Do Not Do This Cool Thing / Video Games

• Ineptly done Anti Poop-Socking features have a high chance of being one of these. In an attempt to limit people's gameplay, rewards sharply drop after a certain amount of time. The hope is that instead of the player spending four hours a day on a game, they only spend two after they realize that the third and fourth hours don't give much of a reward. This leads to some particularly dedicated players increasing gameplay time to SIX (or more) hours in order to keep up.
  • Even a correctly done measure can have this effect regardless. World of Warcraft encourages players to log off and rest by providing Rest Experience: for every eight hours your character spends logged out at a city or rest area, that character will gain twice the monster killing experience for one xp bar bubble (or 5% fragment of your experience bar), up to a maximum of ten days' worth (or a level and a half). This has led players to level up multiple characters at once, cycling through them to level up a single character as long as any rest experience remains and then switching to the next rested up character.
• The Metal Gear series (particularly from Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and onward), which is heavy on anti-war messages in the plot, avoids this trope by making it possible (albeit extremely difficult) to complete each game without killing anybody (intentionally, at least). On the other hand, there's tons of cool-looking, stylized violence in the cutscenes and collectible weapons just begging to be used, and most of the boss characters talk about how Snake is an honorable warrior and, if they die, do so in glorious, noble and/or bombastic ways. So really, it still has it both ways.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is the only main game after Metal Gear Solid that requires you to kill a character. Said character is the mentor and essentially a mother figure for Snake/Big Boss who he shares an incredible bond with and is written as a highly sympathetic person. Needless to say, the act of shooting while she's on her back is presented in a relentlessly tragic manner that basically kills Snake on the inside and is essentially the true starting point for every single horrible thing that happens across the rest of the series.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots includes a massive arsenal of weapons which, ironically, manages to avoid one of the above problems, as that expanded arsenal means players who want to play without killing people are no longer forced to rely on two dedicated non-lethal weapons or punching people out for the entire game - in addition to the returning tranquilizer-converted pistol and sniper rifle, the knife can shock people into unconsciousness rather than cutting or stabbing them, Metal Gear Mk. II can sneak around under stealth camo and stun enemies in cover, and all the shotguns and grenade launchers have the option of using non-lethal rounds. On the other hand, though, especially in the third game of the series, there are many, many fun ways to make life hell for the bad guys without actually killing them, which may be just as bad in the long run.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker may be the best inversion in the series, as going through the missions killing everyone actively penalizes you - you lose "heroism points" for it, and every soldier you kill is a potential recruit for Mother Base lost. In-story, Big Boss is also idolized for his aversion to killing his enemies, and it's very rare that enemies captured during a mission will ever have any qualms against working with you. However, while the game also has many non-lethal options like 4, those playing the game in a non-lethal capacity will still find approximately three-fourths of their arsenal to be completely useless.
  • The Hitman series has the same problem. As a silent assassin, Agent 47 is supposed to kill no one save for his targets while being unnoticed and firing the least amount of shots. But hey, there's tons of guns to collect & fire, though most of them are noisy, hard if not impossible to conceal, or fire more rounds than needed.
• A more successful example might be Def Con. Almost everyone who has played it tends to feel pretty guilty.
  • The conceptually similar Balance of Power, from 1985, also tried hard to portray nuclear armageddon as a bad thing. If the player failed to prevent war, the game ended abruptly with the text "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." Unfortunately, it didn't reward success, either - your reward for shepherding the world through eight years of brinkmanship was simply a message stating "You have kept the peace". Maybe the real message was "Running a power bloc is difficult and unglamorous."
