

In Michigan, it was necessary. We are able to make amendments to our state constitution via ballot proposal.
The legislature in Michigan had been Republican controlled for forty years. In 2018, a ballot proposal removing redistricting from the legislature and handing it to an independent bipartisan commission shared the ballot with another proposal legalizing weed. The legalizing weed proposal really brought out the vote, and so we voters enshrined in our state’s constitution that districting couldn’t be done by the legislature.
Following the new districting lines, power shifted to the Democrats (again, for the first time in 40 years). We’d had plenty of Democratic governors and a liberal-leaning state court system, but the legislature was gerrymandered to fuck so we were stuck. Now we have a legislature that represents the state’s population much better. It won’t always be Democrat, it won’t always be Republican, but it also won’t be extremely far right because that would be political suicide in a swing state where gerrymandering is illegal. This leads to compromise, which leads to slow but inevitable progress.
Voters should get to choose their representatives. Representatives shouldn’t get to choose their voters.
Depends entirely on the story being told. All can be impactful.
Games where the main character is a blank slate can allow you to build meaningful relationships and aspects to your character, but it takes a lot more work from the devs to flesh out those story branches. When done well, it’s excellent. Mass Effect did a good job with this. Skyrim is an example where it’s well done but with less of a rigid framework and therefore less specific handling by the story.
Games that have a specific character but still allow you to shape their path can be beautiful. The ending of Red Dead Redemption 2 has audio callbacks to important decisions you made during the game that shaped who your version of Arthur Morgan was, and it brought tears to my eyes.
And games where the decisions are set in stone and the character development is entirely in the hands of the writer, director, and actor, like a movie, can still be phenomenal. God of War (2018) and Ragnarok are excellent examples.