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Guilt-Based Gaming

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He's actually a different kind of hero.

"No! Don't leave me all alone inside your computer! You can't imagine the things your CPU does to me when you're not watching!"

Given that the popular press would have you believe all computer-related media were created by the powers of darkness, and that video games are all super-violent simulations that corrupt impressionable young minds, you'd think the last thing gamers would need on top of society's disapproval was more guilt.

Especially when it's the game itself that's trying to make you feel like the biggest Jerkass in the world.

Guilt-Based Gaming is when the game tries to deter or punish the player, rather than the character, for a certain course of action. The princess berating The Hero for failing to rescue her pet budgie doesn't really count — while the player might feel bad, it's the character being admonished. However, if the princess were to turn to the camera every time the gamer tries to quit and screech "How dare you think of leaving while my kingdom is in danger!", that's Guilt-Based Gaming.

The most popular methods of employing this trope are:

  • Discouraging messages on the "Are you sure you want to quit?'' dialogue box. This one is common in games and software in general (and admittedly does serve a useful purpose in allowing for people who might have pressed a button accidentally).
  • In-game characters complaining about your absence, mainly in games that run in real time.
  • Bad consequences if you don't live up to the game's "standards" (e.g. characters leave for good or fall out with you if you don't speak to them enough). Any pet simulation that isn't specifically geared towards children has your pet running away forever or dying if you neglect it.
  • Giving you the game over sequence if you save and quit (bonus points if It's a Wonderful Failure).
  • Staying logged out of an online game long enough might have in game characters being shown as missing you (even crying) or chastizing the player for their sudden absence on their next login.
  • Uninstalling the game might have in game characters being sad and being shown as missing you (even crying).

It's a petty, manipulative ploy that messes with the player's emotions without having to use the plot and writing to do so. It can be effective, acknowledging the player and making them into an integral part of the story... or it can be a cheap shot, making the player feel guilty for putting down the control pad to go and eat.

Either way, it's always a little weird to be scolded for letting a video game down. Morally.

Reactions to this trope can vary. Some people ignore it and do whatever they were going to do anyway, some come to dread hitting the "Quit" option on the save screen, some find it offensive and intentionally stop playing, and some may find they develop a compulsive urge to check in on their virtual pet every hour in case it's thrown a hissy fit in your absence. It can be somewhat amusing as well, since the game treats itself like Serious Business more than the player does.

Compare It's a Wonderful Failure (the results of a failure are shown), What the Hell, Player? (the game calls you out on being a jerk), You Bastard! (the game doesn't stop you, but you're reminded that you shouldn't be enjoying whatever you're doing), Anti-Rage Quitting (the game penalizes you for quitting mid-game, often in multiplayer games where quitting creates a problematic experience for other players), Anti Idling (the game tries to stop you from lollygagging, sometimes overlapping with this trope), Continue Your Mission, Dammit! (the game acts like there's a time limit when there isn't one, sometimes invoking this trope but more often not) and Continue Countdown (the game may combine these tropes to pressure a player to continue playing). Contrast Anti Poop-Socking, when the game is encouraging you to take a break from playing.

Has nothing to do with games where determining the guilty party is the main point. Or where you're curing GUILT.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Guilt-based idling 
  • In Baby Hazel, idling will provoke sad expressions and, in the case of the child characters, tears.
  • In Baldur's Gate games, characters will complain about the wasted time if they are left idle for too much time. Even your protagonist (who in-universe is the party leader, so the complaints of the companions would be directed at him/her!)
  • Notably averted in BioShock Infinite. If you stand still for a while, Elizabeth will wander away and start admiring the scenery, calling to you if she spots any items you missed. The developers have stated that they didn't feel the need to yell at the player for taking their time.
  • The Borderlands series: If you leave your character standing in one place too long, they start making remarks about it.
    • The first game, Borderlands:
      Mordecai: Now that you mention it, I DO love standing here doing NOTHING!
    • Borderlands 2:
      Salvador: As fun as watching Skags hump.
  • In the fourth Commander Keen game "Goodbye, Galaxy!", Keen has several idle animations. He'll first look up above him, then he turns to face the screen and glares at you, then he shrugs, and finally he sits down and pulls out a book. He'll keep flipping through the book's pages until you move him again.
    • An Easter Egg exists in the Pyramid of the Moons, where if the player idles on one of the many moon emblems scattered throughout the floor, Keen will moon the player. So clearly Apogee didn't want the player to feel too guilty.
  • In Conker's Bad Fur Day, If the player leaves Conker standing around, he will start performing a large variety of activities, one of which is asking the player if he/she is dead.
  • In DanceDanceRevolution X onwards, if you stall at the results screen or song select screen, the announcer will make snarky comments nagging you to advance to the next stage.
    "Dance, please! Daaaaaance!"
    "What is this, a golf tournament? Foooooooore!"
    "We're not playing cards here, we're dancing. Come on."
  • Destroy All Humans! combines it with a variant of Idle Animation: if you leave it on its main menu long enough without doing anything, Orthopox will start making snarky comments to the player about just leaving him waiting. Not as harsh as some other examples, since the game's only guilting you about leaving it running when you're not actually playing it. Plus, at least here the guilt trips are funny.
  • Duke Nukem 3D: "What are you waiting for? Christmas?"
  • Not guilt-based exactly, but a long pause in Dungeon Keeper 2 is greeted by the Mentor mocking you with "The very rock yawns with anticipation of your next fascinating move."
  • In early versions of Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Alyx would nag the player to keep moving if he stayed in an area too long. Playtesters quickly began to hate Alyx, so the feature was removed.
  • Side questing is necessary in the console version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to achieve 100% completion and for achieving certain helpful bonuses such as extended health meters that make it easier to finish the game. Some of the in-game instructions even encourage you to try side quests at certain times. However, any time you veer away from the main plot in favor of taking Harry, Ron, and Hermione off item-hunting or pursuing the side quests, even if the game itself just got through encouraging you to pursue a side quest, the two members of the trio whom you aren't directly controlling will whine and complain constantly about being dragged along. If it's the beginning of the day, they'll complain that you're wasting their time and they're going to be late getting to class, or whatever location the game wants you to go next. If you've met all your immediate goals and there's nothing else you have to do right then, they'll complain that they're really tired and want to go to bed (even if it's still the middle of the day).
  • More than one computer card game (Sierra's Hoyles Book Of Games for one) that features table talk between players will include increasingly irate messages as the other players assume you've walked away from the computer.
  • In Irisu Syndrome!, failing to score enough points will cause Irisu to cry. Keep performing poorly, and you get the first half of the game's Downer Ending.
  • In JumpStart 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain, the game will keep asking you why you're not doing anything. This is especially nerve-wracking during the scenes in the time machine, when Botley, sounding very urgent, will complain "Of all the times to freeze on me...we're so close!"
  • The Last of Us: If you stand still for a while, Ellie will begin to ask Joel to get with the program, getting more passive aggressive the longer Joel stands still.
    "Oh, nice, you're just gonna... just gonna hang out, do absolutely nothing."
    "Um... are you gonna do anything? Just gonna stare at me? Just gonna stand there? What are you doing?"
    "What are we doing? This is taking entirely too long - you doing nothing and walking around doing nothing... you are literally walking around in the same exact spot."
  • In the Solaris levels in MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, if you sit still in your Mech for too long, the announcer will make a snide comment about how hiding may be a good tactic for a mercenary, but it's not the way things work on Solaris.
  • In Nintendogs, if you don't interact with your dog for a while, it will start whining and barking for you to come back. Leave it alone long enough and it'll eventually run away (though it will come back once you tap on the screen).
  • Ōkami has a fringe example: in the first play-through of the game, if you don't press any buttons on the controller, Amaterasu will first sit down, then yawn, & finally lie down & take a nap. Then, later on you get an item that, when equipped, restores your health during the idle animation, at the cost of some of your in-game currency.
  • Pangya your caddies get mad at you for wasting time. It's a good thing though because your turns are timed.
  • The Pokémon Stadium games have the announcer complain when you don't make a move for a while. "What's the matter, Trainer?"
  • In Saints Row, recruited gang members will pester you if you stand around with them for too long. It's okay, you can promptly blow them away with a sawn-off if they complain. In Saints Row 2, your lieutenants will mouth off about whatever's on their mind if left to their own devices. In Saints Row: The Third, different recruitable characters can have conversations with each other.
  • One of the earliest examples: if you didn't press any of the buttons for more than a few seconds in the 2D Sonic the Hedgehog games, Sonic would glare at the screen and tap his foot impatiently. The levels do have a time limit, however, so this might be seen as more of a helpful reminder.
    • Sonic Spinball accompanies this with the HUD ticker reading "YO, MOVE IT!", and then "HEY, ANYBODY HOME?"
    • In Sonic the Hedgehog CD, if you waited for three minutes, Sonic would say "I'm outta here!" and jump off the screen, which would give you a Non-Standard Game Over.
    • In Sonic the Hedgehog 2, after going through the toe-tapping animation four times, Sonic would eventually lie down, looking at the player with a very bored expression. In Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, Tails yawns, and in Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Knuckles does some shadow-boxing.
    • In most of the 3D Sonic games, idling for a long period of time will result in the characters talking to themselves or, in the case of Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog, each other. This is normally more of an Easter Egg than anything, but in Shadow, a few of the things they say when you do this are heartbreaking. Especially painful is Charmy Bee's comment about wanting to go home and watch cartoons in Shadow's Prison Island... an innocuous line, until you consider that the planet is being invaded by aliens, who are shooting at 6-year-old Charmy as he looks for disks on an abandoned military base alone on the orders of the closest thing to parents he has, and the only one protecting Charmy is Anti-Hero Shadow.
    • In Sonic's appearance in LEGO Dimensions, after tapping his foot for a few moments, Sonic will recline on the ground ala Sonic 2. After a few moments more, he will fall asleep and dream of running.
  • In The Stanley Parable, if the player stays in the broom closet, the narrator will keep telling them to move on, eventually calling out to anyone passing that the player is dead.
    • This is more humourous than guilt-tripping, but it lampshades the fact that the person is trying to get the "Broom Closet Ending", hoping to guilt the person into looking for a different ending.
  • If you do nothing on the General Pepper submenu in Star Fox Adventures, Pepper tells you to stop wasting time.
  • Whack Your...: If you idle in "Whack Your Boss", a message pops up asking, "How much longer are you gonna keep this poor devil waiting?!".
  • In the original PC version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Regis would get increasingly impatient if you wasted time choosing a gameplay option or typing in your name. Wait long enough, and Reege gets so fed up that you automatically quit out of the program. This is odd, given how Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, unlike most game shows, had no time limit for answering questions.
    • This becomes Hilarious in Hindsight nearly a decade after its 1999 debut when the half-hour syndicated version added a time limit to each question.
  • In the X-Men Legends games, the player-controlled character will start complaining - loudly - if you idle for too long.
  • In You Don't Know Jack, the host will start berating you if you take too long to enter your name. If you wait even longer, he fills in a random name for you and makes fun of you some more.

