And You Thought It Was a Game: Difference between revisions

A character approaches a situation under the impression that they're dealing with a prank, a con, or a staged event. Unfortunately for them, it's all quite real. When they eventually find out, expect mighty embarrassment or even [[Fainting]] if the situation was dangerous enough. Sometimes this is a [[Magic Feather]], and it's revealed that the character is [[Achievements in Ignorance|far more competent than they realize]].

 

 

In comedies, discovering that the situation is real often turns the poor shmuck [[Genre Savvy]].

 

Compare [[Real After All]], [[Mistaken for An Impostor]] and [[All Part of the Show]]. Contrast [[The Game Never Stopped]] and [[You Just Ruined the Shot]], where the character thinks events ''are'' real, but they aren't. See also [[Mistaken for Badass]], [[Not a Game]].

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

** Suzuo also put on the suit because he didn't take the claims about fighting supervillains seriously, since the suits makers were a toy company. He realizes too late that toy companies can make weapons too.

* ''[[Digimon Adventure 02]]'': Ken Ichijoji has no problem with enslaving, torturing and killing Digimon because he [[More Than Mind Control|thinks]] he's just playing a [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|virtual MMORPG]]. When he is finally proven wrong with [[Dead Sidekick|Wormmon's death]] he suffers a BSOD, triggering his eventual [[Heel Face Turn]].

* The protagonists in ''[[Bokurano]]'' are told they're going to pilot giant robots as part of a game. This is a massive, ''[[It Got Worse|massive]]'' [[Kill'Em All|lie]].

** At least from their point of view. For whoever's ''behind'' it, however...

 

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* One of the [[DC Comics]] science fiction comics once had a one-shot story about a man stuck in his humdrum life who finds three discs. Each one, when activated, whisks him away into what he thinks is a particular vivid daydream where he gets to play the role of the hero, and vanishes when the 'daydream' ends. The final 'daydream' takes him to his hometown where he thwarts a gang of bank robbers. When he returns home, he finds himself being hailed as a hero and he realizes that all of the 'daydreams' were actually real. He faints.

* In an old ''Eagle'' story from the ''Thirteenth Floor'', a bullied schoolboy is trained in Kung Fu by a computer using virtual reality, but he is still too afraid to fight the school bullies until the computer lures them into its VR suite and lets the little "wimp" spiflicate them thinking that they're part of the programme.

 

* [[Inverted Trope|Inverted]] in the 2008 Disney film ''[[Bolt]]''. The title character is the canine hero of a sci-fi/action show who, [[Enforced Method Acting|in the interests of verisimilitude]] [[Captain Obvious|(and because he's a dog)]], is kept in the dark about the fictional nature of his show . When one episode ends on a cliffhanger and Bolt accidentally escapes from the set in his efforts to save his human co-star Penny, things get complicated...

* Also inverted in ''[[The Truman Show]]''.

* Happens with Commandant Lassard in the fifth [[Police Academy]].

** To the point of him ''helping'' the kidnappers get away.

* The entire premise of ''[[The Game (film)|The Game]]'' is the millionaire protagonist working out whether he is taking part in a Live-Action Role-Playing adventure game, or are there actually people trying to kill him?

** Or {{spoiler|is he really just going insane and having paranoid delusions?}}

* This is the entire plot of the classic sci-fi film ''The Last Starfighter''.

** The main character is a teenager who is the best in his town at a video game. You can guess what happens next.

* At the end of ''What About Bob?'' Bob thinks he is undergoing "Death Therapy" although Dr. Leo Marvin is actually {{spoiler|trying to kill him.}}

* Played with in the original ''[[Tron]]''. Flynn's been zapped into the computer system and captured by Master Control's forces. They take him to the Game Grid where Ram informs what he thinks is just another captive Program about the situation, and that he'll be forced to play video games. Flynn laughs it off, saying he plays games better than anyone...and then the poor bastard finds out just how differently things work on the other side of the screen.

* In ''[[A Bug's Life|A Bugs Life]]'', Flick mistakes circus performers for real warriors, and they think he's looking for performers.

 

* The Endymion in Dan Simmons ''Rise of Endymion'' does some pretty bad ass acrobatics on a mountain cliff, all the while thinking that dropping would be such a hassle because somebody would have to retrieve him from the safety line. Just until he sees some fearful friend rush to him with just that safety line he forgot to attach. Considering the circumstances, his lapse of mind is easily forgiven, though.

* In John Dickson Carr's ''The Arabian Nights Murder'', a set of friends putting on an act to trick one of their buddies hires an actor to play a professor in an Arabian museum. They are surprised when a ''real'' professor, a friend of the museum's owner, arrives for a meeting and is treated as an actor who looks just like the real thing. In the meantime, the professor thinks that the actors are real, and attacks one of them in an act of misguided heroics.

* The Howlers in K.A. Applegate's ''[[Animorphs]]'' books are savage killers. However, their mind has been compared to a dolphin's in playfulness. They only kill because they have no idea that their victims are alive and feel pain and emotions. Seeing an emotional display causes their master to stop using them immediately as they were unwilling to fight.

* Another dramatic example: in the sci-fi novella "Wine of the Dreamers", Raul Kinson is raised in a dwindling [[Human Alien|alien compound]] and believes the devices he periodically sleeps in are advanced virtual reality devices that create three alternate worlds within the dreamers' minds. Killing or humiliating dream characters is a popular sport. Unfortunately, the dream worlds are actually long-lost colony planets, one of which is Earth! Over the course of millennia, the dreamers have destroyed space programs and even triggered nuclear wars due to a misremembered plan that the "dreams" must end when the colony worlds achieve interstellar flight.