• Army of Two and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots suffer from this. The games aren't intended to be anti-war, but rather, there is a specific aspect of war they're trying to denounce. Both games are based around of the concept of the military-industrial complex, the privatization of the military and turning war into a business. Yet, they both fall victim to Truffaut's theorem, just as the anti-war films do. To clarify;
  • In Army of Two, protagonists Salem and Rios eventually realize that the Security and Strategy Corporation, the Private Military Contractor MegaCorp they work for, is doing a lot of evil things in their attempt to get the US government to pass a bill that will dissolve the US military and replace it with a completely privatized one. To do this, they're attempting to discredit the US military by working in league with anti-American terrorists, as well as leaking sensitive troop information to insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and even trick Salem and Rios into killing a US Senator who opposes the military privatization bill. However, after you spend the majority of the game as a badass mercenary using the PMC's awesome weapons (which you can upgrade and stylize to make even more awesome) and using them to take down hoards of enemies, the game certainly manages to makes private militaries look totally awesome and badass. Additionally, SSC's executives do make numerous good arguments to justify increased military privatization, which while undermined by the fact that they're using them to justify an evil plan, are valid points nonetheless and receive very little refutation. Then to make it even worse, it's only in the second to last level that Salem and Rios catch on to the scam, and the whole taking down your bosses to prevent their evil plan is crammed into the final mission. And to top it all off, the game ends with Salem and Rios starting their own PMC business which they use in the sequel to do the same badass stuff again.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4 takes place in a future where the military has become mostly privatized, and the world's economy is dependent upon continuous war. While this time, the player isn't a PMC, and the game does a good job of showing the Crapsack World this has brought about, it again manages to make PMCs look extremely cool, thanks largely to the awesome technology they use, such as the Gekko robots, as well as the nanobites that turn even barely-trained ground troops into super soldiers.
• Max Payne does a pretty good job of getting its point across well, assuming that its point is that a Roaring Rampage of Revenge is lots and lots of fun. If it's trying to be anti-violence, not so much. Max Payne 3 tried to avert this by showing how badly Max's quest for revenge has affected him, but ran into the problem that the gameplay was still all cool, stylized, and Bullet Time-laden, which made Max's angst come across less as the laments of a man driven to horrible actions and more the whining of an insufferable stick-in-the-mud.
• Valkyria Chronicles: War Is Hell, everyone suffers, and the bad guys feel pain too. Except it's a strategy war game where the good guys are all adorable, everything is rendered with a soft, unthreatening watercolor filter, and half the fun of playing the game is watching your squad's Potentials activate and listening to the stuff they say as they turn enemy mooks into greasy stains on their darling cobbled streets. It also doesn't help that "good guys", "bad guys", and "good guys in a bad situation" are so clearly defined they might as well have nametags, and the protagonists never have to get their hands dirty to kill every single person who could possibly be blamed for the war.
  • Lampshaded by Unskippable's commentary on the game.
  Paul: You know, I know people are dying and stuff, but with these pastel colors and fuzzy frame... I can't help but think everything is going to be okay.
• Spec Ops: The Line may come closer than most for averting this trope. The game makes its message very brutally, deconstructing military shooters not by trying to make the players say War Is Hell, but rather make the gamers look at the hero power fantasy in what they are doing, and the cost of what being a shooter hero would actually do to a person. Even Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation could hardly find any jokes to make about it, and it showed in his review.
• Inversion: There were gamers who have gone as far as declare Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 to be horrible just based on No Russian alone.
  • Played straight by other gamers who cheerfully laughed while mowing down the civilians, because it's fun shooting NPCs who can't defend themselves, in an amount of carnage that even a Grand Theft Auto killing spree would find hard to match. Subverted by some players who refuse to shoot any civilians and "fake" it by shooting over the civilians' heads, if they shoot at all. Subverted differently by other players who, regardless of how they play the scene, find it a genuinely disturbing way of saying "This is where you're headed when you start believing morality is obsolete in the name of security." Then there's the people who just say "It's a game." and went through the level with some impatience for a challenge. Averted further by people who use any of the game's numerous opportunities to avoid and skip the level.
  • Though it's far, far less infamous than No Russian, there are some players who see General Shepherd as a total badass and don't understand why we're not supposed to root for him because of it. For that matter, a good portion of the people who do realize they aren't supposed to be rooting for him probably only realized so after he shot the even more popular Ghost in the face.