    Guilt-based negligence 
  • In 3D Custom Girl, your virtual avatar will berate you for not visiting her if the game hasn’t been opened in a while. She cheers up quickly afterwards though.
    Girl: やっと来てくれた。待っていたんだからね。(Yatto kitekureta. Matte ita ndakara ne.) Translation 
  • Quite a few of Ambition’s mobile games use this.
    • Their simulation games (MOE Can Change!, Animal Boyfriend, the now defunct FairyDoll, and Dream Girlfriend/Boyfriend) punish the player for neglecting their character by making them sick, which not only keeps them from waking up for 12 hours, but also sharply tanks their affection and mood. This can be easily avoided by manually putting them to sleep before enough time has passed.note 
    • Did you neglect your virtual boyfriend for so long? Dream Boyfriend in particular guilts you by periodically sending notifications about how lonely your boyfriend is without you.
      [Boyfriend’s name]: ”It’s not fun going out on my own.
  • Animal Crossing uses Guilt-Based Gaming to reinforce the clock watching aspect of the game. As well as the fact that time and events will move on without you if you don't keep checking in, the animal residents will bemoan your absence when you do play again, or they will move away because you haven't spoken to them for so long. Try to quit without saving and a demented mole will spend five minutes berating you for your moral failure.
    • There's a rather heart-breaking YTMND about this, when someone checked in on their mom's game after she died.
    • The game sends you presents from "your mom" itself as events.
    • This comic gives an idea of what the town looks like after a few years of not being played. Then again, so does this one...
  • If you don't play iOS game Arctic Zoo for a while, your animals can get sick. The dialog that pops up says "Your [animal] has gotten sick. Do you want to buy medicine or do you want to let it die?" Medicine costs real money, of course.
  • In Baldur's Gate II characters will complain if you take too much time before going to solve their personal quest, giving you a warning, and leave the party if you still ignore it. They will effectively point out how your negligence is deleterious or even immoral, particularly when their family is involved. In some egregious cases they will complain even if you ignore a quest that is not directly related to them, but crosses their values: for example, Anomen, member of the holy Radiant Heart order of paladins, will pompously woe to you if you don't go to rescue the child of Garren Windspear from Firkragg's dungeon.
    • Deconstructed by the answers you can give in dialogues regarding the hurry you have to go save Imoen. Which is totally virtual, since you can go questing all around Amn for the whole time and nothing will happen until you effectively go to rescue her at your own discretion. There is no real urgency despite the plot saying so, you dictate the pace.
  • In Baldur's Gate III, one of your companions needs help of a particular kind, and neglecting their needs will lead to them seeking alternate means of help that will cost them, and you. Gale has a Fantastic Nuke embedded in his body, and he needs to absorb magical energy from enchanted artifacts to defuse it temporarily. If you take too long to help him with his condition, he will eventually announce to you that he found a better solution. Peering into his mind reveals that said solution was selling his soul to Raphael in exchange for defusing the nuke permanently. Either way, he doesn't need your help — or you — anymore, and he will leave your camp, never to return.
  • The Brain Age games have your floating-head-teacher remark on your absence if you don't play daily: "I didn't see you at all yesterday! It was sad!" If you haven't played in a long time: "Um... who are you again?"
  • A variant with toys happened with Cabbage Patch Kids. According to the backstory, every Cabbage Patch Kid was in danger of being enslaved by the evil Lavender McDade to work in her gold mine, and only adopting them could set them free. Hope your parents have a lot of money, kids, otherwise they'll be slaves forever!
  • Deus Ex: Invisible War makes you feel like this if you go straight to report to a girl's uncle that she's safe after uncovering a plot that is putting children in danger. To get to the uncle you have to practically walk past the police station, but it's hardly prominent. If you didn't make a report yourself, then her sick uncle breaks off the conversation and runs across town to do it himself.
  • Devil Survivor 2 combines this with permadeath: At key points in the game, Nicea predicts one of your friends' deaths and shows the video of that person getting killed. Brutally. If you choose to neglect that person, you get to see the poor fellow's last moments of life for yourself and you lose that character for the remainder of your playthrough.
  • If you stop playing Disney Infinity with a specific character for a few days, then log back in, the character's greeting message will express relief. "I thought you'd forgotten about your old buddy Jack ..."
  • In Dissidia Final Fantasy, after turning the game on for a long time neglecting it, you get the following note from the moogles: "Hm?—Oh! Insert Player Name Here! Well I'll be, I didn't think you were ever coming back! It's good to see you. Remember us every once in a while, would you? Everyone is eager to catch up."
  • In the Modular Epilogue of Fallout: New Vegas, places you've never interacted with, or characters/towns you've never completed missions for will often end up with their worst endings. For example, training an underachieving squad means that they'll receive special commendations for their exemplary work at the second battle for Hoover Dam. Otherwise, they would be court-martialed and hanged for deserting.
  • Farmville: While most of the animals don't mind it if you don't log on, if you go a day or more without feeding your dog while it's still a puppy, it'll run away. They can be rescued, but it costs real money.
  • If you continually ignore Hay Day's notifications, it'll send you one that says, "Your farm animals miss you!"
  • The arcade version of The Idolmaster had a feature where the idol could send emails to the player's real-life address, and some mails asked the player to play at a particular time, which would lead to a boost. The flipside of this is that if the player doesn't play for a long time they'll receive increasingly upset/worried mails from the idol asking them to come back.
  • Ingress:
    • If you go more than 12 hours without playing, the next time you start the game application, your scanner complains that it was "getting worried about you."
    • A portal's resonators lose 15% of their energy for each day that the portal's owners don't interact with it. If a resonator decays, the player who put down the resonator gets a notification in the COMM's Alerts tab.
  • The Iphone/Ipad game Lords & Knights starts sending you push notifications about being gone from your kingdom too long and that your subjects have need of you. Ditto with Kabam's Battle for the North Kingdoms of Camelot spinoff.
  • The Love Plus games run with real time, and if you didn't play the game for quite some time and start it up, the girl with the highest affection currently will tell you off for ignoring her for such a long time and you'd better make it up to her.
  • Mass Effect:
    • In Mass Effect 2, your fish will die if you don't feed them. But that's the least of your worries - if you dick around when your crew is kidnapped, many of them will die at the hands of the Collectors, and you'll get chewed out by the remaining survivors for taking your time. Dr. Chakwas always survives. Which means there is always a survivor to chew you out for letting everyone else die. Oh, and since the game won't tell you that doing the Derelict Reaper mission will trigger the crew's kidnapping, it's likely that you'll still have some Loyalty missions to finish, forcing you to choose between the safety of the Normandy crew and the ground team. At least you can finish the missions for Legion and one other squadmate before your crew's heads are on the chopping block. Both of these are based on in-game time, measured by completing missions; outside of combat, timed missions, and conversations that contain interrupts, you can leave the game idle with no ill effects.
    • In Mass Effect 3, if you don't talk to James Vega on the ship until after some important events or right before the final mission, he will call you out on it, accusing you of not caring about the common grunts.
  • Moshi Monsters: Not logging on in a while would drain the monster's "happiness" bar, as would going a long time without either shopping for virtual items or tickling the monster.
  • In the iPod/iPhone game My Virtual Girlfriend, the girlfriend will scold you for neglecting her if you don't go to the app daily. It will even accuse you of seeing other apps.
  • Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector has your current food gradually deplete over time as cats come to your yard. If you leave the game unattended for too long, your food will empty out and cats will stop visiting. Fortunately, since the premise is that the cats are just lured by the food to come to the yard to play, that's the only bad thing that happens. It is implied the cats would just find food elsewhere, so refilling the food bowls is all it takes to start attracting cats again.
  • Neopets seem to get hungry very quickly - you can stuff them until they're "bloated", then come back a day or two later to find them "starving" (complete with a picture of them crying). They'll never actually die, of course, but if your pet is very sad, there used to be a rare random event that can turn them to basic blue, putting all the effort you spent earning that expensive paint brush to waste. And it's a wonder that anyone puts their Neopet in the pound, given the massive guilt trip you're given if you try as your Neopet desperately pleads with you not to get rid of it. Even if you're just visiting the Pound's page, you have little pictures of your distressed pets above the button that asks if you want to get rid of them.
    • Very easily averted by putting your Neopet in the Neolodge. For a total of 140 neopoints per pet, you can have them bloated and happy for 28 days straight. No feeding required. While the Neolodge offers various different hotels that can cost up to 500NP per night for one pet, there are much cheaper ones that you can use, the lowest of which costing 5NP per night. You are also given a large selection of extra "services" that are an additional 5NP for each, per night; however, neither which hotel or which services will influence how full and happy your pet will be. Just leave them in Cockroach Towers with no extra services for a month with your pocket change, they'll be thrilled.
  • Nintendogs: Even if you can put them into the hotel, you've still gotta leave one out. Try donating a dog. The game does its best to make you feel like a monster.
  • A milder version for toddlers: Chirpy on a VTech "Learning Time Cuckoo Clock" (aka "My First Clock" in the UK) will get sick if you neglect feeding him for a few days. It will show a low-res animation of Chirpy on an IVR drip with a hot water bottle on his forehead. It will also go as far as disabling access to most of the games when that happens. However, being targeted for toddlers, Chirpy won't die no matter how long you neglect him, and gets well immediately after you feed him.
  • The Petz series is actually pretty fair about this. For any day where you don't even open the game, that day is considered to not even exist. Your petz don't age, but they don't mind, either. For any day where you do open the game, any petz not played with will be considered "neglected", and an excess of this will cause them to run away (and be lost forever — not that it matters).
  • Psypets on Psypets.net will die if left unattended, as will Powerpets on Powerpets.com, though they're at least nice enough not to get hungry when you're not online, so if you go on vacation and come back, they'll be fine.
  • The song "Rainbow Girl" is sung from the perspective of a character in a Dating Sim, who is in love with a gamer who has stopped playing her game in favor of new ones. It's downright heartbreaking.
  • If you don't log onto Roar for a while, the animals would either get bored (requiring their treat to be replaced), or get sick (requiring them to be medicated, and, if the player fails to do that, they'd be transferred to another, supposedly less negligent, park).
  • In Sally's Salon and Sally's Spa, failing to meet the quota for a level will cause the eponymous character to turn on the water works. She gets better in Sally's Studio.
  • If you release a chao in Sonic Adventure, you'll be treated to art of a hobo chao looking back at you sadly, three menus asking if you really want to release it, and this damned music.
  • In Spiritfarer, if Stella neglects to feed her sheep and keep them in corrals, they will eat her crops. Bruce and Mickey will also get mad at her for it, and their mood won't improve until she prevents her sheep from escaping.
  • Star Ocean: Till the End of Time has one NPC exclaim "Wow, I've not seen you in a while" if you do not use a particular function on the game's menu for a decent amount of in-game time.
    • Welch makes a allusion about taking a vacation for three years. On a saved game that hasn't been touched in 3 years, all inventors on Stand-by.
  • TouchPets Dogs on the iPod:
    • If you don't go on for a while, you return to a status updates saying "[dog's name] is lonely and needs to be played with!". If you leave push notifications on, this message will pop up even when you aren't running the app.
    • When food runs low (which happens a lot), the dog and the app will beg you for more food. Even if you don't have any.
  • If you don't use a particular character for a while in Warriors Orochi 3, they will complain about this. Conversely, if you've been using someone a lot, they'll boast about their prowess.
  • Project Mirai:
    • Spend more than a week without playing the game, and your partner will turn around on the partner selection menu. The next time you visit that partner they will give you an angry glare followed by a cold shoulder, and the game will soft-lock until you apologize (by repeatedly either pressing the "I'm sorry..." button or using the voice controls to say it yourself).
    • If you stop playing for more than a week, every partner that you have reached the first level of friendship with (as evidenced by dots on their selection image) will be angry at you.
  • Tamagotchi: If you don't tend to your Tamagotchi, it will die. On later versions, extra animations appear if the Tamagotchi is left alone for too long (sulking in the corner, begging for food, etc.).
  • In most Facebook games by Zynga, you'll be guilted into coming back to check on your cafe/farm/whatever, because if you don't do so in a timely matter, whatever you were working on rots and it doesn't earn you any money or experience points. While most of Kabam's games lack this, if you run out of food in one of their games, your troops will desert you and you'll lose a ton of might, unless Kabam is doing something and has disabled troop desertion.

