Selective Obliviousness / Video Games

• In the Borderlands 2 DLC "Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep", Tina is the Game Master for a Dungeons & Dragons expy. In the game, she pretends that Roland is still alive and still just as heroic as ever after Roland had been shot dead by Handsome Jack during the game's Wham Episode. Throughout the adventure, the Vault Hunter players all nervously dance around addressing Tina's delusions, until they finally get fed up with playing along and start trying to address it directly, which Tina poignantly ignores as best she can. After the final boss is defeated, Tina finally breaks down and admits she knows she's lying to herself, but it's her story and she just wants to pretend for a while.
  • Her giving Angel a Historical Villain Upgrade is also this. She dismisses it simply by saying that no one would have died if not for her, completely ignoring that Angel had no choice in her actions and rebeled against her evil father as much as she could, even defying him with her dying breath. In Tina's world, she's just as bad as Jack is.
• Role-players in City of Heroes (and presumably other games) almost require this trope for certain scenarios to take place. For example, there's certain to be more than one (or more than fifty) characters running around who all claim to be the same specific character from mythology (popular examples include Thor, the Devil, and even Santa Claus). If you accepted that all these characters' stories are true, even though they clearly contradict each other, they'd go insane. Also tends to be a vital tactic in other areas of roleplay: text-based combat (rather than in-engine PVP) oftentimes breaks down into "Bang bang! / OH I dodged! / No, I shot you / no you didn't!" levels of quarrels; Selective Obliviousness is oftentimes the only way to resolve a situation before ending up needing to get mods involved.
• The Detective in Disco Elysium engages in this on a number of topics, with his brain downright shutting down leads and refusing to acknowledge things like the Ex-Something, or his former co-workers. You are even allowed to add more to the list, such as (if you fail one particular check early on in the game) refusing to acknowledge a mounting pile of evidence that your name probably isn't "Rafaël Ambrosius Costeau".
• Dragon Quest VII: The Praector of Gorges/Aeolus Vale acts unaware of how Firia/Fidelia is being bullied by her sister and the other kids in the village for not having wings. It's eventually revealed that he's afraid to intervene, not wanting to reveal that she's not an orphan, but his child by blood, whom he disowned without completely abandoning her. His own mother is aware of the whole situation, and really rips him a new one when he continues to deny the truth even when the BlissRock is stolen and Fidelia's lineage makes her the only one capable of helping the heroes save the day.
• Kingdom Hearts: Throughout the game, Riku repeatedly ignores all the obvious evidence that Maleficent lied to him and Sora not only didn't abandon him and Kairi for the Keyblade, Donald, and Goofy, but has been spending his every waking moment trying to find them. It isn't until he's possessed by Ansem, as well as Sora's Heroic Sacrifice to save Kairi, that Riku finally realizes the truth. It seems to be the influence of the darkness, for the most part, that's twisting his mind and making him delusional.
• Mass Effect 3: On the mission to Thessia, Liara refuses to acknowledge the fact asari development was clearly influenced by the Protheans, like how the earliest visual depictions of the goddess Athame look less like an asari and more like a Prothean. And by more we mean exactly. She does this even if Javik, an actual Prothean, is in the room pointing this out to her. If the player just has Javik's DLC included but hasn't brought him along, the other party member will get increasingly exasperated (or just plain irritated) by Liara's denial.
• OMORI plays this to discomforting effect. After taking certain actions in the Hikikomori Route, Omori will fully repress Sunny's memories of Mari's piano. In the real world, this means he can still enter the piano room and detect the piano's collision, but the narration will deny that anything is there. Similarly, all throughout the game, Sunny has the closet under the stairs repressed, so the player can't even see the door. The closet contains the remains of his broken violin, from the day of his recital. Finally, in one of the neutral-bad endings, after Sunny witnesses the aftermath of Basil committing suicide, the door to Basil's room will immediately disappear before the player's eyes, and the narrator will remark that nothing is there.
• Prayer of the Faithless: At the bottom of Purgatory, Aeyr gets told the truth of his mission, and one reason why he might not have seen it is said as "...Or maybe you knew the truth from the start, but you chose to ignore it."
• In [PROTOTYPE] soldiers who react to the display of the protagonist's Lovecraftian Superpowers or explicit hostility but super-fast runs, super-high jumps, running up a wall or falling from the sky and punching a crater in the pavement will be ignored. Without this trope the game would be much more difficult to play.
• Rave Heart: Ellemine admits that she suspected Eryn of being a traitor because of his Anti-Psi device, but didn't want to believe her brother was capable of turning on the Rave family.
• This trope gets lampshaded in Tales of Symphonia by Zelos when the party seem to repeatedly fail to notice that Mithos isn't all he seems to be despite constantly-mounting evidence, at one asking himself how they can trust him so easily.
• World of Warcraft: In Battle for Azeroth, Rexxar claims he rejoined the Horde to wage war against the Alliance because "Jaina Proudmoore couldn't forgive them for Theramore" and that she has "killed too many". That Jaina was the poster child for peace between the two factions and was betrayed multiple times seems to escape him, with Rexxar even dismissing that the Horde started the current war, saying he doesn't care. During his quest chain in Stormsong Valley, Rexxar rallies horde soldiers to "Drive these alliance scum from our lands", ignoring that said lands belong to Kul Tiras and the horde are the ones invading.

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