That's not my description of conservatism. Individualism is not inherently conservative, it does not have to be the status quo, it just is within the current circumstances of western society.
That depends entirely on what you mean by "individualism", what your point of reference is and whose opinion you take as indicative of "Western society".
You are skipping my actual rebuttals every time. I understand not every game has a conservative premise, and you're ignoring that. I made the point that the world trying to be regained in both those games is the real world status quo, and now you've ignored that.
Which real world status quo?
The status quo of the real world is that said world is constantly changing. That has been the status quo for hundreds of years, if not forever. The real political questions are not whether change should happen, as if we could stop it even if we wanted to, but what should change and how.
Games typically do not offer the kind of explicit political endorsement you seem to be suggesting. Gordon Freeman isn't really fighting
for anything, he's fighting against the Combine. The world that might hypothetically come about through his actions is not really important because it's not part of the story, but even given how little it's dealt with it's also clearly not just our world. In the narrative of Half Life, our world failed catastrophically. It surrendered to the Combine after failing to offer any meaningful resistance. Our world also doesn't have Vortigaunts living in it, or physics-breaking gravity guns, or teleportation machines. Whatever postcolonial order the human resistance is trying to create in Half Life is different than and arguably
better than our world.
However, this is still only surface level, diegetic stuff. The conflicts in video games, while fictional, are often representative of real conflicts both between and within real world societies. Rapture may be a fictional underwater city, but it is based on a philosophy and political theory (a very
individualistic philosophy and political theory) that many people in "Western society" subscribe to. The implicit critique within bioshock is aimed squarely at a part of our own society, at part of the existing "status quo". Because again, the status quo of our society is not a single monolithic consensus. Our society is pluralistic and dynamic. That is the status quo.