    Guilt-based quitting 
  • Trying to exit Airport Mania? The game will warn you that if you quit, there won't be anyone directing air traffic and the planes won't be able to land!
  • This is true of most arcade fighting games, as the countdown screen shows your character's bloody, beaten face (occasionally with increasingly despairing animation cycles as the timer ticks down).
  • 20XX has a few responses for confirming that you're quitting the run (saving and quitting after killing a boss has a different set of responses). One of the more direct is "CONFIRM SELECTION: YOU ARE A QUITTER".
  • In 3D Custom Girl, your virtual dress-up girl will bid the player goodbye when they quit the game. Depending on how long the game’s been running, this ranges from sadly bidding you goodbye to cheerfully waving you off, all before she gets pulled back into her virtual world and the game exits.
  • Quitting in The 7th Guest prompted Stauf to scream, "COME BAAAACK!!" at the player.
  • In American McGee's Alice, you have to click "yes" in a screen with a picture of the Mad Hatter saying "Running away, are we?" if you want to exit the game.
  • Aladdin (Capcom) uses a screen where you can either continue the game or quit, with the Genie holding a string in both hands for those options. He smiles if you decide to continue, so it's obvious what the other option does.
  • Rather than using quit prompts for this trope, the Amnesia games developed by Frictional Games have achievements for quitting to main menu in an early area, with the descriptions going among the lines of:
    NOPE/Nope, Merci!: Left when things were getting interesting.
    Nope, c’est trop!: Quit the game right as things got interesting.
  • The quit screen in Anna's Quest says "Do you really want to leave Anna by herself?"
  • In Aquaria, or at least the demo, the last thing you hear when you quit the game is a gasp of "No!" presumably from Naija. When you reach the end of the demo and the previews of the full game's content have played out, the game automatically quits. It's more irritating than convincing, especially since it feels out of place.
  • In Banjo-Kazooie, choosing to save and quit results in a cutscene in which Gruntilda steals Tootie's beauty, turning her into a fat, ugly monster. This also occurs when getting a game over, but you don't feel as guilty about that. The player also has to see this at the end of the 360 version's demo.
  • In Bayonetta, if you choose "No" on the Continue screen, dozens of hands come up out of the ground and pull the eponymous witch down to Hell, while she screams at the top of her lungs.
  • The menu and options in The Binding of Isaac are all made to look like they were written by an eight-year-old boy (Isaac himself). If you click "Quit", a small, filthy piece of paper appears, which reads "Are you sure you want me to die?"
  • BitBuddy: The titular virtual pet outright tells you that if you quit the game or close the window, he will die. He's not kidding, and if you do so, he will actually die.
  • The flash Tower Defence Bloons Tower Defense 5 has "If you quit, the bloons win!" as the quit message. Either way, the bloons will win, as the game becomes an Endless Game after beating the difficulty level.
  • In Blue's Journey (Raguy in Japan), the continue screen will have Princess Fa tearfully pleading the player to continue the game, with Blue being carried by Mooks in the background. If the player lets the timer go down, she will call them a monster.
  • Bookworm Adventures features a very sad Lex (the titular bookworm) pleading "Don't leave me!" when you try to quit.
    How can you say no to such a cute face?
  • In Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time, if you exit a level without collecting any clocks or golden carrots, Merlin will scold you:
    Merlin: Nice try, but you haven't found any clocks! How can you expect to return home this way?
  • Trying to quit in the middle of a Strike Force mission in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, alongside the usual "are you sure" message, actually warns you that you will lose whatever forces are currently deployed if you try again or attempt a different mission.
  • Hovering over the quit icon in Camelia's Locket: The Tale of Dead Jim Cane displays the message "Turn tail and run like a scurvy dog!"
  • Most of the quit messages in Chex Quest 3 (possibly as a nod to Doom, the engine used). The best three are probably "Don't abandon the Intergalactic Federation of Cereals!", "The Real Chex(R) Warrior wouldn't give up so fast!", and "I hope you're just taking a break for Chex(R) Party Mix."
  • The quit screen of Chuzzle has one of the titular and insanely adorable critters crying... Just how are we supposed to exit the game after seeing something so heartbreaking?
  • Civilization:
  • Retroactive example: during the ending of Contact, the Professor informs you that he and the boy kept on living every time you turned off the game.
  • In the original Croc for the PlayStation, selecting the "no" response after losing all your lives "treats" you to an image of a depressed looking Croc, lowering his head and sadly trudging away, his faithful bird companion following suit...
  • Hovering over the quit button in Cropbusters changes the picture of a happy sunshiny farm into a decrepit rainy one.
  • Quit Dead In Vinland and the confirm dialog reads "This lovely Viking family won't survive long without your guidance. But then, you probably have something better to do."
  • The quit screen in Desktop Dungeons says "Really leave the Kingdom of Hello, [Insert Name Here]? How will it survive without your precious administrations?"
  • Flo in Diner Dash 5 shows a sad face waving goodbye as you leave, thinking you won't help her rebuild the diner.
  • Dino D-Day has some from all of its numerous human and dinosaur classes. The human ones tend to be more straight examples while the dinosaur ones (translated, of course) usually has to do with how they're hungry.
  • Doki Doki Literature Club!: An interesting example - after most of the game is destroyed, leaving you and Monika alone in the classroom, if you quit the game, when you next open it Monika will complain that whenever you exit the program, it plunges her into a hell of lights and noise where she is unable to move or act in any way. She eventually softens the blow and says that she understands you have your own life to live, but requests that you not leave her like that any longer than you have to.
  • If you quit in Donkey Kong 64, a cinematic plays of K. Rool preparing to blow up DK island. He goes through with it in his Final Smash.
  • Don't Starve:
    • In the base game, "Wilson will miss you!"
    • In the All's Well that Maxwell update, this was changed to "Maxwell will miss you!"
    • In Don't Starve Together, "Charlie will miss you!"
  • The quit screen in Dr. Germ says several different things, among them "Where will I find another assistant?", "I can't save the world by myself!" and "I get so...lonely while you're gone."
  • Rogue-like RPG, Dungeons of Dredmor, says this upon the player exiting: "Please don't go. The Diggles need you. They look up to you."
  • EarthBound (1994) is in fact the opposite. The game keeps encouraging you to take a break, though it still refers to not doing so as "working hard", which sends some mixed messages.
  • Hovering over the "no" button on Farm Mania 2's quit screen makes the game's sheep mascot's ears twitch and its tail wag, while hovering over "yes" makes it shed a tear.
  • The prompt to cancel a subscription in Final Fantasy XIV is accompanied by a picture of a moogle with a look of sad resignation on their face.
  • Final Fight's Game Over screen is similar, with your character tied to a chair in front of a lit bundle of dynamite, desperately trying to writhe his way loose from his bonds or blow out the fuse before time runs out. If you put in a quarter and hit start, a knife thrown in from offscreen cuts the fuse, and your character breathes a sigh of relief. The sequels varied the Death Trap, with the characters about to be crushed by a Descending Ceiling, or drowned by rising water.
  • The quit screen in Gardens Inc: From Rakes to Riches says "Are you sure you want to quit? Jill still needs your help..."
  • Garfield: Caught in the Act: When the player loses all of his or her lives and has continues, they will be treated to a screen of Garfield clinging to the TV screen, desperately wanting to get out of the TV World. He watches with a frightened look as the player makes the choice between "Yes" and "No" and the countdown decreases. When the player chooses "No" or the timer runs out, the TV forms a mouth and eats Garfield, then snickers, having ensured that Garfield will never return to his home to see his friends and family again.
  • When challenged by another player on the GGPO fighting game emulation service, you can choose to either accept the challenge or "wimp out."
  • The original Heavy Gear video game had this. Quitting to the desktop in the middle of a mission was represented by "Flee to Windows," and the confirmation screen only had "Confirm your Cowardice." If you went through with it, you're treated to a shot of your Gear self-destructing as the game quits to Windows.
  • Heavy Weapon has a "message" from your superior whenever you try to quit, such as "There's only one thing worse than a traitor, and that's a quitter!", "Are you going to let the Red Star win this time?" and "Will you abandon our allies at their time of greatest need?"
  • Hovering over the "no" button on Heroes of Hellas 4: Birth of Legend's quit screen shows a smiling Hermes on a bright yellow background, while hovering over "yes" shows him depressed on a black background.
  • In Higurashi: When They Cry Matsuribayashi-Hen, the last episode of the saga, a character breaks the fourth wall near the beginning of the game and quite clearly speaks to you, the player, asking for your help to get them out of the "Groundhog Day" Loop. She says that, if you don't get them through the events of the game and to the Good End, they will never be able to save themselves. And also that, if you uninstall the game, you will seal their fate forever.
  • id Software added humor to Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D by having the games state something ridiculous when you tried to quit. Some of them were rather mocking, like "Press N for more carnage. Press Y to be a weenie." Some were outright threats, such as the following from Doom 2:
    Go ahead. Leave. When you come back, I'll be waiting with a bat.
    You're lucky I don't smack you for thinking about leaving.
    • At least one actually agrees to quit the game, saying: "Let's beat it, this is turning into a bloodbath!"
    • Doom³ asks if you're running away when you quit.
    • Strife, another early FPS based on the Doom engine, would have a little mocking sound bite by the game's characters when you shut down the game. Among them were "Fine, just kill and run!" "You can quit... but you can't hide...," and "Wha, what's the matter? Mommy says dinnertime?"
    • Ubiquitous as Doom game mods are, it's no surprise that the majority of them have modified the quit messages to suit the author's sense of humor or the atmosphere of the mod.
      Sonic Robo Blast 2: You're trying to say Sonic2K6 is better than this, aren't you?
  • When you went to quit The Incredible Toon Machine, it asked, "Return to Reality?" Your choices were a big oval spotlight (or something) colorfully proclaiming, "NO!" or a small, rectangular, gray box reading "affirmative".
  • All of the Infinity Engine games (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment) delivers a prompt saying something discouraging if you try to exit them with Alt-F4. "Do you really want to quit? Boo will miss you..." from the second Baldur's Gate is probably the most famous of them.
  • In the FPS/adventure game Isle of the Dead, attempting to quit gives the prompt "Taking the coward's way out?" Confirm, and you get a brief scene of the protagonist blowing off his own head with a rifle you normally get later on (regardless of your current progress). Oh, and then a mad scientist cackles evilly with lightning flashing outside his lair (which you also see every time you die).
  • Katawa Shoujo makes sure that you don't quit by putting a sad picture of Hanako, as if exiting the game will make her cry. When you choose to return to the main menu, the window will have a picture of a frowning Shizune. The question is normal, but it implies "Look, Shizune is so like judging you for 'quitting', do you want to disappoint her even further?". And if you're playing Shizune's path or aiming for it... uhm, good luck with that.
