Video Game Culture has two sides of stereotyped gaming by the media. One is the popular Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 which is portrayed in media as a violent game that motivates a player to commit acts of violence in real life. The other is the extremely kiddy game rated E for Everyone (in North America),note PEGI 3 (in Europe), or S CERO (in Asia). The game in question involves an overly sweet character in a Sugar Bowl setting filled with cute, anthropomorphic animals.
When this trope is seen within fiction, the game is often the alternative offered by the parent of the character when he proposes the latest violent game he wants for the holidays or his birthday. Needless to say, when given this one, it's seen as a yawn and our young man now seeks a chance to relish in laughable amounts of gore. Failure to do so will result in mockery. For something even more stereotypical, these games will be marketed towards girls, due to the perception that "girls don't play violent games." note
To some people, every game that does not have an M Rating falls under this category, and even some games WITH an M-Rating if the graphics aren't hyper-realistic. Many of the people who feel this way are too young to be playing a T-Rated game, let alone M.
Most Real Life games that would seem to meet this definition are better received than their fictional counterparts (filtering out Sturgeon's Law, of course), either because they're actually marketed toward small children (who don't care much about quality, as long as the game isn't actually unplayable), or because they're actually good. Plus, the Rule of Cute exists for a reason. However, just like Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000, they don't get named like this in Real Life; some examples include Animal Crossing, Cooking Mama and Diner Dash just to name a few.
Contrast with True Art Is Angsty. This page has a Word Salad Title.
Examples:
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Comic Strips
- FoxTrot:
- One storyline had Andy joining a concerned parents group called MAGG (Mothers Against Gory Games) and vowing to only allow MAGG approved games in their house. The storyline revolved around Peter playing a game called Nice City and later complaining about the other games Andy had given him, which included Resident Good and Eternal Lightness.
- One Sunday strip saw Paige give a few of her old video games (with titles like "Rabbity Rainbow" and "Peanut Butter's Puzzle Jam") to a little girl she babysits frequently, only learning afterwards that Peter had been using the cases to hide his M-rated games from Andy.
- One arc had Paige receive a beta-test version of Riviablo. Jason is outraged, until he realizes he must have signed up for the beta while logged in as his sister. Paige gets him back in the end
by claiming Blizzbund followed her advice and are redesigning the game to be an example of the trope.
Per your suggestions, the final version of the game will have less violence, cuter monsters, and significantly easier puzzles. PS Thanks especially for the great idea to change the game's title to "Happy Town".
Films — Animation
- Sugar Rush from Wreck-It Ralph can be described as Mario Kart meets Candy Land. This doesn't stop arcade visitors from playing it.
Live-Action TV
- Spoofed in an episode of the German kids TV Show "Bernd das Brot" (Bernd the Bread). The titular bread is forced to play a "mega motivating social game" called " Happy Pink Pony Farm" where you have to tend for your farm, feed the happy pink ponies and defend your salad against ravenous zombies.
Tabletop Games
- Golden Sky Stories is quite possibly the most relentlessly harmless roleplaying game in existence. You play a cute furry creature who improves people's lives through small acts of kindness.
Video Games
- Yoshi's Story. This actually angered a lot of fans before it got Vindicated by History.
- Animal Jam is advertised as a cheerful and joyous game where you can play as a Ridiculously Cute Critter in a Sugar Bowl land consisting of every ecological biome known and have fun with your animal friends, while learning some animal facts. The phantoms, however...
- Robot Unicorn Attack revels in its over-the-top Sugar Bowl-ness.
- Barbie games tend to be about as unthreatening as you can get. There are surprising exceptions to this, however, and some of the games can actually be a legitimate challenge.
- An infamous commercial for Blur tried to market it as an "X-Treme and totally not kiddy" racing game with kart racer-style weapons by juxtaposing the game with the most Sugar Bowl-y kart racer they could conceive (and an obvious Take That! at Mario Kart).
- Subverted in Team Fortress 2. While the game itself is a standard, if a little goofy shooter, it's shown in the "Meet the Pyro" short that this is how the Pyro sees the world as they set it on fire.
- In fact, you can experience this in-game by wearing Pyrovision Goggles, where everywhere is lush green grass, grenades are baby bottles, you can tickle others to dea- laughter with rainbows, lollipops, and bubbles, pick up health and ammo as cake or presents, and live in eternal happiness forever.
- Any video game made by Fisher-Price. This shouldn't be surprising considering their target market tends to be for children under five. Anything deemed "too scary, too questionable or too objectionable" is changed or removed. Also, their games are primarily Edutainment Games, which this trope usually goes hand-in-hand with. note
- Most Edutainment Games that are targeted at younger kids are primarily this. Examples include:
- Late 90's Reader Rabbit, especially Baby, Toddler, and Thinking Adventures. Preschool through Second Grade are also this, albeit at a slightly lesser extent (in that you now have an ineffectual, bumbling villain named Spike the Porcupine to content with).
- Some Jump Start titles, those targeted at Kindergarteners or younger to be precise, also fits this trope.
- Zig-Zagging with the 2003 Strawberry Shortcake games. While the Nintendo DS and the first Game Boy Advance games are like this, the subsequent Game Boy Advance and PS2 games avert this straight. The first two PC titles are also like this, but averted with the third title (which was a port of the PS2 title). Played straight, however, with the 2009 iOS titles.
- The two My Little Pony (G3) games plays this trope straight. Especially the Nintendo DS title (see image). There's also the sole My Little Pony: Friendship Gardens G2 title, in which you raise a virtual pony.
