On May 1, thousands of workers, students and families are marching around the United States as part of the May Day Strong movement, boycotting work, school and shopping in one of the biggest May Day and International Worker's Day demonstrations in years, per the Guardian. The movement includes labor unions, immigrants' rights groups and political organizations across the country.
Video games have been here before. Long before today’s protests, some of gaming’s greatest titles were already quietly asking questions about power, labor and what people do when the system stops working for them. If you’re home today and want to channel the energy of the moment into something interactive, or if you just want to understand what all those signs are really about, here are five games that get it.
Final Fantasy VII
In Final Fantasy VII, a corporation controls the planet’s energy. The rich live above a literal plate in gleaming towers with clean air and city lights. Everyone else lives in the dark below it, breathing the runoff. AVALANCHE, the scrappy resistance group you join, tried writing letters, organizing and marching before they ever picked up a weapon. Shinra crushed them every time, because Shinra owns the systems that were supposed to hold Shinra accountable. Final Fantasy VII doesn’t ask you to find the subtext. It puts it directly in the dialogue. One of the most quietly radical mainstream games ever made, and it’s been hiding in plain sight since 1997.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Hardspace: Shipbreaker opens with your character already $1.2 billion in debt to the Lynx corporation, a debt you took on just to be allowed to work. You spend your shifts cutting apart old spaceships with a plasma cutter to pay it off, knowing mathematically that you never actually will. It is one of the most on-the-nose labor allegory in gaming history, and it is also a genuinely fantastic, meditative experience. The union storyline that unfolds across the campaign, as your coworkers debate whether to organize, and Lynx responds exactly how you’d expect, is quietly one of the most moving things in recent gaming.
Disco Elysium
Set in the wreckage of a failed communist revolution, Disco Elysium is one of the most politically literate games ever made. It doesn’t preach or offer easy answers. It asks hard questions about ideology, failure, complicity, and what happens to people who believed in something that didn’t work out. Your character is a detective investigating a murder in a city still raw from the last time someone tried to change things. Every political perspective gets its moment. None of them are let off the hook.
Papers, Please
In Papers, Please, You are a border inspector for a fictional authoritarian state. Your job is to check documents. Your family will go hungry if you don’t check enough documents quickly enough. The game slowly, methodically makes you complicit in a system of oppression, not through any dramatic villain turn, but through exhaustion, economic pressure and the grinding reality that resistance has a cost your family will pay. It is ninety minutes of gameplay that will make you think about how ordinary people end up inside unjust systems for the rest of the day.
Cyberpunk 2077
Strip away the neon and the gunfights and Cyberpunk 2077 is a story about what happens when workers’ rights are stripped completely and permanently. Night City is a place where corporations have replaced governments, healthcare is a subscription, and your body is company property the moment you let them augment it. It is a cautionary tale dressed as a power fantasy, and the fact that it’s thrilling to play almost makes it worse.