  • When attempting to quit Killing Floor, it will note that "You can run. But they'll find you before dawn." Killing Floor 2 adds a few more, both for leaving a game for the main menu (stuff like "Abandoning the fight already?") and for closing the game entirely (things like "They're going to find you either way. They'll find you and they'll eat your heart, like a fleshy little snack.").
  • If you try exiting Kitty Powers' Matchmaker, Kitty will complain about the lonely people who still need your help to find love.
  • In the Lamb Chop's Play-Along CD-ROM game Lamb Chop Loves Music, entering the Quit menu causes Lamb Chop to disappointedly ask if you're sure you're leaving already. If you pick “no”, she cheers, but if you pick “yes”, she says goodbye with noticeable resignation in her voice.
  • In keeping with the cooperative aspect of Left 4 Dead, every time you attempt to leave a game, you get a confirmation dialog with the sentence, "You'll be letting your teammates down..." While understandable when playing online, it also pops up in single player. Since the AI survivors do their best in giving you pills, sacrificing their health packs to help you recover, and helping you get up when you're down, it is hard not to feel a tad guilty for leaving. The "letting down your teammates" message even pops up if you load the credits and decide to end it early.
  • Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards: If you try to quit the game, Larry will beg you not to do that, saying that you can't imagine the things the CPU does to him when you're not watching.
  • At the end for the demo of LIMBO, It will show the main character getting picked up by a large spider, seemingly to his death, and the game stops with the word 'Continue?', with the options being 'Unlock Full Game' and 'Abandon The Boy'.
  • In Lords of the Realm 2 the normally monotonic narrator will sound downright surprised and indignant when he asks to confirm, "Exit the game, my lord?!?"
  • Clicking on the quit button in Magic Haven: Escape From Imhotep displays a picture of the title villain standing gloatingly over some creatures in cages, with the caption "Leaving? Excellent! Your magic friends will serve at my pleasure until you return."
  • The quit menus in the PC versions of all three Max Payne installments have Max making appropriately noir-style comments, in line with his constant narration in the games themselves.
    "The Valkyr-case was anything but closed."
    Don't quit: "I couldn't stop. I had to push on."
    Quit: "But I was too tired to go on."
  • MechWarrior 2: Instead of "Quit", it said "Flee to Windows". When you pressed it would ask you "Embrace cowardice?" The sequel, Mech Warrior 2: Mercenaries, instead had "Sell out?" as its exit question.
  • Hovering over the "Quit" icon in the main menu of Metro 2033 causes the two mercs in the background to say various derogatory things about you.
  • MegaRace has three possible cutscenes from host Lance Boyle when you quit. Two play it straight and one is an inversion, and which one you get depends on the circumstances of your last race:
    • Quit after losing a race, or before winning at least five without a Game Over: "The Enforcer can't take the heat, huh? It's because of quitters like him that vicious speed gangs miss out on a wonderful rehabilitation program developed by New Directions in Meat, Incorporated, makers of Bleed, the candy bar poor folks love to be a part of!note  Tune in next time to MegaRace, where we'll have a real Enforcer to admire! I'm Lance Boyle, and you'd be, too, if you were me."
    • Quit after dying: "Look at that loser crawl away to die! I'm sorry, people, but that's the end of our show. And be sure to tune in next time, when maybe we'll have a winner to worship on VWBT's MegaRace! I'm Lance Boyle, and that's who you'd be if you weren't somebody else."
    • Quite after winning at least five in a row without a Game Over: "Hey! Doesn't time fly when you're watching low-lifes die? Heh-heh-heh, just kidding. We'll let our Enforcer get some well-earned rest now. Tune in next time to MegaRace, where our tough guy takes it all the way! I'm Lance Boyle, and if you were me, that's who you'd be."
  • In the PC CD-ROM based Monty Python and the Holy Grail game, bringing up the quit menu has a narrator asking "Are you sure you want to do that? Your friends will call you a big sissy." Clicking 'yes' will prompt the narrator to say "Oh, you big sissy!"
  • The continue screen of Mortal Kombat 4 has your character falling down a pit. If you don't insert quarters to continue, they get impaled by spikes at the bottom of the pit. Five seconds of this music are more than enough to make you pop in another quarter.
  • The quit screen in My Life Story says "Are you sure you want to quit? Your boss won't like that."
  • The quit screen in Mystery Case Files 10: Fate's Carnival says "Are you sure you want to leave? Madame Fate will be disappointed."
  • Neopets: Trying to disable your account shows a Neopet with a sad expression saying, "Don't you want me?".
  • In Night at the Hospital, trying to close the program from anywhere but the title menu brings up the disturbing message "Do you really think you can leave that easily?" and if you do it in the middle of a game it asks you, "Are you really that much of a coward?"
  • The early Ninja Gaiden arcade game's Game Over screen featured Ryu strapped to a table with a buzzsaw being lowered while presumably hungry demons eagerly watch. Even worse, you saw him look left and right, panic in his eyes, as he waited for you to put in more quarters.
  • The Half-Life spin-off Opposing Force had one. Rather than the usual "Are you sure you want to quit?" found on Half-Life and Blue Shift, you get a box saying "You're going AWOL on me, son?"
    • The mod, Sven-Coop also had a unique message trying to quit saying: "You think you can quit this easy?"
  • In Outlaws, hovering your mouse over "Exit" in the pause menu will play a sound of a chicken clucking.
  • If you quit in the first game of the Outpost franchise, the game asks you "Ready to leave Outpost?" Choose "Yes", and you get a cinematic of your planet blowing up.
  • The Quit option on many Paradox Interactive games (particularly those using the Europa Universalis engine) is called "Surrender." This is Egregious in the Hearts of Iron series, which is a World War II simulator.
  • When quitting in Peggle, Bjorn puts on a sad face as he asks if you're leaving. Averted in the DS version, where you don't have to manually exit out.
  • In Pokémon Stadium 2, the cursor on the minigames pause menu is a Pikachu head. If you select "quit", the cursor cries.
  • Sierra's Quest for Glory I: So You Want To Be A Hero? would react to a quit attempt with "Quitting, huh? How about a slice of quiche?" which is nothing compared to what they say when you die...
  • Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal had an interesting form of this. If you go to the options screen, where the "Quit" function is, you see Captain Qwark on the chair, looking at the TV screen that indicates the "option" highlighted. The screen before the quit button? Qwark is stuck in the TV, looking AT YOU as though he wants out. The quit button itself? Qwark is gone, the TV turned off.
  • Rise of the Triad was probably the most over-the-top, where quitting was equated with suicide. You would be asked to swallow cyanide, drive off a cliff, drop a guillotine on yourself, and such and if you did quit, they'd play sound effect of just that happening. note 
  • Saints Row 2: If you quit in the middle of Zombie Uprising, it says "Are you sure you want to quit? You'll release the apocalypse into the world!"
  • Downplayed on Seusville. Clicking on one of the external links results in the message, "Are you sure you want to go this way? Wouldn't it be better to stay and play?".
  • Hovering over and clicking the "yes" button on Shopmania's quit screen makes main character Lewis burst into a comically exaggerated flood of tears.
  • Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri has the announcer's robotic voice saying, as soulfully as a robotic voice can, "Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you." It doesn't do this every time, though. Of note, it won't say this if there are no drones in your society, apparently the Tallents don't care if you live or die!
    • Surviving Mars also references the drones looking up to you when you quit (though only as text; it's not voiced).
  • The in-game manual for SimEarth lists the effects of all menu options.
    Quit: This will implode your monitor, possibly doing you severe bodily harm.
  • Speedy Gonzales: Los Gatos Bandidos had a rather horrifying continue screen: as the timer ticks down to zero, you see the menacing silhouette of Sylvester bearing down on a hapless, innocent mouse. The music gets more and more frantic, climaxes with a Last Note Nightmare, and finally fades to black on the poor mouse's fate. And then the Game Over screen implies that all of Speedy's friends are dead.
  • The quit screen in Spooky Bonus says "Please don't go! Old Town still needs you. Are you sure you want to quit?"
  • At the main menu of Stay Tooned!, simply hovering over the Quit icon makes a baby cry.
  • Taken to quite the degree in Street Fighter IV and Super SSFIV. Your character is panting heavily, barely able to stand but still trying to not give up, and once the time runs out, they collapse to the floor in despair and anger, often screaming or punching the ground. The only one who's calm is Cody, who just lays down on the ground for a nap.
  • In Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, selecting "Quit" at the continue screen results in Yoda admonishing you, "That is why you fail."
  • Team Fortress 2 inverts this, with the Scout having a line Breaking the Fourth Wall by telling the other players to ragequit. There is even an achievement for making someone quit. Granted, however, that these are not actually making you quit, but your buddies.
  • The Game Over screen of Toki shows your girlfriend on a screen saying "Help! You've got to keep playing or I'll be killed, please save me!" When the timer to put more quarters is half consumed, she starts crying.
  • Inverted with Totally Mad, a CD-ROM set that contained all of the then-released issues of MAD. When asked to confirm if you wanted to quit the program, choosing "yes" would be followed with cheers and applause.
  • In Transarctica the only way to quit is by picking up the revolver on your character's desk and committing suicide, followed by a screen about your body being found by your followers in the morning.
  • While it doesn't insult the player directly, the "Quit" dialogue box in Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War has "COWARDS DIE IN SHAME" printed in big letters at the top of the box. Reeeeal subtle... but considering the setting, it does fit perfectly.
    • An earlier game, Chaos Gate, asks if you're going to "Betray the Emperor?" whenever you quit.
  • The main menu in Welcome to Bummertown has a "Give Up" button instead of a "Quit" button.
  • The Game Over sequence of Wild Fang has The Hero trapped in the jaws of a dinosaur, desperately struggling to not be Eaten Alive as the jaws close. If the player puts no quarters, he's Fed to the Beast and an enemy cuts in, "saying" "NO FUTURE!"
  • Dying in The Wonderful 101 (which happens a lot, by the way), will have whichever Wonderful One you died as coming out of and crying over their fallen body as a ghostly angel with a Flatline in the background. Selecting "No" when asked to continue will prompt a message asking you if you're really sure you want to quit. Select "Yes" on this prompt and the weeping angel ascends to Heaven with a ding.
  • If you cancel your account in World of Warcraft, a crying orc peon appears, the game's way of begging you to change your mind. It was probably intended to be mostly funny, but it could still make you feel pretty crummy.
    Aww, look. You've made the peon cry.
    • Confirm your cancellation, and the subsequent email that follows makes a comment that you've absolutely devastated the peon, but the game understands that you've made your choice and will keep your data in case you change your mind.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown:
  • The quit screen in Zuma's Revenge says "Are you sure you wish to quit? This will make the mighty Zuma angry!"