- Any title released for early educational consoles like the VTech V-Smile (especially it's Spin-Off Babies-riffic V-Smile Baby), the original Leap Frog Leapster, and Sega Pico (and it's spinoff Advanced Pico Beena) tend to be this. They tend to use licensed cartoon characters to make up for it though. Averted in some later games for educational consoles: The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic game for the LeapPad Explorer had Discord, an extremely dangerous and competent villain, as the antagonist.
- The Kirby games are infamous for being games that seem like this until you start to notice the little bits of Eldritch Abomination and Nightmare Fuel scattered about, and then the final boss is always a refugee straight from Hell. Kirby's Epic Yarn in particular is completely sugary and saccharine (even managing to avoid any sort of American Kirby Is Hardcore trappings its ilk have succumbed to).
- Animal Crossing has the entire premise of being a human being moving to a peaceful village of cartooney animals and living peacefully while making friends. Resetti even lampshades it at one point if you keep hassling him:
How 'bout playin' a fantasy without any epic battles, no fightin' against the odds to save some magical realm? Wouldn't it be nice to just lay down your sword, pick a few pretty daisies, and just be... nice?
- The Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures has the level Happy Fun Candy Time, which is filled sunshine, rainbows and smiling faces everywhere. Just try to ignore the severed unicorn head in the remake...
- Style Savvy revolves entirely around running a clothing boutique, and later a beautician and hair salon. There's no stakes or any real consequences for failure and every character is nice, with the customers being unnaturally patient and understanding, nothing at all like retail customers tend to behave in real life.
- Harvest Moon, a series revolving around living a peaceful life in a farming village. That said, the older games could get surprisingly dark, though the later games play this painfully straight.
- The adventure epic premise of Frozen and its sequel seems rife for an adventure video game tie-in, but instead we end up with not one, but two match-three puzzle games for mobile phones, and a rather basic platform game for the DS and 3DS. It's easy to blame the lack of a traditional home console release to the rise of smartphone gaming and the revenue to be had with freemium titles, but Disney being rather protective of their crown jewel IP could also be a possible reason (and it is, given how the Arendelle world in Kingdom Hearts III is a more or less straight adaptation of the original film with the Kingdom Hearts characters shoved aside to the background due to the restrictions Disney imposed on Square Enix on what not to do with the Frozen arc).
Web Animation
- Homestar Runner:
- At a slumber party, Homestar isn't allowed to play M-rated games — the only game he is allowed to play is Clapping Party, a game in which the goal is... getting the onscreen hands to clap. An Easter Egg at the end of the cartoon lets you play the game yourself, and it's about as fun as it sounds for the first two levels, until you unlock Blistergeist mode.
- The Easter egg game "Duck Pond" on the Homestar site is incredibly simple, but also quite addictive. All you do is feed ducks. In a pond.
- Japanoschlampen:
- Cutie Eichhörnchens Abenteuerländ (Cutie Squirrel's Adventure Land) from the makers of the Ninja Shotgun Gemetzel (Ninja Shotgun Carnage) series.
- The cut USK12 (roughly PG-13) version of Vorlaut 4 turns out to be close to this.
Web Comics
- Gabe from Penny Arcade is a hardcore gamer who is also a fan of Barbie Horse Adventures. (A real game). This is subverted (in the strip) with the game's Copy Protection, in which the horse spawns with no bones if the codes are entered wrong. Gabe is then told "Select the gun, then select your horse".
- From the revived version of The Sifl and Olly Show, the episode "Olly's Top 3". Olly describes his three favorite videogames of all time. Numbers 1 and 3 are basically torture porn games, but his number 2 pick is Pretty Ponies Daycare.
Web Original
- The cel-shaded Halo 5: Master Chief & Friends Adventures in Dreamland. (It is introduced at 2:20.)
- Inverted by one mashup which takes an ad for Farming Simulator and plays BFG Division over it. It works surprisingly well.
Western Animation
- The World of Warcraft episode of South Park has Butters' favorite game be Hello Kitty Island Adventure.
- An episode of The Simpsons revolves around Bart attempting to get the ultra-violent popular video game Bonestorm. He instead ends up with Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge.
Welcome to Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge. I am Carvallo.
Now, choose a club.
You have chosen a 3-wood. May I suggest a putter?
3-wood. Now enter the force of your swing. I suggest: feather touch.
You have entered: power drive! Now, push 7-8-7 to swing.
Ball is in: parking lot. Would you like to play again?
You have selected: No. - In ReBoot, The Funhouse would be this kind of game, if we weren't watching from the perspective of the Game Characters.
- Code Monkeys:
- Mary's games dance the line around this trope, trying to combine it with feminist values, though some are less innocent than others (like when she is forced to make a "Little Suzy Snackcakes" game with bulimia as a game mechanic.)
- There's also "Everyone's a Person", made by the Hitler family to teach people that everyone is a person (even Hitler.)
- Arthur has a browser game called Virtual Goose. Unusually for this trope, the main characters think it is the most awesome game ever, although DW's board game Confuse the Goose is considered a baby toy despite being identical.
- Teen Titans Go! has Puppy Tummy Tickles, a video game in which you just tickle a puppy's tummy. Starfire introduces it to Cyborg and Beast Boy to break up a fight between them over a video game. and also to carry on Starfire's plan to spread kindness. It works.
- The episode "Squirt the Daisies" in Cow and Chicken has Cow play the titular game all while her brother Chicken engrosses himself in Immortal Wombat. Unsurprisingly, Squirt the Daisies is what one would expect with an overly-girly game.
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius depicts Carl with a whole collection of llama-themed video games. Two of the titles he mentions (Ninja Llamas in Space and Llama vs. Mecha-Dingo) actually sound pretty action-packed, so of course he goes with his favorite: the apparently 100% conflict-free Llamapalooza. It still winds up rescuing Jimmy and Sheen after they've been trapped in the latter's Ultralord game.
