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And You Thought It Was a Game: Difference between revisions
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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]].
Not always played for laughs, if the character realizes the reality of the situation before he succeeds (and especially if their oblivious actions have made things worse in the meantime).
In comedies, discovering that the situation is real often turns the poor shmuck [[Genre Savvy]].
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* 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...
* Played straight by the ''[[Beelzebub]]'' delinquents through the entire premise of the FPS/online video gaming chapters. Furuichi and Lamia convince the Ishiyama gang to join in the search for Lord En by challenging him at online games. They agree to [[Shouldn't We Be in School Right Now?|skip school]] and look for him - all under the impression that Lord En and his retainers are from a rival school that simply want to to beat the crap out of the Ishiyama students. Little do the thugs know that, while playing with En and his maids [[Serious Business|non-stop for three straight days]], {{spoiler|Behemoth's 34th Pillar Squads are assembling to annihilate humanity in Lord En's name}}.
== [[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 the [[Lucky Luke]] "Nitroglycerine" story, Luke is escorting a shipment of nitroglycerine to a railroad tunnel site. The Daltons, spying on him, think the huge crate is filled with gold bars, being sent to the town of "Nitro". Hilarity Ensues when the Daltons try to shoot the lock off, jump bridges on the train, etc. At the end, Joe demands to know where the gold was, and faints upon learning what was inside.
* A comic about [[Donald Duck]], ''Lost Valley'', has him forced to become a tour guide in the Amazon. When he and the tourists come upon an ancient temple inhabited by evil sentient apes who kidnap his companions, initially he panics... until he finds a booklet that details the travel bureau's great plan to create a fake ancient temple with costumed actors to scare the gullible tourists. He then proceeds to kick ass and take names. After they're all back to civilization, Donald angrily storms into the office to protest about being included in a fraud, only to be told that he came upon a REAL temple with REAL monsters. He faints upon hearing this.
* 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.
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* [[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]]''.
* In ''[[Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]]'', Willie spends her first proper night in the jungle jumping and panicking at every sound and critter that appears, a tendency not helped by a tamed elephant's over-friendly tendency to lay its trunk on her shoulder. Then, after a particularly exhausting scream-a-thon and subsequent argument with Indy that wears her out, a deadly snake slithers down from a tree onto her shoulder. Whilst Indy himself is [[Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?|paralyzed with fear]], Willie -- fed-up and assuming it's just the elephant -- yells "''Quit it''!", grabs the snake and hurls it very far away without even looking.
* In ''[[My Name Is Bruce]]'' Bruce Campbell (playing himself) is kidnapped by a fan who wants his help fighting a monster that's killing the townsfolk. Bruce believes that he is there to star in an unscripted movie. Bruce realizes that the monster is real when he leads an attack on it, and he promptly turns around and flees.
* Happens with Commandant Lassard in the fifth [[Police Academy]].
** To the point of him ''helping'' the kidnappers get away.
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* 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.
* In one episode of ''[[M*A*S*H (television)|Mash]]'', Radar runs unthinkingly into a minefield to save an injured Korean girl. When later told how brave he was by B.J., Radar responds "Did I just run into a minefield?" Granted, he knew the minefield was there ''before'' he ran into it, but didn't fully grasp what he had done until the danger was over.
** 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.
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== [[Video Games]] ==
* Since the Holy Grail War in ''[[Fate Extra]]'' takes place in [[Cyberspace]], many of the participating Masters initially approached it as a game. The full impact of just what they'd signed up for and [[There Can Be Only One|the conditions for winning]] (namely that the losers ''have their body and soul erased from reality, no one but the surviving contestants remembering they ever even existed'') doesn't sink in until the first round ends. This is particularly driven home by {{spoiler|Shinji}}'s reaction.
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Kent from ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]'', who believes he's facing vampire- base [[LARP|LARPers]] rather than actual vampires, although in his case it endures in the face of all evidence because his [[Weirdness Censor]] is incredibly strong - which in [[Planet Eris|the Sluggy universe]] is another way of saying [[Too Dumb to Live]].
* In ''[http://clanofthecats.com/ Clan of the Cats]'', the main character is a [[Shape Shifter|shape-shifting witch]], who can transform into a black panther. After an incident during a vacation with her [[The Ditz|ditzy half-sister]], she runs off into the woods in a distressed state. Shortly after, a black panther is found hiding in a crawlspace under the house they're staying in, and The Ditz crawls in there to comfort her half-sister. After spending most of the night trying to cheer up her half-sister, she finally finds out that it's a REAL black panther, who has just escaped from a private zoo...
** 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.
* ''[[Killroy And Tina]]'': When an enemy of Killroy's [http://www.graphicsmash.com/comics/killroyandtina.php?name=killroyandtina&view=single&ID=4148 shows up while he's training Tina], Killroy lets Tina believe it's part of the test.
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