    Guilt-based shunning 
  • In Baldur's Gate your companions will complain if you remove them from the party. Some will be very sad, like Imoen saying that you were friends, or Ajantis saying that you were a team. Others will be pissed off. In some cases they will be so angry that they will leave for good, if your reputation or deeds didn't match their alignment.
    • Downplayed in the sequel Baldur's Gate II, where most characters will acknowledge the removal only stating that you can meet each other on some location, sometimes even saying that it was a good time spent together. However, there are still some cases that can make you feel guilty, like Imoen mentioning your lack of gratitude in the starting dungeon, Nalia saying how she didn't want to leave the party now that things started to work, or particularly Jaheira and her very emotional farewell.
  • In Baldur's Gate III, asking a companion to leave your party and stay at camp will lead to them voicing their disappointment. Some will take it better than others: Wyll and Gale question whether its a good idea, Shadowheart and Lae'zel snark about it, and Karlach and Astarion sound genuinely crestfallen.
  • Firing a baseball player in the NES Baseball Stars shows a brief vignette of the player walking off into the sunset.
  • The dancers in Dance Central will make snide comments about your low score at the end of the song if you put in 0 effort.
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • Certain characters will leave if they disagree with your actions, of course, but one character in particular will either betray or fight for you if you win him over (and really, all it takes is a few dialogues). Plus, if you ever try to break up with one of the romances or send away followers that have become loyal to you...well, let's just say you want to have a recent save on hand, or you'll be bound to regret that decision.
    • When you're selecting your party, deselecting someone results in them looking dejected and cursing (mildly).
      Shale: Pigeon crap!
    • In Dragon Age II, you have the opportunity to return Fenris to his former master and to turn Isabella over to the Qunari to avoid fighting the Arishok. You will catch hell about it and you will feel guilty. Anders is the only one who approves betraying Fenris.
  • In Earth 2160, firing a Hero Unit makes them angry.
  • EarthBound (1994) has an instance where one of Jeff's classmates has gift-wrapped a bunch of cookies for a birthday party. Gift-wrapped presents are the main source of loot in this game, so you might think that one of them has something good. If you do open them, not only will you find nothing good, but the classmate will say that he 'can't believe you'd do something so nasty'.
  • Fallout
    • Fallout 3 doesn't guilt trip frequently, but any time you try to disband a follower, they give you a mopey confirmation dialog. Dogmeat lets out a forlorn, inquisitive whine. The bad-boy ex-raider acts incredulously abused. The friendly super mutant tries to act nice, but comes off as really cynical. Your snarky slave wipes the smirk off her face and gives you 'But..but...what did I do?' puppy-dog eyes. Even the damn robot acts like you're throwing him to the wolves!
    • Not so much for Fallout: New Vegas if you progress far enough into the story line. When you reach the city of New Vegas, you have the option of using the Lucky 38 Casino as your home base, with the added benefit of sending your companions there instead of where you found them. For example, sending Boone back to Novac will have him say "Well, I guess I'll go there, try to figure out what to do with myself. See you around" , while sending him to the Lucky 38 will have him simply say "I'll make my way there", with no guilt at all. This holds true for the rest of the companions, with some even getting excited if you send them to the Lucky 38 (it is a really nice hotel).
    • Fallout 4 strikes a balance between 3 and New Vegas. Simply asking companions to disband yields very few guilt-based responses: your companion may bemoan you parting ways, but in most cases, they'll invite you to find them later and team up again when you're ready. As for exchanging one companion for another, the two companions in question will share dialogue with each other, sometimes with friendly banter (such as MacCready and Cait flirting, or Piper and Nick Valentine playfully ribbing each other) while being displeased other times (exchanging Danse with a synth companion or the synth-sympathizing Deacon). Dogmeat still whimpers sadly, but most companions will apologize to him or reassure him his owner is in good hands...except for Cait, who calls Dogmeat a "dirty little mole rat".
  • In Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, kicking NPCs out of your party (or refusing to let them join) can be a heart-wrenching experience. A level 10 or more party member will be polite, but a low level guy will be miserable. A top-level MVP will just be mad. The Final Fantasy Tactics remake for the PSP makes it even more guilt-based for kicking out a monster, who obviously can't talk, but it still "looks at you pleadingly, as if asking to stay" or "doesn't seem to understand that you want it to leave". Come on!
  • Mass Effect 2 gives you the option to end any romance that you have entered into. The response from your paramour will be heartbreaking. Breaking up with Thane, a dying man and widower, will make you hope you have a recent save file on hand to go back to.
  • Dismissing a Felyne helper in Monster Hunter will cut to a black screen with the Felyne tearfully walking away all alone, then pausing as it asks you if you're really sure. Say no, and it'll joyfully run back to you as the screen turns bright and fills with flowers. Say yes, however, and it'll run off into the distance, crying its little eyes out.
  • Moshi Monsters: Failing to feed an ice cream cone to a monster, or feeding them the wrong kind, on the "Ice Scream Parlour" game will result in them getting mad at the player.
  • Neopets:
    • In the game "Petpetsitter", failing to attend to a petpet's needs on time will make it disappear into thin air. This is logical, if a little cruel, for the needs that could be fatal in theory (such as hunger and the broken robots), but makes little sense for the mundane needs, like needing to sleep or use the bathroom.
    • In "Slushie Slinger", if you don't give a customer a slushie before they reach the counter, they will angrily storm away.
    • If you don't give a Meepit its juice in time in "Meepit Juice Break", it will die.
  • In NieR: Automata, you can run away from certain plot-important battles and abandon your allies. This will lead to message like "All androids met their demise. Except the really selfish ones." and the credits will zoom by in one second.
  • No Umbrellas Allowed can chastise you for commuting to and from work by flying bus if you use it to skip the demonstration at Elevator Bridge. Customers will then call you out for it, threatening that your ignorance to the economic inequality between Junuk and Singsing makes you no different from an Avarice Criminal, and that it'll become your downfall. If you continue ignoring the protests and accumulating wealth, you'll be tagged with a Pre-Avarice Criminal Badge, increasing your risk of getting arrested unless you can pay for a lawyer to bail you out. If you earn more than 50k Vana, a cyberattack steals half of your money from you as part of a relief scheme for the impoverished, although AVAC pays it back to you towards the end of the day.
  • Planet Coaster will try to make you feel like a huge dick if you fire any one of your employees. Fire them and watch them sadly trudge to the exit of your park. It's enough to make you want to keep a low turnover rate. Checking their thoughts will also yield messages like "What do you mean, 'fired'?!"
  • In Shin Megami Tensei games where your demons can change skills, if you refuse to let a demon change skill they'll protest. Even if it's a skill change to a skill that brings absolutely no benefit (e.g. a Pleorma skill for an element that the demon has no skills of). They still accept your decision though, even if it's out of reluctance. Generally, despite its well-deserved reputation for grim storytelling, the series isn't quite as sadistic about this in its demon negotiation and fusion mechanics as it could be. Specifically the games rarely push the player into considering the uglier ramifications of demon fusion (in fact, there are demons who in negotiations reveal that they would look forward to being fused). Even when you fuse your pet dog with a demon in Shin Megami Tensei I, any guilt is left entirely to the player's imagination. That said, Shin Megami Tensei IV cranks it up a notch by introducing a new way to win over demons in negotiation: letting them kill a demon in your party or your stock they don't like. If you say yes, you'll hear a blood-curdling scream. Still, the only real penalty for doing this is having to go through the trouble of reviving and healing the sacrificed demon.
  • In The Sims (any version), if your Sim is friends (or higher) with another Sim, and does not talk to that Sim every so often, the relationship drops until it will be as though the two Sims had never even met.
  • Your cards in Swordgirls become sad if you try to trade them out of your deck for other cards and will beg you to let them stay.
  • In the Facebook-based game The Sims Social, running out of energy plays a sad tune, likely forcing the player to have to buy or get more energy. Problem is, hearing that every single day can be grating.
  • In Terrible Triplets, if you fail to change one of the babies, clean up their vomit, or feed them promptly, they will cry. Justified, since that's how babies behave in real life.
  • One of the routes in the visual novel Yume Miru Kusuri involves saving a girl from being bullied. Midway through the other two routes you are told that she attempted suicide.