  • The original Modern Warfare suffered from this with its attempts to show the horror of war. The game has several scenes of your protagonists doing reprehensible things, like killing enemies in their sleep and calling in an AC-130 to mercilessly dump heavy ordnance on infantry - even the Middle East missions as a US Marine are implied to be solely about keeping the unnamed country's oil - and famously had a player character die in the detonation of a nuclear bomb, ending one of the game's storylines on a low note while showing that soldiers can die at any moment. But the rest of the game has the player fighting against the villain responsible for detonating the nuke. Said villain is a Hate Sink the audience is meant to want to see dead, and the game ends on a bittersweet note as the use of violence has helped bring peace to the world by killing the bad guys, with the later games only having anything to say on the matter because they suddenly pretend the bad guys won all along to justify sequels.
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance tries its damnedest to paint staying in Ivalice as a bad thing and Marche's desire to destroy it and bring back the real world as a good thing. Unfortunately, all the characters from "our world" that we see are better off in Ivalice, and the world itself is portrayed as a wonderland outside of the Jagds. Alternative Character Interpretation raised its head, and the result was "Marche the Omnicidal Maniac". Supposedly this was less of a problem in the original Japanese version, but even there the trope applies.
  • Even the Jagds themselves could be an example of this. Towns where laws have no effect aren't really a bad thing when the law system is so incredibly anal that you can be arrested for using certain attacks or even dealing damage to monsters.
  • It's the same debate that took place in The Matrix circles, and was implied in the films themselves. One realm is far less "desirable" than another realm whose existence the writers try to vilify, but the former realm is more "real" than the latter. Hence "real Crapsack World" versus "imaginary paradise."
  • However, there are subtle clues that not everyone is better off in Ivalice. Marche and friends may have gotten everything they ever wanted, but judging by the fact that a group of zombies in one mission have the same names as the bullies who picked on Mewt in the prologue, some of the townsfolk may have been turned into monsters.
• Grand Theft Auto IV has plenty of anti-criminal motifs, it shows how crime and lust for money destroys the lives of opportunist gangsters and how it affects their friends and relatives. However, the missions involving contract killing are done in such a way that instead of making crime repulsive, actually makes it look attractive and fun. The characters we encounter, though they are criminals, are often comedic and very likable and not like those we are afraid of in real life. And thus the game became very popular, being one of the best selling games of 2008 and it's still played by millions of gamers who seem to not get its anti-crime message.
  • Red Dead Redemption did much the same thing in the same way.
  • Grand Theft Auto V also does this, showing that getting into "the life" will either bring you nothing but pain for years and destroy all your dreams (in the case of Michael) or leave you Lonely at the Top (in the case of Franklin). Only problem is, this also the game that gives us Trevor Phillips, who from the start of the game is shown reveling in wanton destruction, rape, torture, and murder, and cracks jokes about the mayhem he creates in his wake every time you tap the attack button.
    • On the other hand, Trevor's life is shown to be pretty miserable all around, and he only finds enjoyment in it because he's too unhinged to care. His Comedic Sociopathy is played up to the point he doesn't even seem to live in the same universe as the other playable characters.
    • Then of course, depending on the ending, all three protagonists can end up with all of their problems solved, ridiculously rich, and with no real repercussions to their actions. Only due to the fact they decided to work for themselves instead of cutting deals with everybody else to survive. Throughout the game, working for other criminals is a thankless and penniless affair. Every job they do for someone else ends with them being ambushed or betrayed. This is highlighted in the non Deathwish ending where the survivors are cast aside as pawns and their clients ends on the far better end of the deal.
• Ace Combat insists often and firmly that War Is Hell. However, you play as an Ace Pilot, arguably the most glamorous combat role in existence, your arrival bringing hope to allies and sparking fear in enemies. Your distance from your targets means you never see in gory detail the aftermath of your passing and as a Featureless Protagonist (very often an unrelated mercenary, at that) you are spared the direct effects of deaths in the family. All these combine to dull the effect of the message.
  • Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War ultimately zig-zags this trope. It has your squadron spending the whole game telling you about how much they hate war and wishing the two sides could come to a peaceful agreement rather than forcing them to keep fighting. While this is all going on, they are also constantly congratulating you for almost every one of the near-countless kills you are bound to make; one of them eventually actually complains that he's lost track of how many kills he's made, while also reveling in the fact that the enemy has nicknamed the squad "the Demons of Razgriz". The last part of the above point is finally averted, however, when after seventeen missions of getting to know your three wingmen very well, one of them is shot down and dies. Then it turns out that the two sides were manipulated into starting the war by a shadowy organization called the "Grey Men", and you're back to the usual merciless slaughter from the air because now there's an actually-evil enemy for you to fight, complete with a good half of the people you meet up with near the end deciding to stop fighting that war and start helping you end it.
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters: Best explanation for the popularity of Gig. He may be a Sociopathic Hero, but a hilariously entertaining Deadpan Snarker, too. And he loves hotpods, so he can't be 100% evil, right?
  • This trope is especially not helped by the fact that Gig ultimately makes a Heel–Face Turn, a Heroic Sacrifice and gets a Redemption Earns Life. Most of the characters still can't stand him, but he is enjoying life and may or may not become a couple with the main character.
• Homefront somehow manages to mostly avoid becoming this trope. It bluntly and plainly shows that War Is Hell and since there is more focus on characters and the action is of a lower octane than in the Modern Warfare series, it really does deliver its antiwar message well.
• Mystic Messenger has Jumin Han's route and his second Bad Ending. The writers' intent was to deliver An Aesop on how treating someone you love like a possession and hoarding them all to yourself is not true love. If the player chooses to enable Jumin's latent possessive nature, he will bind your hands and feet, make you wear shoes implanted with a micro GPS, and lock you up in his penthouse Christian Grey style. There, you will have everything you want except freedom, and he treats you as an object for his own amusement. This ending is meant to be seen as horrific as Jumin has chosen to succumb to his emotional issues rather than change for the better. The problem? He's filthy rich, classy, and very handsome. This caused the message to fly over the heads of a vocal contingent of the fanbase, with many of them finding this ending kinky, and even going as far as to say that it would be preferable to his Good or Normal endings.
  • This happened again with the V Route update, this time to Saeran, AKA: Ray, and Rika. The V Route storyline tries to deliver a similar message about the difference between obsession and love. However, by giving Ray and Rika Freudian Excuses and making them Affably Evil (NOT helped by the copious amounts of Les Yay the protagonist has with Rika, including a Bad Ending wherein they actually get together), they caused people to ignore the message once again. As a result, you have another group of fans wanting to romance Ray and/or Rika in spite of Cheritz' repeated attempts to showcase them as abusive and warn the players about how unhealthy a relationship with either of them would be.
  • And then Cheritz completely broke the above aesop all on their own by giving Ray a route of his own branching from the same Another Story created for V's route. This means that, in fact, it is perfectly fine to try to reform the mentally unstable man who kidnapped you with your love and encourage his creepily unhealthy obsession with you. Yay?
• Heavy Rain: The story's awesome and dramatic and everything, but the single most awesome thing in the game is ARI - Cool Shades that do all kinds of awesome things via Cyberspace; Fingerprinting Air, accessing the FBI Omniscient Database, turning a prison cell of an office into Scenery Porn, and letting you bounce a ball off a wall like in a prison flick without a ball or a wall. They Eat Your Soul. What, are they saying anything more realistic than Heavy Rain are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know?
• Iji is much more successful at averting this than most games because it's completely possible to play through the game without killing anyone. Also, if you do kill everything in sight like a normal game, the dialogue will make you regret it unless you're very callous.
• In a meta example, this is what led to Destroy All Humans! being made. Matt Harding pitched the idea because he was thoroughly fed up with making typical shoot-em-ups and proposed the exact opposite of the game he would like to make. Naturally, it was approved and Harding effectively sabotaged his career, which led to him quitting his job and making Where the hell is Matt?. Not that we're complaining.
