you want to explore, what "political" means, that's fine. we're not making a thesis here, so allow me to also ramble, but i'm cautious of your alies: another person in this thread has implicitly acused me of homophobia, sexism and racism, because that's the tactics with these kinds of people.
first of all we clearly have different relationship with video games, just by the games you've mentioned, or the fact that you've worked in the industry. i don't play call of duty, because i'm not on board with jock sniffers on political grounds. your other examples are similar, and i agree with you, a lot of video games are political, and i stand by my point. i don't like to engage with them! i find their treatment of political subjects to be juvenile, naive, reductionist, historically illiterate, and yet often moralizing and grandstanding. few games that aspire to deal with tough social subjects ever deliver. this is in my opinion.
there are two dimensions to the question of politics in video games, that make engagement with politics often an unpleasant experience. the question of familiarity that you touched on, and the question of player's choice. with low familiarity and low choice politics are not a problem. yeah i don't know anything about organized crime in japan, why would i care what the game tells me. with high choice politics are also not a problem, this is a very very very rare thing in the games treatment of politics. and i think the faux choice between "i sided with the developer's prefered political position, and got the good ending" and "i sided with developer's disliked political positions, and now i'm literally hitler" is not a real choice.
so the real problem with politics in video games is often high familiarity with low choice. the developer wants you to know that their guys are really the good guys, and they imbue them with all the political views that the developers share. you're "forced" to play out scenarios, where you are not invested in the narrative anymore, you're just doing it for the mechanics of the game. i've played shadowrun: dragonfall recently, you're part of an anarchist commune, and there's a lot of kind of talk that you hear in anarchist communes, and, man, i've been part of anarchist communes before, and all this talk is bullshit, but in the video game universe it works!
which gets me to my original criticism of "activist journalists". these people want more politics in their games not less. by virtue of their activism, and interest of the kind of audience they attract, they are also much more likely to dedicate both time to games with explicit political subjects, or often times explore games from political perspective. they are also much more likely to advocate for high familiarity, low choice games. that's my past experience with their output. there is a lot apolotical games, there's a lot of low familiarity political games, "activist journalists" pretty much gaurantee that politics is front and center of gaming experience.