    Other 
  • Some software programs (mostly ones used for free trials) may ask you why you are uninstalling the program. One program actually has an option that says, "I don't want to tell you."
  • A technical example occurs with banner adverts for various Internet games that encourage the viewer to participate in the game. Otherwise, that poor puppy with the sad eyes is gonna stay in that cage!
  • Ai To Yuuki To Kashiwamochi (or Love Mochi, as its official English title is) has a variant on this; after the player completes a certain number of games, the heroine Ai goes "missing" from every screen in the game. On the instructions page, however, she is replaced with the text "Go for 50,000 points!". Nothing worse happens if you don't score that high, but if you've gone through the cutscenes chances are you're going to want to bring her back.
  • Walk into a laser wall in the final dungeon in Albion and you'll be told everyone in the party suffers a quick painless death.
    • Remember, nobody give a skilled healer a life sentence just because she couldn't save one patient. Especially not in an accident prone mining town where monsters come out of the ground if you don't perform the necessary ritual. Think of that before releasing Nelly, or you'll be greeted by a crying girl she orphaned the next time you return to Umajo Kenta. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero indeed.
  • ALTER EGO (2018):
    • If you try to restart after reaching the true ending, Es pleads with you not to reset her precious memories.
    • She will also plead for you to help her in the SUPER EGO ending and asks for forgiveness in the ID ending.
  • Animal Crossing:
    • The game has a... unique take on preventing Save Scumming. Upon resetting, you immediately get set upon (har har har) by Mr. Resetti, who proceeds to unleash a can of Motor Mouth ranting on you. The more you reset, the harsher and longer his rants get; in fact, if you reset too many times, he threatens to reset your game, then pretends to do so.
    • The Animal Crossing series has guilt-based town deletion confirmations. When you select the option to rebuild a town, the game will remind you that the town on your current save file will be erased, as will all the inhabitants. In most games, one of the town's inhabitants will panic when you first select the option, and will tell you what rebuilding a town entails with the fear and anxiety of someone who believes The End of the World as We Know It is nigh. In the GameCube game, the inhabitant will even flat-out say that no one in the town will survive. This is downplayed in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where deletion options are limited to deleting a resident's registration: the island and the inhabitants will remain, but not only will the player's home and belongings be deleted, but all of the inhabitants' memories of the player will also be erased, as Tom Nook spells out matter-of-factly. There is no way to delete the "Resident Representative", the main player for the game; nor are there options in the game for actually deleting the island, which can only be done by deleting the game's save data from the Switch's storage.
  • One achievement you can get early in APICO tells you to "Plant Some Darn Trees" after cutting down many for wood because you annoyed the forest spirits.
  • In Area 51, the Game Over scene is horrific as you watch one of your fellow comrades turn into a Kronn warrior and finishing you off. Or if you're misinterpreting that, the player character turning into a Kronn warrior and lunging forward to finish off the actual player. Even worse, you get the same screen upon actually beating the game. In short, victory is meaningless and the cycle will only continue from there.
  • Black & White, particularly when you kill a human, especially if they'd promised a loved one they would be fine.
    Deaaatth....
  • In BlazBlue, Bang Shishigami's storyline, when you lost against Hakumen, you can hear how Litchi Faye-Ling, after no longer seeing Bang as a disgusting Stalker with a Crush, frantically screaming his name (In the same tone of Metal Gear as well).
    Litchi: Bang? Bang! BAAAAANGGG!!!
  • One of the messages shown between rounds in Bloons Tower Defence 2 tells the player they may not need to use every single type of tower to complete the game, but to think of all the programming and artwork that would be wasted if they didn't.
  • If you fail some missions (particularly story missions) in Brütal Legend, you'll be subjected to some rather brutal cutscenes showing your failure, which range from Eddie getting his eyes plucked out of his skull or listening to his friends scream over the radio as the bus (and everyone in it) blows up, to Lita getting her skull bashed in by a Grave Digger.
  • Champions Online has an interesting variation - The account management page for cancelling your subscription depicts one of your characters looking sad as they try to guilt-trip you into staying with the game.
  • Some players have reported joining the Chaos covenant in Dark Souls after talking to the Daughter of Chaos. The fact that this Cute Monster Girl is very sick, suffers a lot, thinks of you as her dearest sister (the same sister you killed in rightful defense), and considers that sister her very reason to live didn't help.
    • And that's not the only case where the game will make you feel very bad if you dare behave like a bastard. Every time you harm someone who sincerely doesn't wish you ill, the lines during the combat and of death will reflect the astonishment and sadness from such betrayal.
  • Dead Space punishes the player for letting the main character die with death scenes that range from merely incredibly gory dismemberment to the outright traumatizing asphyxiation. Supposedly, the developers designed these death animations so they would make the player feel guilty for failing, rather than the more obvious goal of grossing you out. Probably the most disturbing scene is when Isaac is decapitated by a Divider, and the monster's head crawls on the twitching body where Isaac's head should be, inserts its tentacles into the bloodied neck and starts roaming around. You don't want to see it again if you're sane.
  • Demolition Man for the 3DO has an interesting and rather jarring case of this. First off, it's a game based on a movie, but it has the added double whammy of being made during the mid-90's, when "Full Motion Video" was thought to be the future of gaming. The game is a Gallery Shooter with some FPS and fighting game elements as well. You go around shooting the bad guys as they appear on screen and all that stuff. You only have one continue that you can use throughout the whole game. What happens when you game over? Sylvester Stallone himself straight up tells you to your face that "You... Suck." among other insults. That's right, the game berates you and makes you feel guilty for not being able to beat a Nintendo Hard game that suffers from very poor controls and cheating AI.
  • Maiden Astraea from Demon's Souls is, in many ways, a precursor to the Daughter of Chaos from Dark Souls, made worse by the fact that you must kill her to progress in the game. Astraea is a former Saint of The Church who went to care for those abandoned by other clerics, lost her faith, and turned into one of the most powerful demons just to give them some comfort. When you first enter her boss arena, she berates you for invading her sanctuary and begs you to leave, stating there is nothing for you to loot or plunder (which is not quite true, as you are specifically after her soul). She has no way of fighting you, and her bodyguard will only attack if you try to approach her, underscoring that neither wants a fight — but if you kill him, she will commit suicide, throwing her demon soul in your face in an act of final defiance. Enjoy that warm and fuzzy feeling while it lasts...
  • Discworld MUD has several kinds of pets. Kill your own pet by accident and the poor thing will haunt you for several minutes. You'll get all sorts of visions of the heart-broken animal's ghost and occasionally run to a random adjacent room from time to time until the haunting wears off.
    • A spell can give you an animated cabbage that follows you around. If you "Eat cabbage", instead of simply saying "You eat the cabbage" or something similar, you get a detailed description of the cabbage still staring at you lovingly, as you rip it to shreds and consume it. Then you get flatulence.
  • A non-game example (which refers to a game): A comment from Bear in .hack//SIGN goes as:
    Bear: It's only a virtual world, I realize, but thoughts turn into reality, so the world I abandoned by resetting might have remained engulfed by evil.
  • Dragon Quest had a room with treasure behind a locked door with a soldier inside. You gain access to keys later in the game, which disappear after one use. If you use one of the keys on the door, you can take the treasure and talk to the soldier. The soldier simply tells you: "True heroes never steal." There're no consequences to ignoring him and taking them anyway, but it's still a bit of a guilt trip.
  • Elite Beat Agents. "You're the Inspiration". Did you just fail it? Have fun watching a little girl who just lost her father fall into deep depression.
  • Once things start getting really bad in Eversion, the "Get ready" screen inverts this, guilting you to stop in an attempt to scare you shitless.
  • Three Dog in Fallout 3 acts as the player's in-universe karmic barometer. Choose the good ending in sidequests and he'll be singing your praises, but go for the evil path in sidequests and he'll be calling you out as a menace for the rest of the game. This gets particularly complicated in the Tenpenny Tower quest, though, because he's decided to side with Roy and the ghouls even though Roy is a murderous, racist asshole who will kill the inhabitants of the tower (some of which aren't even that bad) if he gets his way, and even if you get the Golden Ending that should make both sides happy he'll murder all the humans right after you leave.
  • Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly has it in the form of Mio's twin sister, Mayu. The game makes it very clear that she is dependent on the player, because she's not as brave as Mio. And a limp from an old knee injury causes her to be slow, too, so she will often plead for you to not run too far ahead and not abandon her. And characters to tell you to watch out for her. And Mio's goal is to keep her sister safe. What the player thinks of her can vary, though...
  • Yet another reason why Fire Emblem fans obsess over individual characters. Some pairs of characters will have conversations revealing their backstories and interpersonal relationships. Some will have have paired endings (usually getting married.) Anyway if they die, you lose those conversations, lose the bonuses from relationships, and their ending is replaced with "Character died on Chapter 17."
    • Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon (11) is even more cruel. If you've been playing a sloppy or aggressive campaign, prepare for 5 minutes of "X fell in battle in chapter Y and vanished from the pages of history".
      • Some people can't even bear to let NPC units get killed, even if you don't get any rewards for leaving them alive.
    • Leaving some characters unmarried in Fire Emblem: Awakening can cause this, most notably Lucina and Henry. Some fans also marry their female Avatar to Chrom because they can't handle the thought of a male Morgan with no siblings.
      • This even goes back to the earlier games. In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance a lot of players will feel bad for giving Ike an A-level support with anyone but his troubled childhood friend Soren, while Eliwood/Ninian in the 7th game goes either way (fans who ship it can't bear to break them up by giving their A-support slots to other people and sending Ninian home to her world, while others can't bear the idea of separating Nils from his sister by having her stay with Eliwood). And while Renault disappears no matter what you do, some players find his ending with Isadora more rewarding as it shows he's had an impact on someone.
    • Downplayed in Fire Emblem Engage, where if you don't deploy a character to battle for more than a few fights, talking to them when exploring a battlefield may have a chance to trigger a unique response. Said response ranges from the character feeling left out or inadequate and will request to fight in a future battle. This will also give the player 10 Memory Fragments for speaking with them.
  • In Grand Theft Auto IV, the characters will call and demand that you play minigames with them, and they'll get huffy if you turn them down. If you decline too many times, your friendship with them will go down and they'll stop doing favors for you.
  • The Harvest Moon games lay the guilt on thick whenever an animal dies on your farm - whether it was your fault or not. Especially unfair in Harvest Moon DS, where Takakura will scold you for not making your buildings strong enough in the event of a shed collapse/mass death... even if you made it out of Golden Lumber (The strongest building material in the game - has a 1% chance of collapse, as opposed to the 10% chance for Stone or 33% chance for regular Wood)
    • Some games in the series will ease up on the guilt if the animal dies of old age, there is at least one however that will cause you to lose massive friend points with everyone in the game if this happens.
    • Harvest Moon: Magical Melody guilts players the first time an animal gets sick! The morning of the day the illness happens, players are "treated" to a cutscene in which the character is berated because they didn't properly look after their animal, and now it's dead. They then collapse in front of the animal's grave, before waking up and seeing it was All Just a Dream. Eesh!
  • Anyone familiar with Knights of the Old Republic knows that Satan ghost-writes the Dark Side results.
  • Averted in Liferaft Zero from the story's point of view; however, you're still going to feel horrible if you make a mistake and a little girl gets splattered.
  • Unlike most zombie games, which just say "GAME OVER" or "YOU ARE DEAD" for their game over screen, Lollipop Chainsaw decided to go the extra mile and actually show the main character becoming a zombie. (and this is in a funny zombie game, for God's sake!) Made even worse by the fact that her boyfriend, Nick, says in an upset tone that he wishes he could've protected her. Even more depressing is if you die in the Prologue chapter. "Juliet... I will always love you..."
  • In Mass Effect 2, if you choose to hand the Collector Base to the Illusive Man, your entire party will tell you off for it, with Grunt going so far as to call you "weak".
  • All the Metal Gear games have your support team screaming after you if you die.
    Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!
    • In the first Metal Gear Solid, Psycho Mantis will scold the player for not saving often enough. He will also mock you if you save too often, taunt you if you get spotted too often and outright insult you if you've died too often too.
    • Some support team members go farther than just yelling your name. If Raiden dies in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, sometimes Rose will call after him: "Jack? Jack? No! This can't be happening! Jack!"
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater guilts you in a cosmic sense- if you die and quit, you get a message telling you that you've caused a "Time Paradox". It also happens if you kill Ocelot.
    • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots does the by-now standard scream, and then dissolves to static. It's actually disturbing the first time. For some, every time. Otacon does a standard "Snake? What's going on? Snake? Snake? SNAAAAAAAAAKE!" a few times but more often than not the message before the scream is "Answer me, please!" or the even more depressing, "No! You can't die!" It also flashes very brief glimpses of what was on the line as Snake is dying before the static. (It may not be the first thing to give rise to Epileptic Trees about it all being a VR simulation, but it does encourage them.)
    • As a reference to this, while playing as Snake on the Shadow Moses Island Stage in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, you can call up Mei Ling, Otacon, Colonel Campbell or... Slippy? and the two will chat about one of the other fighters on the field (Who you call depends on the fighter the conversation is about). If Snake gets KOed while the conversation is going it'll break off and the person on the other end will shout "Snake? SNAKE? SNAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!" as per the Metal Gear Solid games.
  • Neopets:
    • Trying to fit more than fifty items in your inventory will result in a sad Jubjub appearing on the screen.
    • Losing a game of "Hassee Bounce" will result in both Hassees crying if you earned less than 100 points.
    • If you go to the harbour on Mystery Island, two Neopets will tearfully beg you to stay.
  • NieR: Automata pulls this for the game's Golden Ending: During the Nintendo Hard Creative Closing Credits Bullet Hell sequence, dying enough times will let you call upon the aid of other players to help you clear it. Afterwards, you are told that you only made it this far because of the sacrifices other players made; they were only able to aid you by consenting to let their save data be erased. The game then offers to let you do the same, giving up your save data and everything you unlocked to aid another player, selected at random. You are more than free to refuse this offer, of course, and you would be the only one to know of the decision you made...
  • Paper Mario: Just try killing the last Whacka—or even hitting it once—without feeling guilty. At first, the Whacka will complain loudly that you're hitting him, then it will mention that it can't quite remember what happened the other day, implying minor brain damage and memory loss and after you hit it a few more times, the Whacka starts happily singing complete gibberish, implying some form of insanity or brain damage. Hit it one more time, and the Whacka dies. What's worse is that every time you hit the Whacka, it drops the Whacka Bump, probably the most powerful healing item in the game. This is made even worse in Super Paper Mario, in which a Whacka has a young girl as a friend, and his death will sadden her.
