Basic Trope: A video game calls the player out for doing something cruel or just plain stupid.
- Straight: The game "Troper Quest" allows you to kill a kobold, but the game will tell you this is because you're a jackass with too much time on your hands.
- Exaggerated:
- Video Game Cruelty Punishment
- You can do a multitude of awful or just plain stupid acts, but the game will call you out for all of them.
- The game goes into a "The Reason You Suck" Speech directed at you for just going near the kobold.
- Downplayed: You have the option to punch the kobold if you want, but the game will tell you there is no point in that.
- Justified: The character telling you not to do that has a good reason as to why you aren't supposed to do that - for instance, that action may waste precious time or put you in danger.
- Inverted:
- "Troper Quest" rewards you for doing nice and intelligent acts.
- "Troper Quest" rewards you for doing cruel and stupid acts.
- For some reason, "Troper Quest" punishes you for doing nice and intelligent acts.
- Subverted: You kill a kobold with a gun and the game tells you "Don't shoot kobolds. Blow them up instead!".
- Double Subverted: The message telling you to blow them up is Schmuck Bait to see if you really are that heartless. If you do it, the Big Bad will beat you to a bloody pulp.
- Parodied: The game lets you get away with rampant theft, murdering your way through the story because it's faster, setting fire to everything you come across, and running a red light... So long as you don't Poke the Poodle - which is rewarded with an unskippable, 20 minute lecture from every nearby NPC admonishing your pettiness.
- Zig-Zagged: Whether or not the game calls you out for doing immoral acts (and the harshness if they do) depends on how horrible those acts are.
- Averted:
- The game doesn't call anyone out for doing cruel/stupid acts.
- You can't even do cruel/stupid acts in the game.
- Enforced: The game's creators wanted to add an Easter Egg with some You Bastard! mixed in.
- Lampshaded: This trope in itself is an example of lampshading. But:
Player Character: Yeah, I really should've seen that coming.
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: During a If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten! test, Hiro shows the bad guys a video of himself laughing at an example of this trope.
- Defied: The game lets you do something cruel/stupid. It then tells you "This probably wouldn't be a good thing to do IRL, but thankfully you're just having harmless fun in a video game. Enjoy!"
- Discussed: "Oh, it's gonna be one of those games that judge me for playing it."
- Conversed: "I think developpers enjoy coding in options for cruelty just so they can lambast the players. I mean, the streamer had a pretty funny reaction."
- Deconstructed: Doing something extremely terrible in-game has in-game consequences, such as being barred from achieving the Golden Ending, or all of the NPCs in the game becoming hostile.
- Reconstructed: The game is still possible to beat, though it is considerably harder to do so. Masochistic gamers lick their chops in excitement.
What the Hell, Player? Why did you kill that random unabriged version?!
