Baldur's Gate 3. Karlach's reaction once you kill Gortash. One of the few times I've ever really respected a videogame's writing and voice acting on a serious level.

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. 🤯

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

In Rain World interacting with Moon especially if you don't know what is going on then go back once you can communicate with her.

It wasn't super meaningful from a narrative perspective, but no one who played Unreal when it was new is likely to forget that first step off the Vortex Riker onto Na Pali. Sure, there had been games like Myst, but this not only elevated how beautiful games can be, but put the player right in the middle of it like nothing else did. Not an easy moment to recreate. To be honest, that game plus UT2003/04 had some of the best graphics in the business, from both the technical and design standpoints.

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".

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

I'm at probably playthrough #4 of The Witcher 3, and the moment when Ciri wakes up still brings me to daddy tears.

Either playing Beat saber on acid or finishing MGS4.

OneShot. The main story does something interesting early on to draw you in, then with the post game content I have just never felt so connected to a game. it's hard to describe without spoilers. I started the game in the evening then there I was at like 2am "I can't sleep until this world is free". you just really feel like you personally have a part in the story.

I think it was playing Golden Sun 2, when it is revealed that the world is slowly ending and that Saturas and Menardi were trying to save it.

It made me realise that real villains are just people doing what they believe to be right, whose priorities are different than your own. We're all trying to live a "good" life in the end, and a lot of things are more easily forgiven in that light, but that doesn't mean we'll all get along either, because we're all the villain in someone's story!

When I started playing Horizon zero dawn, for first dozen hours I was in the state that fears the machines and sneaks everywhere.

Aloy's voice still terrifies me, I wish there was an option to turn off her random monologues.

Tackling a hard Souls' boss is always a roller coaster of emotion. Usually it's a bunch of anger, some despair, some hope, and ultimately victory. So cathartic.

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

During the game awards last year, there was a virtual concert announced in the game Sky: Children of the Light. It started immediately after the awards ended. I'd never played this game before that night. I loaded it up and joined something like 1000 other people in a virtual stadium around the artist in the center. It then teleported you outside where you followed her around, floating through landscapes, the clouds, etc while the concert continued. It was a surreal moment and I've experienced nothing like it before or since. It was way different from an IRL concert or a simple video streamed to my computer. It's hard to describe.

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.

Night in the Woods. Start to finish. It has so many moments where you just pause and go "....shit." It's the most perfect game ever made.

Also FF7. White teenage boy complex with Aeris for sure, but also blowing up oil facilities, killing CEOs, and Red XIII's story. It's wild to me the themes that this game gets across in Discs 1-2.

Modern Warfare 2 (the first one). When you're climbing the ice wall and you fall and get caught, the level of detail on the face was astounding to kid me. It was like watching something in real life to me.

Probably helped that it was off of my sister's high def TV.

Fallout 3, The Pitt DLC. Deciding whether to take the baby.

Spoilers for Dragon Quest 11

I've played a lot of Dragon Quest games over the years so I'm used to the mostly cheerful games.

In Dragon Quest 11 one of your party members dies to save you so that you can make another attempt to save the world after you fail. Their death is fairly well handled by the party and the party had been friends for awhile by that point.

She willing sacrificed herself to save you and the rest of the party after you fail at saving the world because she believes that you can still do it. She believes that you can still win if you have another shot.

Her sister in the party comes to accept her death and uses it as a driving force to push harder to save the world with you.

The party grieves for her.

At the end of Act 2 though the story undermines it IMO by allowing you to head back in time to change things to save her and the world if you push hard enough, but by heading back in time you erase the future that you built with your party. All that build up, all the character growth, all that copping with the loss and unification that comes from it all. You can change it.

To me it felt like as a player I was betrayed by the story. I felt that her sacrifice made the story that much better. Her sacrifice made the story less "I need to save the world because it's my destiny," and changed it into, "I need to save the world because if I don't than my friend died for nothing." By going back in time and changing things you end the world as it is.

No one else would remember what you did if you succeeded, only you would remember how things were. If you failed then the world would be trapped in a cycle of darkness.

To me it felt wrong to do that, so that's where I stopped. I technically never finished the game but honestly I feel by not making that choice to go back in time that I got the better ending.

Silly I know but I feel that by destroying the timeline as it stood was worse than what the Dark One had done in destroying so much the first go around. Because they only destroyed a small chunk in comparison as you would be destroying literally everything just for the chance to bring that party member back.

Edit: Basically in that moment where they ask you to go back in time (which they insist you do) they are asking you to become the villain of that entire timeline for selfish purposes. That moment when you say yes is how Act 3 starts. In that moment by saying yes, you are no longer the hero. You are no longer the good guy. You no longer saved the world. You destroyed it because you wanted to.

Two come to mind. The first was when I was about 6 years old and walked in on my older brother playing Sim City 2000 on our family computer. It was the first time I had seen a video game of any kind. Before that, I thought computers were just boring machines for doing adult work. Seeing him playing a game on there changed my life, I've been a PC gamer ever since.

The second was when I beat Super Mario Bros on GameBoy. It was the first game I've ever beat fully and it was an incredible feeling. Took me almost a year to do, incredible grind at that age.

There was nothing quite as intense as a ServerSmash in Planetside 2. Which means ~800 people doing joint ops on a single map and everything is highly coordinated.
I think blob fights in EVE are even larger, but this was a first person shooter and also rather arcadey, not a thousand spreadsheets fighting at a server tick rate of 1 ^^

Destiny 2, the death of Caide-6. I was pissed and wanted to avenge him so much.

He was such a beloved character by the whole community that Bungie is bringing him back from the dead (somehow) for the final chapter of the game story.

For me, that moment was in Kingdom Hearts 2. I hadn't played the first game (or the second game) and didn't really understand the concept of sequels that continued a story. My parents had gotten me the game probably because it had Disney characters in it. But this moment stuck with me nonetheless.

It was the game's first boss fight, the Twilight Thorn. Everything leading up to it and the fight itself was just utter cinematography to my young eyes. I wasn't even able to actually beat the fight (and I was the older brother, so I didn't have anyone to help). But it stuck with me for years. I ended up getting a PS4, the first console I bought with my own money, for the sole reason of playing the Kingdom Hearts collections.

Genshin Impact had an event where you had to deliver food to customers. The customers would be in the most out of the way places, and if you managed to find them, they would reject the food for the stupidest reasons. Many players complained about the difficulty, but maybe it was a commentary on how delivery ~~boys~~ partners are treated.

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.

Stray. Honestly the entire game.

I am a cat dad to 3 cats and I rescue anywhere from 1 - 5 alley cats every year. I take them in, clean them up, get them spay/neuter and their vaccines and find them homes.

That game captures cats so incredibly well. The entire game was a pleasure, but there are a few moments that stick out to me.

Spoilers

At the beginning when he falls and is separated from his friends.

The way that the guardians react to him.

The desperation of being so incredibly close to freeing them and so nearly being thwarted.

But most of all, when his friend dies and when the ceiling opens.

And last but not least, at the very end he sniffs the air and smells his friends.

So some god amongst men on YouTube did the painstaking work of figuring out where stray fell, and where he exited and found that stray exited only a 20 second walk from where his home was, and towards his home is the direction he took at the end (but the game doesn't tell you this).

That game was the most wonderful and amazing experience I have had in a game since I can remember. I cannot recommend it enough.

The first season of telltale the walking dead. The ending with Lee and Clementine had my newly Dad self crying.

The Stanley Parable was a great exploration of the nature of free will. It was a game that made me think about the nature of the relationship between me and the creator of the game.