heavy criticism of nuclear weapons present in all the games, in Metal Gear Rising, which is  the most vocally anti war on terror. There  is a lot MGS  has to say that just goes ignored by gamers, wanting to make a conservative grift for profit; it shows that video games have almost always been political as the first MGS Game was created in 1987. To this day MGS is never usually brought up to criticize politics within games even though it is one of the most overtly political games of all time. 

        Off the cuff, Halo comes off as pretty apolitical, just about killing aliens. Though recently due to one of the original Halo composers starting a congressional campaign run, there has been a new discourse from people trying to prove where Halo falls on the political compass.  There are religious themes in the games seen by the names of different items, structures or factions in the universe like the covenant, the ark, or the Halo rings  which is why online conservatives try to use these names to prove it is right wing since most conservatives in America are christian. However, an actual fan of the franchise can poke these arguments apart very easily. The covenant was a genocidal collective of aliens led by a false religion that viewed humans as abominations that needed to be cleansed, resulting in their genocidal crusade against humanity. This can very easily be interpreted as a criticism of radical religious movements including the very same ones some conservatives believe in. 

       The fact that they are trying to prove Halo is right wing is weird, considering the stance that most gamers have regarding political topics in their games. The truth is that most gamers tend to lean conservative politically.  Which proves Gamers never hated politics in their games, they just disliked any viewpoints that questioned their own. I know a lot of this because I was one of these people. I used to mindlessly consume content created by grifting hacks, trying to brainwash me to make a quick buck and for a while they succeeded. In the end though, I got out of it. That’s why understanding the content you’re consuming is so important; you can cry and sob about how video games should be an escape all you want but realistically that desire is idiotic. Art will always be political, books, tv, video games, all of fiction. There will always be an underlying message being spoken by that media. to push a movement called: “video games shouldn’t be political” is frankly a hypocritical and mindless belief, that all games should be just pure slop created to entertain  fantasies and as shown by the Halo discourse it seems that gamers don’t have a problem when it comes to politicizing video games if it’s their own beliefs. I want anyone reading this to realize how important it is to understand the topics presented by different media, especially video games as by now it’s as big or even bigger than the movie industry, which in our current society, doesn’t seem all that encouraged anymore.