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

** In the episode "Move Along Home", Quark begins playing a game with some mysterious new visitors using four pieces, when he discovers that four crew members have been whisked off to the game world. {{spoiler|Subverted when he loses, and they all materialize back at Quark's. After all, it's just a game!}}

* ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' has the main characters attend a convention about the series of ''[[Supernatural (TV series)|Supernatural]]'' books, which exist in the universe. When they get there, they find a LARP going on in which an old urban myth is the basis of a 'hunt'. They team up with a [[Ho Yay|gay couple]] [[Bromance|who are LARPing]] [[Lampshade Hanging|as Sam & Dean]], and when they realise that the events of the book are real, they choose to team up (unknowingly) with the real Sam and Dean to help take down the [[Big Bad]], because "It's what Sam and Dean would do." The real Sam and Dean choose to play along, claiming to just be fans who are so into the books that they took up monster-hunting for real.

* In the ''[[Kenan and Kel]]'' episode "Bye Bye Kenan: Part 2", Kenan comes up with a [[Zany Scheme]] to force his father to quit his new job as a park ranger by having one of his new friends dress up as a bear and frighten his father into quitting. [[Hilarity Ensues]] when <s>a slightly more realistic bear costume</s> a ''real'' bear shows up first.

* In "Rose", the first episode of the revived ''[[Doctor Who]]'', Rose encounters a crowd of Autons, plastic mannequins animated by the Nestene Consciousness, and is saved from certain death by the Doctor. She guesses that the Autons are in fact students dressed up as a prank. She is wrong.

** Which is what many real-world heroes do, including a large percentage of Medal of Honor winners.

* In ''[[The Monkees]]'' episode "The Picture Frame", the Monkees are hired to play bank robbers in a movie holdup scene, not knowing they will actually be robbing the bank.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

** Similarly, in one of the books by Laura Ingalls-Wilder, her mother goes out in the dark to see to the cows, and finds instead a bear. But, believing it to be her cow, she swats it on the rump. This leads to her ordering Laura to "go back inside--now" in an effective lesson on quick obedience.

* ''[[The Wotch]]'': Anne [http://www.thewotch.com/?epDate=2006-01-30 mistakes an actual attack] for a training exercise.

* ''[[Captain SNES]]'' did this in the 2008 Halloween series, with Alex refusing to believe that the murders around him were real initially (they were in a "murder mystery" simulation) but even then, {{spoiler|it wasn't REALLY real as it was [[All Just a Dream]].}}

** Earlier, he'd been fearlessly facing his trials in The Desert and dealing with Zeromus, believing that if he did die he'd simply be able to reset to the last save point and try again. When he is able to later talk it over with Bob, he learns that, due to the rules of the save points, the danger was very real and he was quite capable of dying for real. Naturally, he freaked out.

* Inverted in ''[[Jump Leads]]'' issue 2, "It Came From Space!": {{spoiler|Meaney and Llewellyn believe that they are on a spaceship being attacked by an alien for real, but it turns out it's a historical re-enactment}}.

* ''[[Homestuck]]''. Where to begin... Not only is SBURB's true purpose to {{spoiler|create universes by sacrificing the host planet, Earth is not the first planet this has happened on...}}

* In the ''[[Gunnerkrigg Court]]'' chapter "From The Forest She Came", Annie is trying to convince Kat to talk to her by staging contrived situations in which they must work together to defeat a threat, and Kat isn't buying it. When an [[Eldritch Abomination]] emerges from the water tank, she's quite impressed and wonders how Annie created it. Then she notices that Annie is terrified. {{spoiler|Luckily, it turns out to be Lindsey, their new guidance counsellor}}.

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

* The participants in ''[[Suburban Knights]]'' start their quest off believing that it's just some pseudo-LARP adventure. by the end of Part 2 they discover that there really ''are'' supernatural beings standing in their way, and [[Oh Crap|don't take it too well.]]

* Taken literally in ''[[One Hundred Yard Stare]]'' when Macy threatens to punch everyone if it is just a game...Unfortunately it is [[The Slender Man Mythos|much more than that]].

 

* In one episode of ''[[The Life and Times of Juniper Lee]]'', "The World According to LARP", June's brother Dennis is kidnapped by monsters (as opposed to the ''intended'' target, her other brother Ray Ray... the orders given were something to the tone of "the one who can see monsters"), but believes this to be his [[LARP]] (live-action role-play) group's new adventure. Since his "props" are ''real'' magical items that he stole from June's room (which also happen to make him able to see monsters like Ray Ray), he defeats his kidnappers and escapes the dungeon with no idea that any of it was real.

* In ''[[American Dad]]'', Francine mistakes a real vacation for a fake one, after finding out that most family vacations have been fake. Thinking she is hallucinating the whole thing, she {{spoiler|kills people, sinks a boat, and wreaks havoc before finding out that this is all really happening}}.

** Drakken's plan in "Clean Slate" was to set up a fake engine overload on a train in order to trigger an evacuation. After he and Shego boarded the train, and Kim and Ron showed up to stop them, he realized that he'd forgotten about the "fake" part....

* In one Goofy short, Goofy demonstrates to his son how he would deal with a mountain lion if one should attack, not realising that he has grabbed hold of an actual mountain lion in the process.