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RE: What becoming a brutal dictator can tell us about living
Statism vs anarchism is an incomplete dichotomy, but regardless, you suggest that because anarchism appears unrealistic to you that it cannot oppose statism; that's not true.
There's some truth to the idea that we can cynically use ideology as simply a means to power, but it's a mistake to only consider human action in terms of power, there are other dimensions to social life.
Really my question in this series of posts however is: do these games support the status quo, and if so in what ways. Can they be tools to question the structure of things? What do they teach us?
I'm not ready to accept your fatalistic point of view.
What is status quo? The world is always changing. What's status quo now was new and flashy decades ago. There are also some things that stay status quo forever. We will always be carbon based life forms. Who decides which status quo is good or bad?
Games allow you to experiment with possibilities in a structured sandbox. The framework of the sandbox contains the bias of the programmer, but the gamer also has a large degree of freedom. Then throw in the meta question: Do you play by the rules of the game or do you exploit bugs or even write your own mods and hacks? Any game can be hacked, but so far, nobody is so great of a lifehacker to cheat death in real life.