• Saints Row 2 perhaps does an end run around this trope by avoiding the moralizing and continually plays up the fun and rewards of violent crime. Then the player character grinds a few rather sympathetic characters into the Moral Event Horizon, to demonstrate that he/she is every bit the vicious bastard the player is encouraged to be. Even some unsympathetic characters get terminated with much more cruelty than necessary.
  • Dane Vogel also suffers from this. He's cool, manipulative, wealthy, spends most of the game in complete control of the situation, and his plan would have solved Stilwater's gang problem. The fact that he's a ruthless, self-serving Corrupt Corporate Executive who simply wants profit and is out to crush anyone in his way to get it — especially the poor and disenfranchised — and that his plan to eliminate the gangs involved making things much, much worse before they got better tends to be forgotten because he's awesome.
• Armored Core has you play as a mercenary mech pilot who works for all the wrong reasons (money and being the strongest). The earlier games tend to end fairly positively, but it's pointed out repeatedly most Ravens do not give a damn about how much carnage they cause on the job. Just because your client is an evil MegaCorp doesn't excuse you from responsibility. In Nexus, your final mission results in millions of suicide robots devastating the planet. In 4, the mecha are Walking Wastelands and are ruining the world, and in 4A, you've got the option of killing millions as one mission. Despite that, piloting a mech is goddamn fun, and you're only ever called out on your actions once,^note kill those millions and you earn yourself a fight against your Mission Control, the Big Bad, the Dragon, and your Worthy Opponent. They hate you that much. In other words: That coworker you just murdered? What was his name again? Who cares, his bounty earned you money for new parts for your infinitely customizable robot. Yay!
• Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals shows Mama from Cooking Mama brutally killing and gruesomely preparing a turkey with cartoonish graphics. Game developer Raph Koster explains that his kids found it gleeful fun. Even Majesco Entertainment apparently found it amusing, given that their response was to have Cooking Mama herself put out a press release complaining about it. It's like they said to themselves, "Nobody's going to get their message from it, we aren't going to worry."
• Wings arguably subverts this; the game DOES use World War I for entertainment, but is stated to be dedicated to those who died in it, and also calls attention to the foolishness of various aspects of it.
• In Pokémon, both the games and the anime, treating Pokémon as tools is wrong. The evil teams and the rivals all lose because they treated their Pokémon bad, you won because you care for them. Except the best strategy is to dump all the crappy Pokémon you catch into the PC forever and push the ones you keep in your party to their limits. Sure, they get sad if they faint and they get happy if you use Potions on them...but Happiness is a mostly useless stat^note Unless you have a Pokémon (such as Mega-Kangaskhan or Mega-Salamence) that can take full advantage of the Return move, which scales based on the Happiness stat) and unless you horribly suck as a trainer they will simply be happy enough as time passes. The "best" competitive players even breed new Pokémon to train incessantly from the day they're hatched and throw the parents forever into the PC.
  • And any newborn that does not meet the expectations of the trainer (ability, nature etc.) is usually thrown into the wild without a second thought. Trainers can burn through dozens of baby Pokemon before they find the one that could become the perfect competitive battler.
  • Then there's Hidden Machines, moves that are required to get around the overworld but are useless in battle. The most common strategy there is to pick one or two mons on your team whose sole purpose is to carry the HM moves - meaning you are treating an ostensibly living being as a hedge trimmer / jackhammer / bulldozer / jetski.
  • Invoked in Pokémon Black and White by the bad guys, Team Plasma. Subverted in that only one of the members, N, actually believes in this; when he does fight you, he only uses Pokemon that can be found in the immediate area, and lets them go after he's done. By contrast, one of the first appearances of Plasma's grunts is kicking a Munna, and their true leader, Ghetsis, simply wants people and Pokemon separated so he can conquer Unova.
  • Hilariously, an ad insert in a children's magazine concerning Black 2 & White 2 had the following line:
    Warning! Making your pets fight in real life will get you arrested.
• One of the main points of Ryoujoku Guerilla Gari (Suck My Dick Or Die! in the English release) is that Lt. Prosper is an evil person for abusing his position and authority to rape women, and that in his bad end, Haresu is just as evil for buying into Prosper's lies. The problem is that, as an eroge, the sex scenes are a big part of the draw, and the most extreme ones are the rape scenes from Prosper's perspective and Haresu's bad end...so, "join the army, meet interesting women, and rape the hell out of them"?
