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You start out talking about not writing a political statement but then end up talking about how to write political propaganda that, unlike most political propaganda, isn't poorly-written or obnoxious. Those are different goals that involve going down diverging pathways. In particular, if you're going to spend time and effort thinking about this sort of thing, how about spending it thinking about the ideologies that exist within your fictional world? Not as an allegory, not as an insertion of current issues with or without commentary, but as part of the worldbuilding. And then instead of deciding ahead of time whether an ideology or political faction is "right" or "wrong" or "it's complicated" based on how it maps to the civil-rights movement or transgenderism or whatever, evaluate it (and let your audience evaluate it) on its own terms, as an outgrowth of relevant issues in the world you have created.
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software talks about something similar:
Instead of looking to contemporary political controversies for your inspiration, you can try looking elsewhere. You can look to history, to political conflicts where every side and even the issues they consider important are likely to be one or both of "alien" or "timeless" to modern perspectives. Similarly you can look to old political philosophy. Or to fiction that is at least old enough to not be part of the current political zeitgeist. You can look to science and technology, to the sorts of things that societies could theoretically be doing if they had different values or structures. You can look at all the setting elements you have for other reasons, for game mechanics or because they're cool or because they're part of the genre or because you had to make some sort of map/factions/history, and seriously think through how people in that world would relate to them.
Think about questions like what views are functional, whether functional for society or the individual or for some subgroup. For a recent example imagine if, before the invention of AI art, you wrote a setting where AI art was possible. I think you probably could have predicted the backlash from some artists, on grounds like economic self-interest and their self-conception, and predicted a lot of the specific rhetoric. Or, if it was invented a while ago, there's other questions like what sort of economic role it ends up fitting into long-term. I don't think this would necessarily be the most compelling setting element, it probably wouldn't be central, but I think it would probably be more interesting than inserting either contemporary politics or a metaphor for them. Maybe some reviewer would interpret it as you criticizing real-world automation as stripping meaning from work, but I don't think it would benefit from you approaching the writing as a metaphor, except perhaps by using history as a reference for how these conflicts can play out.
You don't have to do this, not every work (especially videogames) needs to have ideologies and political conflicts invented for its worldbuilding. The Law of Conservation of Detail is a very real concern, though it can enhance even briefly-mentioned details if you've put more thought into them than the audience expects. But if you don't want to do this you probably shouldn't be wasting your time and the audience's attention-span on contemporary politics either. In that case just use the superficial details that seem to match your setting/genre/aesthetic and don't do anything more. It is unlikely anyone will care. Yes there have been cases like Kingdom Come: Deliverance (targeted by Tumblr psuedohistorian medievalpoc and then game journalists for not having "POC" in their piece of medieval europe) but there are too many games coming out for people to create controversies like that about a meaningful fraction. Especially if you're not dumb enough to respond on social media or release a statement/apology.
One reason transgenderism tends to be particularly badly written in fiction, particularly fiction not set in a western country in 2023, is because it entails an ideological framework that is highly specific and restricted to a particular place and time. People will write a medieval fantasy setting and give characters views popularized on the internet less than a decade ago. Even people who don't think they're writing fiction, like Wikipedia editors writing about historical women who disguised themselves as men, will try to fit it into the trans framework (sometimes resulting in the Wikipedia article having male pronouns). Historical eunuchs and the ideological viewpoints regarding them are more genuinely alien than "what if aliens had...4 genders" or "what if aliens were genderfluid shapeshifters", because neither eunuchs nor the viewpoints regarding them were based on contemporary ideas like gender identity to begin with.
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