    • Then there's Posie in Flower Fields. If you want to be a real douchebag, you can hit the Crystal Tree behind her, causing her pain in spite of her patient and gentle requests not to. Do it enough and she'll get rightly fed up with your assholery and force you out of the area, but if you try to come back multiple times, she lets you back in. Possibly to start the whole process of torturing her all over again.
  • Persona:
    • Persona 3:
      • Stand up or turn down a Social Link's offer to get together, and that person will be sorely disappointed. Neglect them for too long, and the Link will reverse and you have to make up with them to gain back their friendship. Actively damage it (such as going out with one girl while you're dating another) and the Link will even break, and berate you for it.
      • The Bad Ending is flat out blatant about it. If you choose to erase everyone's memories to save them the agony of a slow and certain death from the extinction of the human race, the game skips to March, with everyone jovially talking about how wonderful their futures will be. An even bigger kick in the pants? Watching them longly in the distance is your Robot Girl friend, who knows what's coming, but is now a stranger to them after being wiped clean from their memories and can't do anything to stop it anyway.
    • Persona 4:
      • The entire story is having the ability to rescue people from being killed. If you attempt to go to a previous dungeon when you currently need to rescue someone, your teammates will get angry with you for slacking off. If you choose not to rescue them, they die and Igor berates you.
      • You have the option of killing Namatame by throwing him into the TV yourself. This leads to the Worst Ending, which is different than the plain Bad Ending. The punishment is that Nanako is Killed Off for Real. Good luck with that. And as seen in this video, when you get the Worst Ending, Dojima makes you feel really guilty too.
      • This is made even worse at one of the last rescues. The victim is Nanako, who is your 'little sister'. If you worked hard to max out her social link, she tended to greet you every evening with "Welcome home, Big Bro!" Leaving her in the TV world simply isn't an option if you have even a shred of humanity. Adding to this, every single one of your friends insists on the rescue every time you talk to them.
      • In the last fight of the True Ending, if you've managed to max out Nanako's social link, while you're 'dying', you get visions of your friends. Nanako's is along the lines of 'don't leave me, I'll be a good girl, I promise!' even if you could, you probably wouldn't choose death with that hanging over your head. To make this even worse, Nanako is scripted to be the last Social Link to appear in the "Dying" scene. Not to say that she's the only one who can tug at your heartstrings: Chie starts off begging you not to leave her, and tells you that she's scared. Naoki, who has already lost his older sister, says he doesn't want to lose you, too. Ai, who you rhelped become a better person, is completely in disbelief at the idea of you dying. It's hard to say no to any of them.
      • Valentine's Day in general in The Golden. In its own way, it's worse than the jealousy mechanic in Persona 3, because it's unavoidable. If you dated more than one girl, you have to turn all but ONE of them down on Valentine's Day and then sit through a long scene in which they tell you how heartbroken and disappointed in you they are.
    • Persona 5
      • The game integrates this into its Framing Device: most of the game's story is framed as the protagonist testifying to a prosecutor about the events leading up to his arrest. Similar to Persona 4, there is a deadline in which you have to defeat the boss of the story dungeon, and failure to do so will lead to dire consequences, including (in the story's order): Ann being left to the whims of the rapist teacher Kamoshida, Yusuke remaining under the thumb of his abusive plagiarizing mentor, Makoto getting kidnapped and drugged (and possibly worse), "Medjed" leaking the Phantom Thieves' identities before committing suicide, and Haru being wed off by her opportunistic father to a politician's sleazy son. Afterwards, the protagonist is seeing being assassinated by a shadowy figure who frames his death as a suicide.
      • Just like in Persona 4 Golden, if you try to date more than one girl in a playthrough, you will get called out on it on Valentine's Day as every potential paramour makes you regret your unfaithfulness.
  • Pikmin:
    • If all of the Pikmin die, you're subjected to a heart-wrenching cutscene where Olimar berates himself for his failure and laments their loss. Then the game gives you one new one per Onion, content that you've been properly chastised.
    • And of course, there's the heart-rending squeal the Pikmin make as they die. On top of that, if you reach the end of the day when there are Pikmin away from the onions and not following Olimar (especially if you end it yourself from the pause menu), your reward is watching the scragglers hopelessly race back to the onions only to be chomped by nocturnal wildlife. And the game keeps track of how many pikmin you lose this way, too, so it becomes a Mark of Shame on your part for the rest of the game.
    • The first time you let a/some Pikmin get blown up by a bomb rock it/one might have been carrying. At the end of the day, Olimar posts a sad journal entry about what happened, driving into the ground what you've done (be it accidental or not).
    • The marketing behind the games will probably make you feel guilty of using the Pikmin in the first place: They play up the fact that the Pikmin are sacrificing themselves to help you for seemingly nothing in return (although they actually do benefit by learning how to survive and thrive in their harsh world).
  • In Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, the game's narrator(s) will chew you out over nearly every single choice you make - no matter what you attempt to do, you will still be berated for your "horrible" decision-making, and the narrators will take away the points from your score to "punish" you. In fact, it isn't even possible to end the game with a score that isn't a negative value!
  • Police Quest: SWAT (the first one that was a live-action Full Motion Video game) does this extensively.
    • You can hit escape to skip the initial briefing from your superiors prior to the start of the game. If you do so, you have to sit through them chewing you out for being insubordinate.
    • If you try to leave a weapons-range training session early, you get a cutscene of your instructor implying that you're slacking off, to which your character automatically responds by blowing him off, justifying the instructor's concerns.
    • During the optional sniper training segments, your instructor will yell at you if you take too long to follow his directions, get things out of your inventory, or do anything other than practice shooting.
    • If you let your character get killed, you have to sit through shots of his funeral, complete with bagpipes.
  • Pokémon Stadium 2 has trainers that say a few lines to you if you win or lose. They also say different things if you give up in the middle of a battle.
    • Try stealing other trainers' mons in the main series. You'll get the message "Don't be a thief!"
    • If you make a face at your Pokemon in Pokemon Amie long enough, it'll start a minigame that has you imitate the expressions they make. Failing to do this within the allotted time will cause the vast majority of them to give you a sad and disappointed look that'll probably make you not want to mess up at it again (Not that it's easy with how touchy the 3DS camera's face recognition can be...).
  • Inverted in Portal. You have to put your poor Companion Cube into the incinerator if you want to progress in the game at all. Still, GLaDOS does her best to make you aware that you're a horrible person for doing so.
  • In Princess Maker 2:
    • If you overwork your daughter to the point where she dies, her patron deity will criticize you for not taking care of her health.
    • If your daughter has an extremely high Sin level and gets into one of the less savory professions at the end of the game, her final letter to you and her patron deity's comments will accentuate your failures as a parent.
      Your daughter was a gift to you from the heavens, and you caused her to grow up to be sinful and wretched!
  • Here's something obscure: for every different kind of save on a PS2 memory card, there was a little 3D model that went along with it. Most of them, when you choose to delete them, do nothing. But for a decent amount of Capcom games, like the Devil May Cry series, the Viewtiful Joe series and Ōkami, these models would change, as if the data itself was begging not to be deleted. Or, in Okami's case, angry that you'd even consider trying.
    • The worst is probably Ape Escape 2, which has a monkey happily walking along until you try to delete the file, when it will start cowering and visibly shaking in terror while covering its face with its arms.
    • Another sad one is the icon of Fullmetal Alchemist and the Broken Angel which portrays a chibi version of Alphonse Elric who has the most mournful look when you delete the file.
    • Tekken Tag Tournament had a little dancing Ling Xiaoyu as its data. Selecting to delete that data would cause her to drop to her knees, crying her eyes out.
  • The NES version of Punch-Out!! plays with the trope. The game over screen shows a depressed-looking Little Mac against a red background, at first making one feel bad about crushing the little guy's dreams of becoming champ...until you see the text at the bottom encouraging you to "Start training, make a comeback!"
  • The trope is parodied in Quest for Glory IV. An obstacle is present in the form of a hexapod, which will eat your head if you attempt to move past it. You can give it the appropriate item to placate it, or you can throw rocks (or other objects) at it until it dies, which doesn't take much. The game then berates you for killing the defenseless head-eating monster by saying "You bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad hero." And in the CD version, it's John Rhys-Davies doing the berating. Meanwhile, you can burn the place down with it inside once you've finished with all the issues.
  • Some players of Rune Factory 3 claim to have married Raven because they felt guilty from reading her diary after marrying someone else. It's strange that the game would do that to you even though Raven is not even the main heroine; though she is easily the most popular.
  • Sentimental Graffiti, being a Dating Sim game where you build Relationship Values with your Unwanted Harem, keeps track of both how much general affection each girl has for you and how much they want to see you week to week. If they miss you too much, they might show up at your house should you decide to sleep in instead of going on a date with someone. Neglect them (or worse, blow off a date you promised) and they will suffer heartbreak, at which point you have to drag yourself over to their home town and either apologize or break off the romance. Since the point of the game is 100% Completion of precious memories (as well as ending up with the girl of your choice), this forces you to manage your time very carefully.
  • SIGNALIS is a case of a game that guilts you for refusing to save your game. Interacting with a save terminal only to continue without saving would result in the "YOU'LL REGRET THIS LATER" message being briefly flashed on a blood-red background.
  • The Simpsons: Tapped Out does this for humorous affect if you cancel an in-app purchase of a "Golden Scratcher". The cancellation message read, "Purchased cancelled. We are all heartbroken. Maggie is crying. So hey —congratulations! YOU MADE A BABY CRY."
  • Spec Ops: The Line has things go from bad to worse wherever the main characters go, with everyone in the game constantly berating the player character for interfering. As the game goes on, the loading screen advice starts turning from gameplay advice to wry, pithy observations about the themes of the game. After a certain point is reached, the narrative gradually begins to turn post-modern, with the accusations against the main character being aimed as much at the player as at the player character, and the loading screens outright stating that everything that's happened is the player's fault.
  • In Spiritfarer, Stella can cut down the ash trees at Ambertown Park to make ash planks out of them, but one of the visitors there will chide her for destroying the environment. Atul, on the other hand, can get away with collecting wood at the park.
  • Much like Fire Emblem, the Suikoden series has a history of making players pay for poor decisions. Making the wrong move during war campaigns can result in one of the 108 Stars getting Killed Off for Real, with a few Last Words, a simple footnote during the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue and a more bittersweet ending.
    • While Suikoden V gave more characters plot-based immunity than normal, it also made up for this by having characters that could and did die send shockwaves through your base. Upon certain deaths, the player could find little notes in the Suggestion Box from that ally's friends, companions and loved ones reflecting on the death; sometimes this even included goodbye notices as they left your base for personal reasons... like ensuring their fallen friend got buried on their home soil, or not being able to bear sticking around after their beloved perished on the battlefield.
  • Tales of the Abyss has a timed mission in a very slow-loading and low-frame rate Scrappy Level. If you don't complete the mission in time, the game still progresses as normal... But a very friendly and harmless NPC will die, and it will be All. Your. Fault.
    • Whenever Ion is traveling with the party, you can extend Luke's first mystic arte and have Ion rush in and perform a very flashy magic attack. However, after he does, he collapses from exhaustion. If Anise is in the party, she'll yell out his name, and he'll shakily answer "I'm... fine..." The guy is a Waif Prophet and a Distressed Dude to begin with, so it really makes you not want to use to use the extension...
    • In similar vein, using Raven in Tales of Vesperia after you found out that every single spell he uses will shorten his life will lay a guilt trip on you. As an extra nail in the coffin, using his Mystic Artes will cause him to clutch his heart in pain. His relatively weak base stat and weak Mystic Artes (which he makes up with good skill set and AI) are probably a nudge from the developer that you should not overwork the old man.
      Raven: (clutching his chest) I thought I was dead...
  • The Tomb Raider games practically thrive on this trope. Between the spike traps, the T-Rex chomps, the shark attacks... All of this is now shown in increasingly squicky detail with the graphical improvements, and the addition of "Quick Time Events." The series creator specifically wanted a female lead because, in his words, "players would care more and want to protect her." That also means milking every last drop of player guilt when a mistake or a "challenging" level design leads Lara to some brutal death scene.
  • If you attempt to erase your save data in Tomodachi Life, your lookalike Mii will ask you several times if you're really sure you want to erase everything. The game takes it a step further by asking you to confirm the name of island, followed by your Mii going "No! Why!?" while they're trying to run towards you. As they fall further behind in the distance, your Mii will say "I hope we can meet again someday" before they completely vanish.
  • Undertale has this trope all over the place, going with its theme of blurring the line between the player and the player character.
    • Killing certain characters (most notably Toriel and Papyrus) will result in you getting some heartrending last lines from them and/or being yelled at, and if you kill anyone at all you can't get the Golden Ending (though In-Universe, killing only a few people will have your actions acknowledged as self-defense).
    • The Genocide run is a massive gauntlet of all the guilt-tripping the game can throw at you- the only person who acts nice to you is the Big Bad who generally taunts you for being nice. And reloading saves will not help- Flowey and to an extent Sans have Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, and they remember your actions in previous playthroughs. Get the Golden Ending and then go back to see the others? You'll get guilt-tripped for undoing all the good you did. Get the Genocide ending and try again for the Golden Ending? Nope, your game is permanently tainted by the results of the Genocide ending and any time you reach the True Pacifist ending, the final cutscenes will end with the implication of everyone dying. The game even guilts those who watch Genocide Run Let's Plays, mocking them for their cowardice in being unwilling to do the dirty work themselves. And Steam saves the data for it once you complete it. And it will always be there regardless of whether you're going to get the other endings, and the only way you can get rid of it is if you delete the folder responsible.
    • On a lighter note, this trope is also present and Played for Laughs the first time the player is presented with an opportunity to acquire a consumable healing item. They come across a bowl of candy with a note saying to take one. If they take more than one, the flavour text berates them for doing so. If they take four pieces of candy, the bowl spills onto the floor, and any further attempts to interact with it results in the player being told to "look at what you've done."
  • Meta example: the song The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku is about her software, Vocaloid being uninstalled from the computer and how she can feel her memories disappearing, wondering why her user doesn't want her anymore. It's honestly pretty heartbreaking.
    • However there is a hope spot at the end if you believe the Fatal System error is her managing to crash the computer before getting uninstalled.
  • Wii Fit guilts you by making your Mii fat based on your actual weight. It also scolds you for missing a day. "Too busy to work out yesterday, Player?"
  • WildStar has a nightmarish way of removing erased characters. Right after the game asks you to confirm that you want to delete the character (and you do so), the character is set on fire — your last glimpse of them involves them screaming in agony while burning to death.
  • Parodied in You Were Hallucinating The Whole Time, an obvious lampoon of games like Spec Ops: The Line. While the 3 games are presented normally, it then reveals that you really made things worse.