• In-universe-parody in Kingdom of Loathing, with a chest labeled: "Magic equipment. Do not put on skeletons or they will come to life and it will be totally awesome."
• Deliberately invoked in Night of the Raving Dead: as part of their plan to discredit Jurgen the vampire in front of his minions, Sam and Max turn a Very Special Episode of Midtown Cowboys into an endorsement for the garlic-flavored cigarettes they're supposed to be talking about the dangers of. Since the show is a big hit in Jurgen's homeland of Germany, he can't help but smoke the cigarettes even though the garlic makes him ill and embarrasses him in front of his zombie army.
• An in-universe example in Mass Effect, as Shepard has to remind Conrad Verner at least once per game that War Is Hell and trying to do what they do without proper physical conditioning and military training would get a normal person killed very quickly.
• Far Cry.
  • Far Cry 2 may actually be pretty good at being an anti-war game. The designers admit to having deliberately included elements which are not fun, such as weapons degrading and malfunctioning, needing to do tedious missions and drive around the entire map, and having to detour regularly to get more malaria medication. Of course, the game entails you becoming a badass and a hero. So what exactly is supposed to be so bad about all this badass mercenary business?^note Moreover, those "deliberately" not-fun elements may be more of a Deliberate Flaw Retcon. In either case the real moral is: if you become a mercenary, learn some basic gun maintenance and how to avoid local diseases first.
  • Far Cry 3 suffers from this. The majority of the game has minor morality (killing too many civilians in a row results in a Non-Standard Game Over, and most of the sidequests involve helping good people by doing good things) and focuses on how well Jason learns to slaughter entire armies of pirates and mercenaries, with an underlying implication that Jason is becoming a tribal psychopath, regardless of how good he still is or how evil he secretly was, particularly when he rescues one of his friends in a particularly-exciting escape sequence and she is completely appalled that he seemed to be having fun during a life-or-death situation. The end of the game slams the full consequences of being a psychopath by forcing the player to make a genuine moral choice: save your friends and leave the island, or kill them to become the tribe's leader. These choices end up having serious consequences^spoilersIf you decide to leave, Dennis goes off the deep end over your rejection of the woman he loves but can't be with because of you, but accidentally kills her when she shields you from him. If you stay, Citra has sex with you, only to immediately stab you once you're finished, noting that since you've become one of their greatest warriors ever, your child with her will be even greater.... and then the game continues beyond the ending, with Jason back in his normal clothes, only missing the finger the Big Bad took from him. This subverts the choice you just made: Made the Good Choice and left the island? No, you're still here, and you get to go back to killing pirates! Made the Bad Choice and died for it? Nope, Jason is still alive! After that it's back to business as usual as Jason continues kicking ass and having a blast doing it, now without the scripted story to tell you whether there are any downsides to what Jason is doing.
  • To promote Far Cry 5, Ubisoft released the album When the World Falls performed by the Hope County Choir, who are all members of Eden's Gate, the gun-toting, Christian nationalist Apocalypse Cult that serves as the game's main villains. Problem is, the songs themselves are pretty damn good country and Gospel music, especially "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side", a paean to arming up for a confrontation with the government, and "We Will Rise Again", a song celebrating the collapse of a decadent civilization while those that it oppressed inherit the Earth. When removed from the context of the game's storyline, these songs were quickly embraced by exactly the kind of people they were meant to satirize. As one top-rated comment on the video for "Keep Your Rifle By Your Side" notes:
  "If Ubisoft didn’t want us to identify with it then they shouldn’tve made it such a banger."
• One of the games in Game & Wario has 9-Volt playing a videogame in his bed, while at the same time trying to make sure his mom thinks he's asleep. Before the game starts there is a long-winded message saying you should sleep early and not emulate what 9-Volt is doing.
