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What Are You Looking at?

Eddie Riggs: "What are you looking at?"

Mangus: "I don't know."

—Brütal Legend

Happens often in video games. In between missions or cutscenes, you'll sometimes see characters just standing there, staring in a random direction. This is either because said person activates a mission and moving about would make it more difficult for the player to find him/her or it would flat-out take way too much time to make every character do something different. Note that if a character is shown actually doing something aside from standing, blinking, and occasionally talking, this doesn't count (i.e., if a character is chopping wood or getting anything done besides wearing a hole in the ground).

See also Artificial Atmospheric Actions, Welcome to Corneria. Contrast with NPC Scheduling.

Video Game Examples:

Brütal Legend is the Trope Namer and perhaps the only game to joke about it.
God Hand after any of the human characters are rescued they give you fruit then just stand there staring.
Pretty much every other RPG in existence.
- A nice example is Dark Cloud 2, where you're able to recruit people to inhabit the towns you build. When they aren't assigned a house to live in, they are always inside the train. You'd think they get bored, poor sods.
In the Pokémon games, the other trainers are deliberately staring in order to catch the eye of any passer-by and challenge them to battles.
Also pretty much every point-and-click adventure game in existence.
Shenmue is very guilty of this, having people that stare at walls for no apparent reason.