Deconstruction Game - Television Tropes & Idioms

A form of Deconstruction, which has apparently become a rising fad in flash games.

A deconstruction game is a game that deconstructs aspects of Video Games in general. At the minimum, it takes one aspect, and blows it up to such ridiculously exaggerated proportions that it simply becomes laughable, as if to make a point that "You can't make a game based just on this!" or with some, "If you enjoy games because of this one reason then you are an idiot!"

In order to qualify, a single part of the game at the minimum must take at least one single trope, mechanic, or gimmick, and either explore it exhaustively to the possible point of Mind Screw, or play it far too simple and flat to be taken seriously. Typically they rely heavily on their nature as a parody to be entertaining, but on rare occasions they're fun to play as well. They often make use of Playing The Player.

Examples:

Action Adventure

Shadow Of The Colossus: Boss Battles. The game is almost nothing but boss fights, and what little bit of plot the game has makes most players question whether they're really doing the right thing by killing them.

Adventure Game

Harvester: A deconstruction of Evil Is Cool and Videogame Cruelty Potential, not through heavy-handed Videogame Cruelty Punishment, but through a heavy-handed ending that asks, What the Hell, Player?
META: Amateur adventure game design.
Flower, Sun and Rain: Sidequests, convenient puzzles, event flags and adventure game mechanics in general. The game, and often even the characters, will deliberately waste your time while your actual mission is to stop a terrorist from blowing up a plane. No one's really clear on why you need to solve math puzzles at every turn, either, but they seem to accept it as normal. In the end, your reward is mostly mockery.

First-Person Shooter

Haze is a deconstruction of military shooters like Modern Warfare and Battlefield. It was a failure, however, due to Executive Meddling forcing them to rewrite the plot several times until the message was completely gone.
BioShock deconstructs several gameplay mechanics as part of a Genre Deconstruction of shooter/RPG hybrids like System Shock and Deus Ex. Mission Control, Notice This and But Thou Must are a product of being under Trigger Phrase-induced mind control, and Death Is a Slap on the Wrist because you're the son of Andrew Ryan and the game's resurrection devices are keyed to your genetic code as a result — thus making you the perfect puppet to carry out the whims of the Big Bad.

Hack And Slash

Drakengard deconstructs a variation of Level Grinding showing us just what kind of person would slaughter armies of enemies in order to strengthen his weapons.

Interactive Fiction

+=3: Standard intfic assumptions
9:05: Openings without backstory, in which the player infers one's role from one's surroundings
In The End: Unwinnable by Design
Ramses: But Thou Must
Rematch: Trial-and-Error Gameplay
Spider And Web: Second Person Narration

Platform Game

You Only Live Once: Platformers in the vein of Mario.
DLC Quest: Overreliance on Downloadable Content.
Level Up: Leveling up in games.
Braid: The classic Save the Princess story is followed to the letter, even being called out by name, until the last few levels, when your motives become increasingly questioned, and the princess is revealed as fleeing you the whole game.
Sonic the Hedgehog OmoChao Edition: Stop Helping Me! (This game actually has added challenge — you have to avoid everything that triggers Omochao's comments as much as possible for Rank Inflation, and for Speed Run enthusiasts, there's the fact that the timer won't freeze whenever Omochao speaks.)

Role-Playing Game

The Modron dungeon in Planescape: Torment: Dungeon crawlers in general. Complete with enemies who don't know their motivation and leave items like, "A goody!" The game at large is a very thorough deconstruction of Protagonist Without A Past and Death Is a Slap on the Wrist. Instead of being simple gameplay mechanics, these things are the wheels that drive all character development.
- Planescape: Torment as a whole also serves a large-scale deconstruction of RPG tropes. Among others, the point of the game is to die, you get your name at the end of the game, there are no elves, dwarves, or swords but you do get to equip eyeballs and your own intestines, the nicest people you get to meet are undead, and so forth.
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale. Item shops.
Progress Quest: RPGs that assign players randomly generated quests and don't require any real strategy. The game automates grinding and fetch quests which is all the game is.
Ginormo Sword: Arguably, grinding and the emphasis on weapon upgrades.
Yume Nikki: Exploration and sandbox gameplay. The entire game is a Beautiful Void and there is no plot to speak of, which has prompted elaborate Fanon and Wild Mass Guessing on behalf of the players, in an attempt to invest the game with externalised meaning.
Super Press Space To Win Action RPG 2009: RPGs in general, and overly-linear Quick Time Event-heavy action RPGs in particular. The credits specify that the game was "inspired by God Of War".
- "THIS GAME IS SO ESSY!"
Parameters is all about distilling an RPG to its purest bare-bones form: all the enemies and quests are represented by simple boxes and numbers and all you need to do is to click repeatedly on them. It manages to be pretty enjoyable nonetheless.
Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is a deconstruction of the entire Star Wars franchise. Or rather, it would have been had the game been released in a finished state.

Simulation Game

Desert Bus, from Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors: Simulation Games. The simulation aspect is carried so far that the game is somehow less fun than it would be to actually drive a bus through a desert.

Stealth-Based Game

Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons Of Liberty: Sequels with suspiciously similar premises to the original, linearity and the illusion of choice in video games, and the concept of video games as a power fantasy, among many other things.

Survival Horror

Nanashi no Game uses the cursed, nameless game to deconstruct RPGs. There's no battles to win, levels to grind or heroics to engage in — you just walk around, talk to people and collect hidden items that must be found to reach the good ending.

Third Person Shooter

Spec Ops The Line is a far more successful deconstruction of military shooters compared with the aforementioned Haze, stating that, for all their pretense of gritty realism, they are still escapist power fantasies. One sequence in particular becomes exponentially more horrifying if you've played the similar, yet more throwaway "Death From Above" level in Modern Warfare.

Web Games

Achievement Unlocked: Achievements.
Upgrade Complete: Upgrades.
- The sequel addresses some things they forgot the first time around. You can now upgrade the part limit on your ship, among other things (including your heart rate).
:the game: and REPLAYING :the game:: Cut and Paste Environments.
- Also, This Is The Only Level.
- Averted in the threequel.
Help The Hero: Grid Inventory
Steamshovel Harry: Forced Tutorials. There is no game. The earth will be destroyed in fifteen minutes— and that's how long the tutorials take!
Execution by Jesse Venbrux can be seen as a deconstruction of Flash "assassin" games. The only way to "win" is to quit. Restarting after you've killed your target results in an "it's already too late" message and shows you the failure screen, even if you delete and reinstall the game. This is because the game records your loss in your computer's registry.
Don't Shoot The Puppy: Press X to Die.
The Stanley Parable: Narrative and choice, along with several smaller aspects of games that promise an open world but confine you to a linear story progression.
Qwop: Some Dexterity Required.
- 50k Racewalker: The same.
- Surgeon Simulator 2013: Ditto
Cow Clicker deconstructed the idea of social games like Farmville, by distilling it to just the simple mechanics. You had a cow, and you can click on it after set intervals. You could click on it more often by paying real world money. And you could post it on your Facebook feed and invite friends. Eventually, the creator got a little disturbed by how popular it was getting, and began to feel like it was stealing when people actually did spend money on the thing, leading to a "Cowpocalypse" end of the game.
Side Quest: Side Quests
Frog Fractions parodies Edutainment Games that are more "game" than "edutainment" by presenting a game about fractions that does very little to teach you how fractions work, and quickly goes wildly and hilariously off the rails.