• An in-universe example appears in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Cyrodiil's only newspaper is The Black Horse Courier, and a number of pamphlets can be found on counters and tables in stores. One issue, Night Mother Rituals!, warns readers of an increase in Dark Brotherhood activity. More and more people in Cyrodiil are performing the ritualistic "Black Sacrament" to summon and hire assassins. Responsibly, the Courier explicitly details how to perform the Black Sacrament, so its readers can better prevent themselves from being caught with the materials necessary (such as a human heart, partial skeleton and pound of flesh) and be falsely incarcerated. You might be inclined to think the Dark Brotherhood themselves had the story printed.
• The meth recipe shown in PAYDAY 2 is actually for salt water, specifically because the devs know that people are going to try and make it anyways if it had real ingredients. Note that the chemicals used for it are still highly corrosive, so Overkill still discourages people from actually trying it.
• Undertale for the most part does a pretty good job of discouraging players from killing anyone, going out of its way to provide fun, quirky, sympathetic enemies and bosses that the player will feel horrible about killing instead of trying to spare. However, there are two exceptions in the otherwise extremely dark, extremely grindy and extremely depressing Genocide route: Undyne the Undying and Sans. Both serve as increases in difficulty in an otherwise easy-but-fairly-tedious playthrough, and the latter is in fact the single hardest boss in the entire game. Unfortunately, both are considered to be two of the best boss fights in the game, the former due to being that character's biggest Moment of Awesome, and the latter due to being such an insanely brutal fight full of fun, sometimes even fourth wall-breaking attacks (and both of them due to having awesome themes). In addition, he, along with Flowey, will only show their true nihilistic natures in this route, and certain important pieces of context from said route are never given anywhere else. While many players were still successfully discouraged from completing the Genocide route due to all the horrible things they have to do to complete it, there's still a subsection of the fanbase who went through the route just for a chance to fight the two bosses and another subsection who did it to play a Villain Protagonist in a darker storyline (particularly since Flowey openly mocks those who would simply view videos of it rather than do the dirty work themselves).
• Sands of Destruction opens with Morte and the World Annihilation Front attacking Viteaux like a bunch of Bomb-Throwing Anarchists. You're in control of Naja and are supposed to fight her off and save the town, but the girl is having way too much fun either way. With the way Naja and his jerkish superior Rajif keep calling her a terrorist, she'd make an excellent poster girl for any sort of terrorist group: "Be a terrorist! Blow stuff up! It's fun!" At least it does help you feel more sympathetic towards Kyrie for falling in Love at First Sight: that kind of enthusiasm can be infectious, even coming from a Psychopathic Woman Child. And, thankfully, she keeps her upbeat, determined personality even after changing her mind about destroying the world, proving that good doesn't have to be boring.
• One level in Emogame 2 has you going onto the set of The Jenny Jones Show, where the use of this trope on tabloid talk shows is mocked for all it's worth. Today's episode revolves around "12-year-old hoochies" in a way that seems to be backhandedly promoting the Troubling Unchildlike Behavior of the adolescent girls featured while ostensibly condemning it, with Jenny Jones bragging about using softcore child porn as a Ratings Stunt.
• Hotline Miami discusses the way people today tend to be desensitized to violence through the media and video games; yet this message is buried under the game's fast-paced, adrenaline-filled ultraviolence backed by a Synthwave soundtrack. The sequel is a bit better about this, but only just.
• The extremely rare Atari 2600 game Pepsi Invaders is a Space Invaders clone where the aliens get replaced with the letters of the Pepsi logo. It was reportedly made by Coke, as a "morale boost" for their employees. One has to wonder if Coke realized that they were making a game where you stare at six versions of their competitor's logo for most of its playtime.
