Trope Decay: Damn You Muscle Memory

The trope Damn You, Muscle Memory! is written to be specifically about when two games have different control layouts, causing frustration in a player when they push one button expecting action A and get action B instead.

However, there is a large non-video game section which is filled mostly with examples that have nothing to do with the trope as written. For example, the A Song Of Ice And Fire example, which is about a man whose right hand is amputated finding out that his muscle memory is all wrong to learn to fight with his left hand.

I think these need to be deleted or split off into a new trope. They're really not related enough to be a single trope.

Some are correct like the Reading right to left on things instead of Left to right because you read too much manga..... (Guilty as charged there.)

However yeah there do seem to be a few that are really not the trope. As well as I can think of at least one instance where in the work actual muscles were changed like you think your moving your pinky but you move your leg and such.

I realize this is a tiny repair, but when I attempted to remove an incorrect example it was immediately restored on the grounds that the trope page has many examples like it. In the interest of avoiding an edit war, I'd like some backup to point to when I machete the wicks and bad examples.

I think there's issues with the title that cause the misuse question.

Just from the title itself, you'd assume that this trope would be about any time an error is made due to muscle memory. The trope itself, though, is written much more narrowly.

To be honest, I think this trope by its title will attract this level of misuse unless we do some serious work.

Personally, I think we ought to split. Leave Damn You, Muscle Memory! to be the trope about muscle memory causing problems for someone, regardless of its source, and make the video game-centric version a subtrope, with an appropriate name (like Controller Layout Versus Muscle Memory or the like).

I'm not sure why the trope should be limited to video games only; aren't we supposed to avoid medium-specific tropes in general?

I'm not sure how a trope about how changing the standard button layout for a game causing frustration can be made broader.

Some tropes, particularly gameplay mechanic tropes, really are medium specific. It's not possible, for example, for New Game Plus to be anything but video game specific.

^^ Essentially, the Video Game version of this trope is an Audience Reaction that can only apply to videogames because only videogames require muscle memory.

For In-universe occurrences, you are correct. Videogames and other media would be lumped together.

edit: ninja'd

edited 31st Aug '11 9:28:29 AM by muninn

Okay, that's a good point. In that case, I would suggest making a new trope "Changed Gamepad Layout" (or something like that), which is a subtrope of DYMM.

That works for me, too.