Leftist Video Games
Socialist, Marxist, Anarchist, Communist or otherwise Anti-Capitalist video games.
25 Games
You find rich people hiding in their little mansions and drop chandeliers on their little heads until they pop.
Budget Disco, with robots.
A true Marxist game. Mike Davis meets FF7 meets Snatcher. Probably the best game that will ever be made about the petroleum industry.
The Big Communism Builder has returned.
Some of the steely determined eco-terrorist stuff has been sanded down, but this is still a shockingly anti-capitalist game to release in the 2020s.
American Decay.
The devs are cool socialists. I like them.
A game about the importance of unions in the 22nd century. A game about gay space communism.
The devs are cool socialists. I like them.
I suppose I'd call NieR's politics "humanist" instead of socialist, but there's enough overlap and this game has enough poli-sci cred to skate by, I think.
No game has ever really captured the feel of post-industrialism in the rust belt like this. It has other strengths and other weaknesses, but that's the one I keep coming back to.
Zaire. Angola. Afghanistan. Guantanamo Bay. The height of the Cold War. NATO. I shouldn't have to go on.
A broader, dumber version of the original game in every respect, but since basically every other game ever made is also broader and dumber than the first Deus Ex, that's OK.
Another game broad enough to contain multiple political ideologies. It's not my fault that the anarchist run is the most interesting by far.
This is a big budget game released in the United States that openly praises Che Guevara. It had commercials and everything. The main bad guy works for the CIA. Come on, now.
Viva la revolution
The epitome of a mid 2000s corporate anti-corporatism. Revolution as a downloadable character skin. Dissident theme DLC packs. But still, there's some heart here.
The least interesting core MGS game from most perspectives, but not this one. Openly interrogates the US' role in the middle east, and the long term costs of colonial expansion in the global south.
Sure, every GTA is critical of the American experiment. This is the only one that feels truly angry at it, however. It's hard to think of any game on this list that has more disdain for consumerism.
Ken Levine is likely more of a centrist, but no game that puts this much effort into digging up Ayn Rand's corpse and shoving it into an industrial thresher can fare too poorly on this list.
The least explicitly political of the main MGS series, but still certainly a game that loves pacifism and anti-colonialism.
Yes, MGS2 is mostly a condemnation of the internet age. There is still plenty of anti-Americanism in there. Remember who the Patriots are implied to be, after all.
I can see how people from the right might disagree with this one, but if nothing else, Deus Ex is politically deep and intricate enough to hold multiple political viewpoints simultaneously.
Certainly not the most explicit anti-American game of Kojima's career, but it his anti-war, anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist messaging really started to coalesce here.
This is a game where the protagonists are all members of an eco-terrorist cell and the antagonists are all part of a hyper industrialist conglomerate. I don't know how much more specific it can get.
