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• A rare game show example, During the 9th season of the American Big Brother, the contestants were asked true or false questions about the game. One of the twists was that there were two pre-existing relationships in the house (Ryan & Jen, Jacob & Sharon), but in the question that asked "True or false, there were more than two pre-existing relationships", everyone would have said "False" but guess what? True - The third was the pet guinea pigs that were put in the house. There was a very good reason that there was an outrage after the episode ended - nobody in the house would have gotten that.
• In this age of free information on the Internet, buying a game manual has become a bit of Schmuck Bait, in a way.
  • Then again, the guide tends to give nice extras, posters and the like, that can't be gained from the internet. As well, not everyone wants to sit plugged into their computer while they're playing their games (re: not everyone has both pc and game systems all in the same room.) And printing it all out? Not with the price of ink cartridges these days.
    • And guides tend to be MUCH better organized especially if no one has made a detailed online guide for the game you like
• Using an operating system that uses a command-line interface isn't as easy to do as with a graphical interface, especially without first knowing what the commands are and what they do, so a manual would come in handy. DOS is probably the most well known operating system like this, but Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and BSD can still be used this way today if a GUI either isn't installed or isn't the default interface, though they're far more stable than DOS.
  • Most people don't know that Windows and Mac OS do, in fact, have command-line interfaces. Even those who do know about them don't use them very often unless they're doing something which is easier to pull off at the command prompt (like compiling source code) or using a program which doesn't have a GUI in the first place (various troubleshooting programs and the odd homebrew utility).
  • Yet there are people who in panic look for the terminal when they are trying to do something in GUI (there's even joke about X being nice terminal multiplexer). Windows don't have good terminal emulator or shell (or maybe I'm not used to Power Shell, which arguably is better language then sh but worst shell). Also arguably now more people know *nix commands then DOS...
• It also seams that the first thing somebody creating a new Programming Language does is hit the thesaurus to make up new ways of doing the same thing. For example you often have to Call/Perform/Gosub/Raise/Assert/Apply/Use your Function/Subroutine/Procedure/Method/Handler/Routine/Code-Block/Sub-Program but every language has it's own way of doing it.
• I dare you to come up with a list of all the Hidden Mickeys in most Disney-themed parks without a guidebook saying where they are. Chances are...you'll probably find maybe half before giving in and looking at a list.
  • To give some examples of how obscure the hiding places for these can be....In Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, there's a hidden mickey in the right cornea of Mr. Toad's eye in a statue placed in the line queue, another is drawn inside the beer foam of a part of the ride, another is carved into the bricks of the line for Indiana Jones, another is in between Sully's legs during the Monsters Inc ride... Good lord! How do people even find these things?!
• In The Westing Game, learning the actual objective of the game depends on a single semantic clue, which the game's designer deliberately sabotaged so nobody would notice it. If one of the players hadn't been taking meticulous notes — something Westing could not have foreseen, especially given that she was only in the game by accident — then no one could've solved it.
  • The notes (the court transcript) were definitely known about by the designer. They also captured the sabotage as well. It took quite the intuitive leap to even realize it was sabotage, and that it was designed to be possible to see through.
• On the short-lived show Drive, many of the clues to checkpoints require knowledge of fairly obscure trivia to figure out, which you wouldn't expect to be in the hands of ordinary people running in an underground, cross-country road race.
  • "Kennedy killed in '73," accompanied by a countdown. The destination? Cape Canaveral, known as Cape Kennedy until 1973, the name change "killing" the Kennedy name. The countdown was for a shuttle launch.
  • "Surrender, America." The destination? Appomattox Court House, Virginia, where Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant.
  • A pair of hot candies with wrappers that say "Atomic Fireball". The destination? The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, with the clue referring to the song "Great Balls of Fire". Made especially frustrating by the fact that, given the clue, Three Mile Island would've been a much more obvious destination.
• Bad teachers/professors and poorly-designed courses and tests can come off as this way. Some professors are downrated on sites meant to rate how good they are specifically because they pull antics like these. Yeah, it helps when you give us a Study Guide (Dang It!) but if the tests don't include stuff from the study guide, then of course students are going to fail.
  • These teachers will insist that the reason for doing this is that it forces students to think creatively, but if you, for example, take a complicated math problem that students already had trouble with, and task them to do the whole thing in reverse for the first time in the final exam, well that's just Fake Difficulty.
  • One Asimov mystery (found in Black Widowers 1) asks how a normally mediocre student managed to get an extremely high score on an exam made by a professor famous for this trope, when the exam had materials from the last week and thus couldn't have been seen ahead of time. The solution is that the professor was cheating; he was bribed by that student to write the exam for him, both for the money and to piss everyone else off.
  • For that matter, nearly all of liberal arts things can become this way when the teacher wants you to come to a specific conclusion. (English, History, and Philosophy are particular offenders) Good teachers usually let students come to their own conclusions as long as they support and defend it well; which is pretty much the point of these activities. Never mind the fact that all literary interpretation and criticism is entirely subjective as opposed to math and sciences; there are no wrong ways to see a work, just the wrong time to see it in a certain way. This is why liberal arts majors become upset when their degree is mocked.
• The works of James Joyce—Finnegans Wake, especially—can become this way. A search of the exact words "Finnegans Wake" on Amazon will result in over 600 books, 1 of just the story (200 pages) and many annotated versions (Ranging 300-900 pages) and many, many more of analysis.
