Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny! in Video Games.
- Meta-wise, most gamers are expected to drop everything related to the fate of the world when they see a vividly-colored beam of light radiating from a piece of equipment; you can always save the world next time, but that ultimate epic legendary shiny must be picked up or it's gone.
- Wide-Open Sandbox games in general. Set out to save the world, spend 200 hours running subquests and exploring.
- The magpies from Beyond the Edge of Owlsgard really, really like shiny things. Showing one of the magpie guards a pearl will cause him to drop whatever he's doing and fly over to Finn, allowing him to get the announcer's horn.
- Taokaka from BlazBlue has a three-second or three-step (depending on which comes first) attention span/memory combo.
- Borderlands 2 has one example with Tiny Tina, as you get ready to destroy a train with some missiles:Tiny Tina: Awwrite counting down. Ten! Nine!
[the missiles fire prematurely and blow up the train]
Tiny Tina: I got bored. - In Devilish Hairdresser, the Angelic Hairdresser's Fatal Flaw is her short attention span. She will often turn away from her work to make a phone call, prepare a cup of coffee, or look at some books, giving the Devilish Hairdresser time to mess with her clients.
- The basis for a joke in Dragon Age: Origins where the game designers fall victim to this trope. It unfolds as follows in the description of a Glamour Charm:This minor magical charm captures the viewer's attention and distra... ooo, pretty...
- Dwarves in Dwarf Fortress, all too often. It isn't uncommon for a dwarf to Urist McTroper cancels post: Pick Up Equipment. Dwarves will cancel a task to pull a lever to activate a critical series or traps or other defensive mechanisms to go get a drink or take a nap. Military dwarves will, on some occasions, literally stop fighting an invading horde of monsters because they're sleepy or hungry.
- An entire invading army can be distracted by one of your pet cats, chasing after it instead of laying siege to your fortress.
- In EarthBound (1994), an otherwise indestructible Master Belch can be defeated if you use Fly Honey to distract him; he'll waste turns to guzzle that mess down, leaving himself vulnerable to attack.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- Depending on your playstyle, there is a high chance your Player Character in any game in the series falls victim to this trope, due to the high amount of content in said games' open worlds. It's very easy to take on a quest, only to forget said quest because of all the optional dungeons you encounter on your way, followed by taking on other quests only for them to also be postponed because you encountered, depending on the game, a gate to Oblivion or a dragon.
- This is a trait of the Demiprinces, a form of lesser Daedra born of the union between a Daedra and a mortal. Demiprinces tend to have short attention spans and get bored very easily. Fa-Nuit-Hen, for example, can barely stay focused on questions during his interviews and outright interrupts people so he can answer them before he loses track of what they're saying.
- Subaru of Ensemble Stars! loves to play around and have fun and hates having to do boring things. And as the trope name might suggest, he absolutely loves anything shiny to a crow-like extent, hoarding coins and anything else that sparkles such as ramune bottle marbles.
- EverQuest II gives us the collection quest items, often nicknamed "shinies" by the players for two reasons. The first is that, well, they glow — they're small, glowing points on the ground with a question mark on top. The second is that you can expect many people to instantly take a leave of their senses and drop whatever it is they were doing (such as traveling, trying to avoid dangerous mobs, healing their group or trying NOT to aggro everything in sight) in order to dig them up. Even more so in groups, where there's a competitive aspect to it — first person to activate the shiny gets it, and the rare ones sell for a mint. A shiny popping up in the middle of a difficult fight can quite easily spell "wipe".
- Guild Wars 2 gives us the Skritt, who have a unique form of Hive Mind. They all have individual intelligence, but the more Skritt are around each other at a time, the smarter they get. Form up a whole Warren (underground city) and they rather effortlessly start repurposing snatched Asura and Charr tech into their own proto-industrial revolution. When there's only one or two around, though, they have the minds of the rodents they evolved from and are basically this trope made flesh.
- Shimakaze from KanColle has this as part and parcel of her fixation on speed. Especially emphasized in episode 4 of the Animated Adaptation: when she's called in for a briefing, Shimakaze bounces around excitedly asking "When do we start?!", but when the briefing actually does start, she's playing with one of her Rensouhou-channote and not listening. When the mission is set to launch, she's nowhere to be found, presumably having gotten bored and wandered off. After some hilarious failed attempts to draw her out, her teammates sit down for tea...and Shimakaze eagerly skips up, asking "What are you guys doing? Can I have one of those scones?"
- Kingdom of Loathing has an Attention Deficit Demon as a potential familiar (though as a rare one by now, since it was available for a limited time).[Your Demon] bounces around, helping you pick stuff up. "Did you know that chili peppers aren't actually peppers? And a coconut isn't a nut, either! Hey, remember that one monster you fought? He was crazy. Do you like music?"