    Real Life 
  • In the casino game of craps, the shooter (player actually throwing the dice) stays in his position until he throws a bad number. You can quit any time you want, but other players will believe you are destroying their luck, and won't hesitate to show or even say it. Card game players will also often feel annoyed at someone leaving the table during their lucky streak, as it apparently disrupts the "natural order of cards".
  • Facebook implemented this to prevent people from leaving Facebook. Trying to permanently delete your profile will prompt the site to bring up profile pictures of several of the user's friends stating how much they'll miss you. They combine it with making the delete profile command almost impossible to find.
  • Canceling an email subscription can involve much the same thing, often times having a message saying, "We'll miss you" or "Sorry to see you go", along with a form asking you to explain why you're unsubscribing.
  • Something Awful's forum inverts this for hilarity - right at the top of the front page is a link that states "Clicking here makes all your wildest dreams come true." Click it and it logs you out.
  • When it comes to offers on things like discounts on a pizza or a "buy one get one free" deal, companies will give people the option to either opt in to get more offers or they can opt out, but choosing to opt out will mock the person's intelligence in some way so that people will think twice for not wanting the offers. For example, the McDonald's phone app will ask you if you want to stay up to date on their latest promotions and the decline option is labeled "No, I like being out of the loop". Declining their option to sign up for deals on all meal offers has the decline option labeled "I like paying full price". Rugrats parodies this mindset in one episode where Chuckie's father gets a letter about a lottery he can enter and the two options are "Yes, I want to be rich!" and "No, I'm happy being poor!"
  • Websites that rely on advertisement revenue to stay afloat will sometimes try to shame you for using an adblocker by asking that you put their website on your whitelist. Others will beg you to support them by asking for donations if you want to disable ads without the use of an addon in your browser. The more aggressive and/or malicious websites will outright block you from browsing their content until you turn your ad blocker off. TV Tropes itself does this if you're not logged in. Most websites with these "ad-blocker blockers", unfortunately, will falsely accuse the user of using an ad-blocker if they have some sort of protection against tracking code enabled even if they don't use any tools for explicitly blocking ads, as many ad systems rely on collecting user data to serve ads, more-or-less punishing the user for trying to preserve their privacy.
  • Cancelling your cable, phone, or internet service will have the sales rep try to convince you not to unsubscribe and how you won't have access to their services or exclusive features. Companies may even try to bargain with the customer by offering discounts or similar deals to keep them hooked.
  • Reddit naturally has a sub specifically dedicated to instances of this: Clickshaming.
  • The paid-subscription social media website OnlyFans (known mainly for porn) has an option for content creators to send mass-messages to former subscribers, potentially to tease them into coming back or to say, "Hey, I miss you, if you re-subscribe I'll throw in a discount!"
  • The museum Te Papa in Wellington (the capital of New Zealand) has a video game with An Aesop about how you shouldn't fish with nets or long lines. It teaches this message by encouraging the player to catch fish, but instead of there being a way to avoid the birds or dolphins you're not supposed to catch, the game just randomly says that you're killing them.
  • For a while, DoorDash would display a pop up message towards customers that try to place an order without leaving a tip for their delivery driver, warning them that their order might be delayed if they didn't tip. This made a lot of people angry as they felt like DoorDash was trying to guilt people into paying more just to have their deliveries come on time.

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