• There was a serious screwup at DeVry when one campus got a program that gave lessons on using Microsoft Office 2003. Most of the class ended up flunking a number of tests. As it turned out:
  • DeVry's software license gave the teacher access to the lessons and test, but the students had access only to the tests, leaving them with no idea what the software expected. They had to guess each step. However...
  • You were allowed only 3 errors per question—and any deviation from what the test expected, even clicking in the wrong place counted as an error—which really made guesswork a pain.
  • The test software had more bugs than an ant farm, and often tests wouldn't be submitted, or we couldn't move on to the next question, etc. etc. etc.
• Buying airline tickets. The algorithms that are used to determine prices defy common sense. You'd think the price of a ticket would depend on factors such as the length of the flight, how far in advance you purchase it, the number of seats left, which day of the week, and so forth, but those are far from the only variables. The price of a flight might suddenly go up or down a factor of 2 or more if you wait a day even if absolutely nothing significant happens. In fact, a company called Farecast existed for the sole purpose of data mining past airline ticket prices and reverse-engineering the algorithms used to get people the lowest possible prices.
• 3D modeling and animation programs. These things have a very steep learning curve, and are unavoidably complex. As a result, even learning the basics requires a large amount of hand-holding. Fortunately, the developers know this, and a large amount of such programs have tutorials and lessons to help new users.
  • The fact that usually you cannot customise the GUI (Maya is a serious offender) thus letting you alone with a cluttered work window on a small screen (Anything x 768 is SMALL) does not help. Protip: Get a screen that is at least 1600 x 900 pixels big.
• Languages. English speakers are exasperated when learning other Germanic or romance languages that assign gender to objects, since it appears entirely random or arbitrary. On the hand, people learning English are (justifiably) baffled at the arbitrariness of pronunciation.
  • "Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through." This is an actual sentence (albeit with two British spellings). All those "ough" words have different pronunciations. "Thoe the tuff cawff and hiccup plow him threw".
• Aircraft examples, showing that Guide Dang It can be a killer.
  • Three Words and an explanation: The Gimli Glider. What happened? 1) The Boeing 767 was the first aircraft in Air Canada's fleet to have metric fuel gauges; all other aircraft had Imperial fuel gauges. 2) The fuel is measured in pounds in the Imperial system and kilograms in metric; 1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds. 3) The flight engineer was supposed to do the conversion from weight to volume (fuel trucks pump by volume), but this aircraft was so automated that the position was eliminated. We come to the first Guide Dang It: who does his job? 4) The digital fuel gauge on the aircraft was inoperative, since something was wrong with the aircraft's computer. 5) The second, and most serious Guide Dang It: nobody had been trained to do the metric conversions, and everybody from the fuel pumpers to Captain Pearson had used the same incorrect conversion factor when checking their math. Result: the aircraft runs out of fuel halfway through the trip. With no hydraulics or electronic systems, Captain Pearson managed to perform the first-ever forward slip in a commercial jumbo jet to reduce speed and land safely at Gimli Industrial Park Airport. Everybody Lives and Air Canada gets chewed out by Aviation Safety Board of Canada. There was a subversion a well: nobody knew how to land a Boeing 767 with no engines—but Captain Pearson did know how to fly a glider.
  • Scandinavian Airlines Flight 751. Ice on the wings broke off and got sucked into the engine, causing a series of bangs to be heard, since the engines were backfiring. Captain Stefan G. Rasmussen throttled the engines down—precisely as he should have done. The Guide Dang It: He hadn't been told about something called Automatic Thrust Restoration, which caused the plane to throttle back up without the pilots knowing it—nor did anyone at Scandanavian Airlines even know it existed. The engines flamed out, and the plane crashed (luckily with no fatalities).
• The freaking laws of physics. How on Earth is anyone supposed to figure out all of these absurdly complicated laws and equations?
  • At least the absurdly complicated ones are only for those looking for 100% Completion. The rest can be relatively easily sussed out by experimentation, provided you don't get thrown in a dungeon for trying it.
    • Rheology (the study of fluids and viscosity) is notoriously tricky. The process of figuring out how fast a fluid needs to go without breaking into turbulent flow is easy enough... if you know exactly what the fluid is. If not? Guess.
• In Homestuck, there is a game called Sburb which is pretty much "figure out stuff within several minutes or die" type, and as such not only the game is not completable without a walkthrough, the only walkthrough that is going to get you somewhere was ended by the author when she blew up what she believed was imperative to pass through, and now instead of playing by rules and attempting to win she is "repairing her fate" and aiming "to do as much damage to the game as possible. To rip its stitches and pry answers from the seams." Yet when a session of aliens tried it, using a slightly hacked and different version that actually was made by one of them, it worked perfectly fine.
  • Homestuck itself is an example of a Guide Dang It—some plot points aren't very well explained in the comic itself (this mostly concerns the animated Flash updates, which look really cool... but are sometimes very unclear), and you're forced to ask in the forums or look up a recap by the author if you want to understand what's going on.
• One episode of Chowder had Mung Daal trying to renew his chef's license, with the episode's conflict coming from the fact that Reuben, the anthropomorphic pig giving the tests, hated him. One of the tests he had to take had Reuben ask for mayonnaise on his sandwich, only to then arbitrarily deduct points from Mung because he was allergic to mayonnaise. Mung's response was literally "How was I supposed to know that?!"
• Tvtropes can be a pain to navigate and edit without a Guide and those tend to be hard to find unless you know what you're doing or spend some time digging
• There's several hint sites for the Real Life "How to Find a Mate" Romance Side Quest, but sometimes even that doesn't seem like enough.