- Melissa from Knights in the Nightmare is often characterized as having a mild case of ADHD. Unlike many other examples, she actually displays hyperfocus — Ancardia is all she can really be bothered to concentrate on, and she's otherwise fairly easily distracted. The more commonly attributed characteristics of the disorder get Flanderized by the fandom.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: Princess Zelda. Multiple times during the festival when she's talking to Link, she'll run off mid-sentence because she got distracted by another booth or person.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Link can defeat Ganondorf by waving a fishing pole around to distract him while taking potshots at him. See it in action here.
This is actually pretty common in the Zelda series — a good quarter of the final bosses will stop and stare at your fishing pole/bug net.
- The Piglins in Minecraft are prone to this, even when they're aggressive, but they soon get back to fighting you afterwards. There's even an advancement for taking advantage of this love of gold. Averted for the Piglin Brutes, they don't get distracted by gold.
- A poster of a troll in Mishap 2: An Intentional Haunting includes four speech balloons containing simple utterances. "Oooh, shiny!" is one of them.
- Monster Hunter 3 (Tri): Deviljho is perpetually hungry and crashes Unstable environments in search of more food (which, more often than not, includes everything that moves). However, if you drop a piece of meat on the ground, it'll immediately stop what it's doing and go chow down. This can be used to your advantage, as you can apply certain items to the meat beforehand to put the Deviljho to sleep, poison it or paralyze it for a short time. The variant Savage Deviljho that debuted in 3 Ultimate is even hungrier and thus more prone to aiming at dropped meat, due to its high metabolism.
- Pokémon:
- In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, your rival shows this at least once. He comes barging into your room, then after a few seconds notes you have a new laptop.
- The Poké Doll is a brightly-colored toy that will distract wild Pokémon and allow the player to run away from them. In Pokémon Platinum, you can use it to escape the plot-mandatory battle with Giratina and end its universe-destroying rampage. Yes, I did just distract Cthulhu with a dolly.
- Pony Island: Satan in a nutshell — I've got to finish this current game I'm working on! It's got to have many levels, suspense, build-up, an epic final boss, and, and ooh... here's a cute mascot for a brand NEW game!
- The Curiosity Core in Portal."What's that? Hey, what's that? Ooh, that thing has numbers on it! Ewww, what's wrong with your legs?! Hey, you're that lady from the tests! Hi! Look at that thing! No, that other thing! Do you smell something burning?"
- The intro sequence of A Princess Tale states that this is how the main character earned her nickname, "Princess Ooh Look, a Kitty."
- In Rakuen, Alice and Dean are a couple of Leebles that live next to Winston. During the festival, Alice is trying to ask Dean how was the work that day, but he gets constantly distracted, at one point by the fact that Alice has ears. (For the record, every Leeble has huge triangular ears that are impossible to not notice).
- The Arakun race in the text-based Retro MUD game are famous for being like this. They also have a racial emote called "ashiny". Players tend to ham it up for all it's worth.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Sonic has issues with staying still for extended periods of time.
- Also Tails, to a certain extent. He's a bit more focused and patient than Sonic is, usually, but he's VERY easily distracted by things he finds interesting. Which, since he's a Child Prodigy Gadgeteer Genius, mostly includes killer robots.
- The Novakids from Starbound are an entire race of these, as they can't focus on any task for long before getting distracted by something new and interesting, have very poor long-term memories, and don't recognize the importance of writing things down for later. They're actually stunningly intelligent on an intuitive level (a Novakid can build a working FTL drive and spaceship just by seeing one pass by and inventing what they need to get it to work), but they keep having to reinvent the wheel. For this reason, Novakid communities tend to fluctuate between stone and digital age (usually lingering on the "steel and steam" age out of affectation more than anything) as one generation makes groundbreaking discoveries and the next one forgets how they work. The beta versions of the game reflected this in the character intro blurbs; while the other races had long-term reasons for their situations, the Novakid's boiled down to "You're on a malfunctioning ship and you can't remember how you got there."
- A Liberated Borg Caitian Duty Officer in Star Trek Online has Flavor Text implying that he has a certain amount of this."My time in the Collective honed me. I am more focused on ... hey, that light is blinking!"
- Fairies in the Touhou Project franchise have this in general, due to being ephemeral and short-lived (but immortal) youkai. In the spin-off game Fairy Wars (which stars fan-favorite Cirno), you have a "motivation meter" in place of a life bar; when it hits 0, Cirno gets bored of the whole adventure and wanders off to find something more interesting to do.
- Trinity Universe: Kanata, main character of the Demon God King route, was confined to his family's castle for most of his life, so actually getting to see Empyria and all it had to offer naturally excites him... much to the exasperation of his handler / retainer, Tsubaki.
- World of Warcraft:
- One of the "silly" jokes a male orc can say:"I will CRUSH and DESTROY and... ooo... shiny..."
- A Dryad named Mylune will actually get distracted by a butterfly halfway through her quest-ending text.
- This trope even applies to player characters now, as anything lootable by your character sparkles in your view.
- The gorlocs in Sholazar Basin demonstrate this literally, having an obsession with collecting shiny objects. Jaloot is an especially bad case, with the item that calls him having the added Flavor Text of "Should he be managing to pay attention at the time".
- One of the "silly" jokes a male orc can say:
