Examples of Bystander Syndrome depicted in Video Games.
- At the end of the Back to the Future: The Game Telltale games, three alternate future Martys appear, begging for Marty and Doc's help in saving the future. Marty and Doc decide to just ignore them and go for a drive. In their defense, they had just finished a lengthy adventure across time and space, and it's strongly implied they'll get around to dealing with this eventually. Remember, they have a time machine and can deal with this sort of thing whenever they want.
- In the Baldur's Gate games, the lazy, lazy NPCs may well claim to be amazing warriors, but they'll still stand around waiting for you to reach them before they go to rescue their friend/kill rats/buy a book/retrieve something that was stolen.
- In BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm, Shrimp is so focused on enjoying his vacation and not getting involved with Catie’s latest quest that he actually refuses to help her several times when she might need it. He steps back when Arianna attacks the ship in the prologue, and doesn’t help with the search for shipwreck survivors in Chapter 1. He eventually changes his tune, but it takes the literal end of the world to finally prod him into action.
- In Child of Light no-one does anything about the Queen of the Night until Aurora comes along; Oengus in particular pulls a Heel–Face Turn minutes after meeting Aurora despite being a powerful combatant himself. Admittedly it's implied that Aurora, being the Queen of Light's daughter, is The Only One with the power to stop her, but gameplay wise soon after the first map it's entirely viable to not use Aurora for a single fight.
- In Dead Rising 3, Basement-Dweller Theodore "Teddy" Lagerfeld Jr. is incredibly rich, with a powerful security system and the keys to the police armory, since he's the mayor's son. When Nick Ramos asks for the keys so the survivors can be armed against the Zombie Apocalypse, Teddy decides that's too much work and tells him to get lost. When Nick persists, citing that many people could die without weapons, Teddy sets his mansion's security system against him. Fittingly, Teddy is meant to embody Sloth of the Seven Deadly Sins.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, being a Wide-Open Sandbox, allows you, the player, to ignore an impending demonic invasion. Sadly, it doesn't affect the gameplay much, so you won't see any consequences of your negligence.
- Zig-zagged in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with the three heroes who sent Alduin thousands of years forward in time, knowing full well that he will come back and someone else will have to fight him again. When you pursue Alduin in Sovngarde, they're more than happy to join the fray and help take him down.
- In the Dragonborn DLC, it's revealed that those three actually didn't fit this trope... but their Dragonborn, Miraak, did. They were forced to send Alduin forward in time because only Dragonborn can permanently kill dragons, and Miraak just couldn't be arsed to deal with Alduin. Without Miraak's help, their only recourse was to banish Alduin to the future and hope that era's Dragonborn would be less of an asshole.
- Fate/Grand Order:
- Galahad helped the heroes out at first by granting Mash Kyrielight his powers, but after Goetia is defeated, he suddenly washes his hands of the heroes and revokes Mash's powers, just as they have to save the world again.
- The Mages of the Wandering Sea refuse to do anything about the Foreign God wiping out humanity because they are safe from it. The most they do is allow Sion and the heroes to take shelter in their base, but they refuse to help them and request not to be bothered.
- The Merlin from Fate/Prototype refused to directly help King Arthur and refuses to help save humanity because she doesn't care.
- Final Fantasy X lampshades this with a merchant charging the party when a giant monster is rampaging outside. Even though the party points out that he'll die if they fail, he simply calmly says that he has confidence in the party and takes your money.
- Final Fantasy XIV has the nation of Sharlayan as an extremely Lawful Stupid version this. They refuse to get involved with the Seventh Umbral Calamity, outright abandon one of their own cities when the Garleans invade instead of resisting them despite having Alexander at the ready, and in Endwalker are shown refusing to do anything when the literal end of the world is happening. Sharlayan is so dedicated to not getting involved in anything that when one of their most revered scholars decided that it was their problem, they branded him a pariah and exiled him and later said scholar's son disowns his own children for continuing on. Note that not getting involved also includes things like not teaching outsiders anything, as the Astrologian quests show. Do that and you're likely to have an assassin sent your way.
- Soren from Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance especially. His first response to finding Princess Elincia is to suggest leaving her behind, and then handing her over to the invading armies because "It's none of our concern." By the next game, He Gets Better.
