Misaimed Realism

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In video games or Tabletop Games, an element of the gameplay that is supposed to make the game realistic, but eventually makes it laughably unrealistic.

This generally occurs in one (or in some cases more than one together) of three ways:

  • An effect is included for "realism", but the effect's magnitude or immediacy is grossly exaggerated.
  • A tactic is included for "realism", but real-life considerations that limit the tactic's effectiveness (such as logistical problems, possible countermeasures, or the difficulty of pulling it off) are downplayed, making the tactic unrealistically effective or dominant.
  • "Realism" is strongly enforced with respect to one aspect of the game, but not to other, closely related aspects, leading to unrealistic play dynamics and silly situations.

The reason why Acceptable Breaks From Reality exist. An Inventory Management Puzzle can often be this.

Examples of Misaimed Realism include:

Examples of exaggerated magnitude

  • In the Metal Gear series, the cigarettes Snake smokes are bad for his health, which is understandable. What is not understandable is how they kill him in two minutes.
    • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has the Cure system, where Naked Snake could be injured by various means (such as an animal bite, gunshot, or other trauma) and he would have to break out medical supplies to treat his wounds. While it can provide more immersion, it also leads to the situation where Naked Snake can set broken limbs dozens of times, carve any number of bullets out of his flesh, and other sorts of field expedient medical procedures, even when by rights such things should leave him laid up.
  • Deus Ex: many of your portable items, such as tech goggles, have battery life. Considering that tech goggles are military equipment, it sure is strange that they can only be used for about thirty seconds before completely crapping out.
    • Denton's superhuman inability to hold his liquor seems like Misaimed Realism, but is justified as a consequence of his nanite-enhanced metabolism.
  • Later The Elder Scrolls games, particularly Oblivion, have NPCs react quickly and decisively if they spot the player pilfering - in the interest of making the game more realistic, obviously. Instead, however, the result is that a horde of guards descend on you like flies on... honey, if you so much as touch an item that doesn't belong to you. The classic example is that of first-time players entering a store for the first time, accidentally jostling an object off a table, and politely lifting it back up to the table... only to be instantly mobbed by overzealous guards.
This is particularly Egregious if you try to interact with a Quest Giver and accidentally take something instead. Sometimes they'll scream for the guards to come and take you away, then politely wait for you to interact with them as if nothing ever happened.
  • In GURPS when you fire buckshot the weapon you're using has zero recoil. This is because listing proper recoil for buckshot would screw up the accuracy of the hit roll.
  • Any game with a Ten-Second Flashlight.
  • The third entry in the Thief game series, Thief: Deadly Shadows, had a rag doll physics version of this. The much-hyped but imperfect ragdolls (a new concept few games have tried back in 2004) were supposed to increase the realism of bodily movement. What they ended up doing in practice was making bodies bend into unusual shapes, completely ruining any sense of realism in the silliest way possible. The backwards U, as though the body's spine was reversed, was a particularly common posture.
  • In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the game does not simply drain your life bar when you're hit and kills you as soon as it's empty. Rather your character can suffer injuries in specific body parts, and the effects vary depending on what type of injury it is; i.e. a broken leg slows down your movement while a flesh wound will cause you to slowly die from blood loss. Likewise, the game also requires different types of treatment for the different injuries, namely either bandaging, suturing, or setting the bones with splints. The treatments also happen in real time, meaning your enemies can still stab your character while he's trying to stitch up that gash on his chest.
The unrealistic part of this is that the treated wounds heal so quickly that there are no lasting effects from any particular injury; the end result is your character will end up breaking and fixing his arms and legs about fifty times and stitching himself up so frequently that he should look like Frankenstein's monster by the end of the game. As far as why they decided to include some realistic elements into this health system that's still otherwise highly unrealistic isn't clear, though being in a horror game, it's very possible it was just done for the sake of grittiness.

Examples of Downplayed effects

  • Forget center mass, shoot 'em in the face.
    • Snipers are well-known for their ability to find a decent spot, observe a target, and kill them with a single bullet from a great distance. But even disregarding the training necessary to be effective at this, there are multiple factors such as gravity and wind that must be taken into account, and it takes a good deal of time to properly line up a shot, especially against a moving target... and more so if there are multiple targets. Basically, you would not be able to easily aim at and kill anyone who comes into your field of view with one shot each, and certainly not with the effectiveness often abused in an FPS deathmatch.
  • A discussion on a Dungeons & Dragons fan forum referred to this as the "bag of flour problem". The issue was that providing bonuses to certain tactics because of "realism" (e.g. in a battle in a kitchen, grabbing a bag of flour and throwing it in an opponent's face to distract him) would lead to players performing unrealistic stunts in order to get that bonus all the time (e.g. walking around carrying bags of flour all over the place to use in every combat).
  • A common source of Grappling with Grappling Rules.

Examples of Partial enforcement

  • The LARPs Dagorhir and Belegarth have rules that state that if two of your limbs have been disabled by hits, you are dead, to represent blood loss. But since "realistically" piercing attacks cause less blood loss than slashing or crushing attacks, pierced limbs don't count toward this limit. This often leads to players looking silly as they hop around like the Dark Knight in Monty Python.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, your character can faint if he doesn't eat enough. However, he can stay for weeks if not months without eating or drinking anything before he even feels hungry. Also, the lack of food doesn't prevent him from running, jumping and fighting like an athlete, and workouts will make him look buff even if he's starving.
  • In Condemned: Criminal Origins, some doors can be broken with an axe. The key word is "some;" why doesn't it work on all of them, considering most of them are made of wood? Also, locks can be smashed, but only by sledgehammers. All other weapons, no matter how heavy and/or strong, can't do that (though these examples are closer to Fridge Logic than Misaimed Realism).
  • Almost anything in Inventory Management Puzzle also falls into this category because of the tendency of games to limit your inventory without also making you be able to realistically put down and pick up items again.
  • FATAL has this all over the place, but in one specific example, there's a massive table of organs that can be struck by a critical hit. Two problems: the table seems to assume that you hit nothing else on the way there (such as striking the liver but missing all the organs in front of it), and the fact that there's no correction for organs people don't have (meaning you can hit a man right in the ovaries).
  • Max Payne 3 has the aim point realistically shake and move along with Max's hand movements when Laser Sights are equipped. An interesting idea in a hardcore tactical shooter like ARMA: Armed Assault or Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (the original one). In a Heroic Bloodshed-inspired game where the One-Man Army protagonist liberally uses Leap and Fire Guns Akimbo? That's just Cool but Inefficient at best, outright harmful at worst.
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