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"Disemboweler IV, the game where condemned criminals dig at each other with rusty hooks."
Fictional video games on TV tend to be disgusting, ultraviolent messes of blood, guts and severed limbs as the hypnotized player kills everything that moves, and more than a few things that don't. Many games are about killing everything, of course, but with some style.
Also, the names for these types of video games on TV tend to be rather unimaginative and generic as if every game was named like Doom, with names such as "ACTION KILLTACULAR DEATHMOWER 5000" or simply "The Decimator", when in Real Life, they're often much more sophisticated and clever, like Half Life, Halo, Contra, Time Crisis, or The Chronicles Of Riddick. Granted, some ultraviolent Real Life games are named like the Trope, but not all.
Often just used for name-dropping as a gag. If such a game is shown, it can be an example of Pac Man Fever (another case of producers not getting it) and/or bear a surprising resemblance to a well-known game.
In a Crime And Punishment show these can cause innocent victims to act out the events, possibly including An Aesop about why video games are horrible and teenagers should be watching responsible adults shoot each other on TV instead.
Sometimes the corruption comes not from the violent games, but from the very influence of computers themselves — from the Internet. This is because Meddling Executives worrying about the time you spend away from your TV want to convince you that New Media Are Evil.
Though they may sound similar, this usually has nothing to do with Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven nor Trope2000.
See also Murder Simulators.
Examples:
- The Simpsons has mentioned such games repeatedly and featured them least twice in the early seasons, once with Super Slugfest, which might have been played straight, once with the hottest new beat-em-up Bonestorm, which really wasn't. Recent addition: Death Kill City 3: Death Kill Stories. 3 guesses what it's based on.
- CSI: Miami went to town with the trope. A not-GTA-honest game was essentially a nonstop synaesthetic rollercoaster of violence, robbery, murder and rape (though only on bonus rounds), causing easily influenced youngsters to mimic these acts point-by-point while shouting "9000 points, bitch!" The protagonists got lines like "It'll all be very real soon" and "So he played <dramatic pause> to death." Also notable for gamers giving their nicks as their names in interrogations, total ignorance of sites like GameFAQs... you get the picture.
- Computer game CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder had an "episode" where fictional game "Gut Wrench 3" was central to the plot. And yes, fictional game was a FPS, was that blody, and yes, murder imitated game's poster. Although in subversion the murder had nothing to do with the nature of the game, real motive was boss cheating one of his employees out of their promised bonus. Resemblance to poster was there to throw suspiction at somebody else.
- The District, episode "Something Borrowed, Something Bruised." Complete with flashes to and from reality and screams of "It was only a game!" The goal of the game is to beat an unarmed bystander to death.
- In Daria (particularly the fanfics), the title heroine and her best friend love playing the video game 'Cannibal Fragfest'.
- Killer Instinct, episode "Game Over." Constantly used the phrase "murder simulator" and went downhill from there.
- Which is sad, seeing how a NINTENDO fighting game shares the same name. Although it IS violent...
- Law And Order Special Victims Unit featured a subversion in one episode. A boy obsessed with a console RPG was suspected of killing another child. After playing through the entire game, the detectives realized that he had tried to save the girl by imitating the game's "rescue the princess" storyline.
- There was a later episode with a GTA clone, but "the game made them do it" was the defense, which the prosecution quickly set to tearing apart.
- Another episode revolved around Second Life, where the rapist used the game to track down his victim. However, the detectives turn the tables and use the game itself to find the necessary evidence to convict the felon. The tacky clothing on the game model was actually purchased in a tacky in-game store.
- The X Files did this one too, with its usual flair. A virtual reality game is killing its players, so our heroes get called in. Scully got to act as the voice of disapproval, while Mulder and the Lone Gunmen were "reduced... back to moony adolescence." Interestingly, this episode was cowritten by William Gibson, one of the people with a claim to inventing Cyber Punk.
- In Harry Potter, Dudley Dursley is fond of "blowing up aliens on his computer." He has a Playstation game called Mega Mutilation Part Three. As an odd side note, he destroys his Playstation in The Goblet of Fire, which is set in 1994, before it was even released in Europe. (J.K. Rowling admitted she Did Not Do The Research.)
- Then again, Dudley can get anything he wants so long as he throws a big enough tantrum. It wouldn't be too big a stretch to have his parents pay for importing...
- The Playstation was released in Japan on December 2, 1994. Unless that scene takes place at the end of that year, after a zero-day import...
- Also, importing a Playstation when it had just been released in Japan would also bring another problem; The games would have to be imported too. The games would be in Japanese...
- But it's completely possible to play most action games in a language you don't understand.
- As stated above, Rowling has admitted that she did not do the research. Dismiss it as a minor mistake, retcon it into an NES, whatever you need to do, do it, and move on.
- The comic strip Fox Trot likes this one, with "Doomathon 2000" being my personal favorite. Hmmm, what could that possibly be in reference to?
- Not sure about the 2000, but Doomathon refers to Doom and Marathon.
- Interestingly, Serial Experiments Lain did something like that. In one of the early chapters of the series, there are several teenagers stuck in an online shooter called Phantoma without even being logged on to their computers, and confusing random people with enemy NPCs as a result. One of them commits suicide, while the other one murders a little girl.