- In The Legend of Zelda games, the world's gonna be destroyed if the princess isn't rescued, whether she's been kidnapped, turned to stone, or vanished off the face of Hyrule. Since you, Link, are already dealing with it, nobody's worried. It's YOUR problem now. They even charge you for equipment vital to your quest. Averted on a few occasions, like Majora's Mask and Twilight Princess.
- In Life Is Strange, a grand total of one person (besides Max) is shown attempting to do anything to stop Kate Marsh from committing suicide and it's the school security chief (i.e. the guy whose job it is to handle such emergencies). Every other student is just standing around watching and a couple are actively taking video of it.
- Lost Judgment discusses the psychology of the Bystander Effect in one scene, especially in regards to highschool bullying, which takes up a significant subplot in the game. Yagami cites three excuses people subconsciously have in an incidentnote , comparing it to penguins who crowd at the edge of the water until the first one jumps in. In the case of the bullies, their victim, and the bystander students, Yagami uses hidden speakers and cameras in the room to taunt the bullies until the rest of the formerly inactive students unite against them.
- Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 have this trope as their entire premise. A rogue Spectre is rampaging around space with an army of Mecha-Mooks that haven't been seen for nearly 300 years, looking for a mysterious device linked to myths of a machine race that exterminated all life? Eh, we'll send a rookie Spectre and his/her Ragtag Bunch of Misfits after him. A mysterious group of aliens abduct hundreds of thousands of human colonists for unknown purposes? The only people who care are Shepard, the second Ragtag Bunch of Misfits he/she assembles, and the human-supremacist terrorist organization that funds him/her. The attack on the Citadel was led by a member of a species of Abusive Precursors and was attempting to ensure their return? It's clearly a geth creation, and Shepard is clearly delusional. Mass Effect 3 is essentially the biggest "I told you so" in history.
- The Central Theme of Persona 5 is examining, deconstructing, and defying this trope. The reason that the villains can get away with what they're doing is because a majority of Japanese society accepts the tragedy and injustice as a fact of life; they're too afraid, unwilling, or apathetic to do anything but keep their head down and hope that they're not next. Some are actively contributing to the injustice because it's easier than being good. One of the main goals of the Phantom Thieves is to inspire everyone to shake out of this apathy. The people of Japan briefly falling into this almost completely at the end is what causes the final boss to judge them (and humanity as a whole) as unworthy of existence and sparks the last confrontation of the game.
- One of the lyrics of Portal 2's ending song, Want you Gone, is "You're someone else's problem/Now I only want you gone".
- Tales of Berseria: The Abbey of Innominat exploit this trope ruthlessly. The Abbey, particularly Shepherd Artorias, preach "The many outweigh the individual" as their absolute philosophy. The masses lap it up, (wilfully mis-)interpreting this to mean they may have to tolerate some minor inconveniences to ensure others are looked after as well, since the Shepherd cares for them all. As Velvet is happy to point out, espousing this philosophy is actually an explicit admission that Artorias doesn't give a single solitary shit about anyone. He'll kill, disfigure, and imprison his own family, let people die in droves, allow horribly inhumane experiments, and cut off whole communities to starve or become daemon food (and does all of this in the first few hours of the game) without even feeling bad about it if it serves his vision for "the many". Of course, the many who are kept comfortable by this system reject her claims - after all, he takes good care of them - and the Abbey is consciously encouraging this viewpoint to operate freely while Artorias becomes a Villain with Good Publicity.
- Senel Coolidge from Tales of Legendia has this mindset at first. He acts as if the world revolve around Shirley, and if something unrelated to her is presented to him, he ignores them or at least tell him not to bugger him with it, pissing off many people, especially Chloe, though eventually he stopped obsessing about her completely. This one is so bad that in the Tales of the World, he gets a What the Hell, Hero? yell that he'd rather let the world be destroyed than just halting his search for Shirley, then he takes the hint (after all, if the world is destroyed, he can't even reunite with Shirley at all).
- This trope is why nobody helps Aeka with the horrible bullying she deals with in Yume Miru Kusuri. People realize she is suffering, but don't help her for fear that they will become targets. If the player picks her route, Kohei and her get so fed up with this that they leave school entirely.