• Fate/stay night revolves around the Holy Grail War where mages summon a hero in the form of a Servant in a battle royale where the winner gets one wish. The story goes to great lengths to show how horrifying the Holy Grail War is, how it puts innocent people in danger, how good people can get involved in the war and die, how the previous war was responsible for the main character Emiya Shirou's life getting screwed up, and how even the wish granted to the winner will be corrupted. The problem is that most of the endings have Shirou come out of the Holy Grail War better off than when he started by hooking up with a cute girlfriend, and even the ending where he Did Not Getthe Girl still has him overcome his emotional trauma. Later entries in the franchise continued to have this issue by having things end on an uplifting note for the main character, while also having a Servant as a love interest. Even the Darker and Edgier prequel Fate/Zero, despite its Downer Ending, still has the life of one of its supporting characters improved thanks to entering the Holy Grail War. In fact, the idea of Servants proved so popular that they've essentially become the main focus of the overall universe, simply because of how cool and universally-adaptable the concept is. Who wouldn't want to hang out with or even become your favorite historical figure or fictional character, upgraded into a gorgeous magically-empowered superhuman?
• The original series of God of War brutally deconstructs the idea of the classical Greek hero, showing that Kratos's Might Makes Right mentality causes him to progressively degenerate into selfish, violent, and vengeful individual going out of his way to kill as many people as he could just because he can. The stories by themselves make it clear that the world does not need someone like Kratos. The gameplay on the other hand requires that you slash up the various monsters in increasingly brutal ways, and Kratos just looks awesome doing so, so many players still root for Kratos despite the stories' portrayal of him. It certainly doesn't help that for much of the series, the Greek gods are framed as so corrupt and cruel that Kratos's crusade against them can frequently come off as Pay Evil unto Evil. The Soft Reboot series starting with the 2018 title would take steps to address this, showing that Kratos truly regrets everything he did in the original series but still has to struggle with his natural love of violence.
• Yakuza 0 has an in-universe example. Shintaro Kazama knows very well what joining The Yakuza means, the burdens, the regrets and the sacrifices one must live with to live that life, and does his best to dissuade his adopted sons from following in his footsteps. His sons, on the other hand, want nothing more than to join, both to show respect, but also to get a taste of the wealth, power and respect he has.
• The instructional video for the PlayStation 2's EyeToy (which uses a webcam to record your movements as a way to control the game) outright says at the end that you can cheat by getting close enough to the camera that any motion would count in your favor, but "where's the fun in that?"
• Yandere Simulator: In the words of the dev, "Getting away with murder should not be easy." He plans to make it a huge pain in the ass to kill someone without getting bum-rushed or arrested five minutes later, yet at the same time give you a special ending for exterminating everyone except Senpai. As of August 2018 it is extremely hard without Easter Eggs or debug commands.
• SPY Fox:
  • In Some Assembly Required, Fox has to make a fake ID to get into a restricted area. Before doing so, he reminds the player that only spies can make fake IDs, and even then, only when they're on a case.
  • In Operation: Ozone, he finds agent Roger Boar hiding in a medicine cabinet, but remarks that it's normally not polite to look in other people's medicine cabinets and that he's only doing it because he's a spy on a case.
  • Later in the same game, Fox points out that it's normally a very bad idea to place one's feet into the slots of a toaster (unless it's the SPY Toaster, of course).
• Receiver 2 contains a tape that is, essentially, a long, drawn-out rant about how awful the Desert Eagle is, stopping just short of explicitly stating anyone who owns one has a tiny penis. The Desert Eagle is a usable gun in this game... and is easily one of the most powerful guns in the game, able to one-shot drones regardless of where they get hit and strong enough to pierce the armor of most turrets. Its only real weaknesses are its recoil making follow-up shots difficult-to-impossible and screwing up while drawing or holstering it being instant death... and given one shot will usually be enough and basic gun safety (which the game drills into your head) will prevent the latter, those are barely drawbacks.
• Helldivers and its sequel are intended to be a satire against warmongering authoritarian governments who wage wars for profit. The majority of the players focus on the "cool" things such as orbital drops, calling down orbital bombardments, and generally just blowing up robots and aliens with overwhelming firepower. Not helped by how the the game itself loves invoking Dare to Be Badass at every turn, from the opening cinematic to the constant affirmation and exhortations of your Mission Control and Super Destroyer crew. Intentionally or not, the game is an excellent demonstration of how and why propaganda works.