The videogame Bafta award ceremony is tomorrow night – not a set of awards that's likely to make the front pages, or even the arts pages, even though videogames are now the biggest entertainment industry in the world. But this year's frontrunner for best game – Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood – has used this position under the cultural radar to good effect, allowing it to include an electrifying narrative about modern-day politics.

AC:B leads the Bafta field with seven nominations. The game has sold more than 6.5 million copies – the Assassin's Creed series has sold more than 26 million. But where AC:B really stands out is in the quality and intelligence of the writing.

Set in Renaissance Rome, it goes out of its way to educate about the historical period and setting. For example, Machiavelli appears and discusses his philosophical concept of "virtu" – the qualities needed to be a leader – with the hero Ezio. And even though the characterisation of Caterina Sforza, the "tiger of Forli", daughter of the Duke of Milan, is a little thin, her placement – imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo by the Borgias – is perfectly historically accurate. The game has inspired many players to learn more about Renaissance Italy and for an action adventure game, a genre often condemned in the mainstream press as "mindless", AC:B is literate and often thoughtful.

The game also contains a hidden modern-day story that is even more sharply written. Fragments of fictional memos, audio recordings and letters suggest that key members of the US government – including former president George W Bush and former vice-president Dick Cheney – deliberately manipulated the American people using consumer capitalism and invented wars.

The story plays out as a dramatised version of Shock Doctrine for the videogame player, or an extreme version of the governmental machinations suggested by Adam Curtis's documentary The Century of the Self. AC:B writer Jeffrey Yohalem previously worked on The Daily Show, the satirical leftwing US news programme credited with getting a younger audience interested in politics.

Yohalem has said he wanted to make "a videogame that was talking about modern-day politics, instead of all these cheesy stories that pretend to be about reality but use fake names in different time periods". AC:B makes a series of serious political points. It's perhaps the first, certainly the most mainstream, videogame to do so, but one hopes it won't be the last.