Times where someone attempts to undercut, undermine and ruin the success of another in Video Games.
- Absented Age: Squarebound: Karen was treated poorly by the rest of the Brass Band Club because the others didn't take club activities seriously, yet were jealous of Karen outperforming them.
- Andrew Ryan complains about this during the introduction of Rapture in BioShock. The whole reason he built Rapture was to create a haven where tall poppies of any stripe could flourish without anyone trying to cut them down. Of course, the game can be seen as evidence that his own philosophy is just as bad if not worse when taken to extremes. Then again, a large component in Rapture's destruction was Ryan falling victim to Tall Poppy Syndrome himself the moment a poppy taller than him came along, so who knows?
- A combination of this, genuine bitterness and her own position probably being worse in its own way is why Goldanna, Alistair's half-sister, is so disdainful of him in Dragon Age: Origins. (Of course, if you were just trying to scrape by as a washerwoman and your half-brother walked in wearing elaborate armor and accompanied by three other people all dressed up equally fine...)
- According to the novel The Calling, Alistair isn't even her blood relative, being a Half-Human Hybrid who doesn't have any of his elf mother's features.
- The same novel both plays straight and inverts this with the brother and sister Grey Wardens Geneveive and Bregan. Geneveive wanted to be a Grey Warden all her life, but when the time came the recruiter refused to accept her unless Bregan took the joining as well. Throughout their careers Geneveive watched as Bregan was loved and respected as commander and knew she would never be like him, this made her resent him. Meanwhile Bregan hates his life, despite how well he did as a warden he never gets over the fact that he was forced into it and he resents Geneveive for wanting to be a warden and dragging him down with her.
- In the Deus Ex: Human Revolution tie-in novel Icarus Effect, the title effect is described as a biological as well as a social phenomenon where, to maintain "stability", if a small number out of a large group attains some distinct advantage, those lacking that advantage will attack the abberants until that advantage is gone. This is part of the reason that everything goes to hell in the actual game as well. Augmented people are discriminated against in society because they're both seen as "unnatural" due to supposedly going against the natural order, and with their abilities being superior to those of a regular human. This even extends to people who need those augmentations to live. This theory gets validated in the original Deus Ex, where nanotechnology-based augmentations become widespread despite their susceptibility to control and decades of religiously-hated augmentation because now the majority can use these dangerous nanomachines while the machine-augmented can't.
- In the Dead Money DLC of Fallout: New Vegas, the reason Dean Domino tried to ruin Frederick Sinclair is because he was happier and more successful than him, which Dean interpreted as Sinclair showing off and thinking he was better than everyone else. If you don't go out of your way to placate his ego, he'll develop similar feelings towards you as well and turn on you, requiring you to kill him in order to proceed. If he doesn't betray you and therefore survives the DLC, he'll learn about the final fates of Sinclair and his love interest Vera Keyes, and feel a bit sad for some strange reason he cannot identify, so he puts it out of his mind and decides to head to New Vegas.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy X: Any city that becomes too big or technologically advanced in will be massacred by the spirit-titan Sin in short order. According to the state religion, this is because advanced cities become decadent and arrogant, enough to spark a global war which Sin prevents through culling, and Bevelle is an exception because it is radically religious and restrains its citizens from developing military technology. In reality, Sin is programmed to protect a virtual city inside itself, it kills off cities to prevent them from developing a strategy to destroy it (and thus the simulation), and Sin won't kill off the technologically advanced Bevelle because they have a deterrent in the form of an imprisoned titan-mecha, Vegnagun, that is completely insane and would shoot Sin (along with the whole world) to bits.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, Elde's progressive decision to sell her goods to anyone regardless of social status or birth quickly makes her enemies in the Jeweled Crozier. Gerhardt, who looks down upon foreigners and lowborn people, quickly moves to stifle her store's success by buying up the supplies she needs to make wyvernskin boots. Elaisse even refers to him as "the hammer that pounds down any upstanding nails".
- Final Fantasy XV: The Greater-Scope Villain Bahamut treats the world as a field of poppies that must be of a specific height and color depending on their position in the field's hierarchy. They manipulate the Big Bad into destroying the world for the sole purpose of wiping the field clean for re-seeding, all because in every age, a small number of 'flowers' would choose to represent their individuality and intermingle with other genii no matter how thoroughly they were indoctrinated into worshipping their gardener. For extra pettiness, it's speculated by Noctis that the only reason Bahamut favored Somnus over Ardyn was because Somnus happened to look like Bahamut, so Ardyn doing better than his brother was a tall-poppy insult to his visage - despite him keeping it hidden all the time.
- In Grand Theft Auto V, Franklin is constantly ridiculed by his friends and even his aunt for trying to find a more productive criminal career and move out of his shitty neighborhood, no matter how willing he is to still help them with their problems. But, with that nonetheless, some of them really care for Franklin, and advise him to 'be normal' in order to stay safe.
- In Harvest Moon everyone will berate and snide you for using Golden Lumber for a fence because of how ridiculously expensive it is and how it makes it seem like you're basically bragging about your success to them.
- In Jak 3: Wastelander, after Jak beats Kleiver's high score at the Gun Turret challenge, Kleiver, ever the good sport, remarks, "The tall poppy has to be snipped sometime." Incidentally, Kleiver is depicted as having an Australian accent.
- In Mega Man X6 this is a recurring theme in the backstories of the Mavericks aka Nightmare Investigators. They are all Reploids created by the Big Bad Gate, who believed that the best Reploids were those that were so high-spec that their programs couldn't be analyzed, like series heroes X and Zero. With the eight Investigators he succeeded in creating Reploids that also couldn't be analyzed, but his peers were jealous of his success and found ways to destroy all eight of them. This led to Gate becoming a bitter recluse until he found Zero's DNA, which he used to resurrect the Investigators and create the Nightmare Phenomenon.
- The Messenger (2018): One of the Shopkeeper's stories is the joke above about the cauldrons in Hell. In her version, the group of people whose cauldron needs no devils standing guard is "people who think the order doesn't apply anymore when a new line opens up at the market". The Ninja accuses her of making up that story just to complain about people she doesn't like.
- Persona:
- In Persona 4, Ai Ebihara's family used to be poor, but after her father struck it rich, they had to move because their neighbors got jealous.
- In Persona 5, Futaba is far more gifted than her peers intellectually and her Photographic Memory let her ace all of her exams with ease. Her classmates quickly grew jealous of her talents and began shunning her, accusing her of cheating and lying for not being on their level. The bullying got so severe that she handed in an unmarked test in an attempt to placate them and locked herself in the bathroom at recess to cry.
- Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth portrays this at scarily accurate levels. In the 2nd and 3rd movie labyrinth, there exists a character that stands out among the others and that character is set to be punished in some way by the movie's Designated Hero. It turns out those were the exact things that happened to the OG character Hikari because she liked movies and stood up for herself which caused her to be belittled to the point that she closed herself in her room to discard her self.
- Enforced in Total War: Shogun 2 with the Realm Divide mechanic. As you win battles and conquer rivals, your clan's reputation will increase until it reaches the point that the Ashikaga Shogunate feels threatened by your success and declares you an enemy of the state, prompting every other clan in Japan - even your allies and vassals - to gang up on you to prevent you from rising any further. The cinematic that announces this even warns that "The tallest tree is the first to feel the axe." All this makes beating Realm Divide all the more satisfying.