- This troper had an odd dream along those lines, killing a random person under the presumption that he was an enemy mook, only to be yelled at by the person's brother. In retrospect the random person wasn't even armed, and the setting was just a a normal apartment building. This probably doesn't bode well.
- Averted in NCIS, where at least two of the protagonists are gamers themselves. One case is solved because one of these has played GTA 3, thus knowing which real-life car a teenager referred to when he named the ingame equivalent. This editor considers such storytelling and knowledge from TV writers to be positively saintly, when concerning this topic.
- Given that the writers aren't gamers themselves, the show still suffers from a bit of Pac Man Fever now and then.
- This troper recalls an episode where two navy crewmen who played an MMORPG 'Immortals', a fairly transparent World of Warcraft parody, ended up dueling with swords, and then killing themselves, all because of the game. Of course, the whole series seems to have a Nerd Culture Is Evil Vibe going. Makes you wonder why they bother doing all this investigative stuff when they could just walk in and arrest the guy with the biggest knowledge of sci-fi/comic books.
- Subverted in Paranoia Agent. The detectives are interviewing the suspect for the Shounen Bat assaults. The boy seems convinced that he is living in the world of an RPG he played, and all the people he assaulted were, to him, the enemies controlled by the Big Bad that needed to be cleansed with his magical, holy sword. In the end it turns out that the kid wasn't the real Shounen Bat, he was just an attention seeker.
- In the Spike Lee film Inside Man, the leading bank robber sees one of the hostages, an African-American boy, playing a GTA-like game of plotless violence with racial overtones. He's not happy. It should also be noted that the graphics on the game are pretty good. For a handheld device. Then again, the robbers weren't meaning to harm anyone. They don't even steal any bank notes but the diamonds collected from the traitor turned Bank manager.
- Ben Tennyson, the titular hero of Ben10 is so enamored of the video game "Sumo Slammers" that he has abused the Omnitrix to get at it and even in it.
- Avoided in The Office (American), season 2, when the members of Jim's new office play Call of Duty as an office team activity.
- Gunnerkrigg Court plays this one for laughs on this page
 , where we see Antimony's first (and presumably last) exposure to video games. To most of you, Antimony's voice will probably sound like the Englishwoman that Peter Griffin put into a coma with a dirty joke.
- One Strong Bad email throws a few gag titles up: Blood Bleeder, Head Chopper II, Scab Wars and Blistergeist. There is the strong suggestion that these games would be really fun to play. It also pokes fun at the Moral Guardians' alternative, because Homestar can only play Clapping Party: no, it's not like DDR, it's just clapping... This is, of course, a one shot joke, and most of the games that Strong Bad plays and enjoys aren't evil whatsoever, varying between Sundae Drivin' and Thy Dungeonman, which is also a real game playable on the site.
- It should be noted that Strong Bad also apparentley dreams about video games, given that he has a tendency to say their titles when he's woken up.
- Furthermore, next to his computer is a floppy disk caddy that almost invariably displays the title of a real-life video game on the frontmost disk.
- Then Strong Bad had his very own episodic game, and the floppy disk caddy contains fictional games. Eugh, Hurricane of Subversions.
- Mamimi from FLCL spends half the second episode playing Fire Starter, a handheld video game with the objective of "burn down a demon-infested city while dodging the cops". (She spends another quarter hanging out with Naota, and the last quarter starting fires.)
- In Kamen Rider Ryuki, Shibaura Jun (Kamen Rider Gai) creates a fighting game that gradually makes the players so obsessed with the game that they start re-enacting it in live-action, to the death.
- Star Trek: Next Generation had an episode featuring a 24th Century version of such a game used as part of an attempt to take over the minds of the crew and thus the Enterprise as a whole. Data and You Know Who successfully resisted the "lure" of the game, the latter resorting to what can only be described as video-game inspired tricks to lead the mind-controlled members of the crew on a merry chase through the rest of the ship while Data worked on an antidote for the addictive qualities of the game. And then he got to kiss Ashley Judd. Lucky bastard.
- Mike Teevee's updated "sin" in Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is having a passion for violent video games. Oh, and being an Insufferable Genius.
- An episode of Tekwar: the series featured a Tek video game where the point is to kill cops. The game was designed to convince the players that they were still in the game even after they stopped playing, causing them to kill cops in real life.
- Then a Tekwar videogame was made, but the objective is apparently to convince people that they should go out and kill the developers.
- In an episode of the CBBC series Stupid one character is playing a game called Killing People 3.
- Dave Barry's Money Secrets includes a passing reference to Death Killer of Fatal Murdering II: The Slaying.
- This trope wouldn't be complete without a mention of the Vampire Piggy Hunter series in Invader Zim.
- Gutwrencher 1, a classic arcade game on the show The Middleman, is so violent, it's banned in 17 countries and is the only arcade game ever to have been condemned by both Tipper Gore and the Dalai Lama. And it's the game that leads to Wendy and Tyler's first hookup.
- The upcoming Wii game Mad World looks like it will actually live up to this trope.
- The third incarnation of the Doom franchise, itself a common target of this trope, contained a very silly playable Mini Game in an arcade machine called “Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3.”
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