Modern game design focuses on player freedom, player choice, and making the emotional responses of the player part of the interactive experience. A good game doesn't push you toward a particular viewpoint. A good game allows you to decide that viewpoint for yourself interactively. This means that we can't assume video games cultivate perceptions of social reality the same way that television does: video games hinge on a give and take between player attitudes and messages delivered by the game. Player choice short circuits cultivation theory because the player, to an extent, creates his or her own meaning.

True player choice allows the player the option to do things that are morally wrong. However, if a player doesn't think it's fun to act like a jerk in a game, they're not going to. There is huge debate in video games about how real choice versus perceived choice works. Some believe that creating consequences for particular behaviours is not ideal because then players make choices based on desired results, not raw morality. Other developers believe that choices are meaningless if they result in no impact on the game world or the player's experience. It's complex game design philosophy that doesn't exist in any other entertainment medium.

The experience of playing a game and the experience of watching a game aren't the same thing, which undermines gaze theory - the idea that camera angles simulate the distinctly gendered perspective and experience of a viewer.

A TV viewer feels no responsibility for the characters in a show. In a game, I feel greater responsibility for not harming the character I'm controlling, and this leads to very different reactions between player and viewer. For instance, we've all seen scenes in TV shows where a character is beaten to bloody death with a golf club, but it's a totally different experience for a player to be forced to beat Andrew Ryan to death with a golf club on command in Bioshock. Ryan's words might actually summarize the difference: "A man chooses. A slave obeys." But a slave also has no accountability for what they do. Gaze theory requires the audience to be a spectator. In video games, the player is a participant. This doesn't mean that a participant is not a spectator as well. It just means, without getting technical, that they're a spectator and more, which changes the variables significantly.

A game that utilized this principle of participation with accountability to maximum impact is the Minority Media puzzle adventure game Papo & Yo. Papo & Yo doesn't use a health bar. The main character, a little boy named Quico, can't "die" in game. But once I realized that the game is a metaphor for child abuse by an addict parent, I became highly invested in minimizing the amount of damage Quico took. I was hyper-aware that I could control Quico's safety as a player, but Quico could not control it as a character. The in-game consequence was emotional, not literal. This is why Minority Media calls their products empathy games.

Fortunately, Feminist Frequency has Papo & Yo on their list of recommended games, even though it's a story about a boy and his father with only one mystical female character who exists only to further the story of the male protagonist. It would be nice if Feminist Frequency was equally forgiving with other games that attempt to make a player feel kinder things as well. Assassins Creed's anti-racism and anti-sexism messages deserve kudos, as does Dishonored's anti-violence moral. Watch_Dogs also shows human trafficking to be a really bad thing. However, all these games were criticized by Feminist Frequency for promoting sexism using imagery pulled out of the context of the games.

To recap (because this stuff is confusing) video games give a player agency in fictional realities in a way that TV shows don't provide a viewer. As a TV viewer, you feel bad when a child is abused. When you are given control of an abused child in a video game, you feel responsibility and guilt for failing to protect that child. This player agency wreaks havoc on traditional cultivation theory: instead of a passive viewer, the player is an actor that participates in choices. When those choices are denied the player, they must be denied very deliberately. As players in video games, we become defined and self-define by these choices, and struggle with frustration when we're forced into things we don't want to do. For instance, Assassins Creed Rogue forces the player to assassinate a popular character as a way of encouraging the player to question the morality of the Assassin/Templar binary. It's gut-wrenching, reluctant gameplay, and it's supposed to be.