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== [[Anime]] ==
* ''[[Serial Experiments Lain]]'' has an online shooter game somehow getting mixed up with a couple of children playing tag. The result? A dude commits suicide after being tagged by a little girl, {{spoiler|which looks to those who play the game as the [[Big Bad]]. As a result, she ends up getting killed by another player}}. Pure [[Nightmare Fuel]]!
* One of [[Heroic Sociopath|Revy's]] [[Pet the Dog]] moments in ''[[
** She later subverts it by bringing a real gun to a second round. Oh, not in ''that'' way, but a few of those kids may get traumas later.
* The plan of "Friend" in ''[[Twentieth Century Boys]]'' is directly based upon an elaborate game of "Good guys vs. League of Evil" Kenji and Otcho made up.
* [[
== [[Comic Books]] ==
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*** Later played for irony, in that {{spoiler|Sarah expresses hope for humanity in the end due to John's actions, and the T-800 [[I Cannot Self-Terminate|performs a heroic sacrifice]].}}
* In ''Wagons East'', some of the kids are playing a game involving taking the roles of various adults, and one character is dismayed when a kid complains about playing him.
* ''[[
* ''Reign of Fire'' has a scene in which Christian Bale and Gerard Butler entertain the children by acting out the [[Luke, I Am Your Father]] scene from ''[[Star Wars]]''.
{{quote| "Of course we made it up."}}
* In ''[[High Noon]]'', kids imitate the battle to be between the Marshal Will Kane and the bandit Frank Miller, with "Kane" getting shot dead. When the real Will Kane turns up, they quickly disperse.
* ''[[Sky High]]''. "Heroes" and "Villains" compete to save a mannequin civillain from spinning blades. Big surprise, the guys who consistently play "Villains" are actual villains.
* A brief part of the "Once-A-Year Day" dance in ''[[
* In ''[[High and Low]]'', Jun and Shinichi play "sheriff and outlaw", then switch roles and outfits, leading to a kidnapper grabbing the wrong child.
== [[Literature]] ==
* in the [[Astrid Lindgren
* An early chapter of ''[[
* There's a story in the ''[[Arabian Nights
* The title character of O. Henry's ''The Ransom of Red Chief'' is a boy who is all too enthusiastic about playing the Indian part.
* In ''The Return of the Great Brain'', the boys play a more formal game called Outlaw and Posse, in which the outlaw is given a head start and the posse has two hours to track him down. In this particular game, the posse ends up rescuing the outlaw from a ledge. The boys promise never to tell their parents, who would never let them play the game again.
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* An incident on the third season of ''[[The Wire]]'', where detective Bunk Moreland sees children dressing up as stick-up artist Omar Little and pretending to rob the Barksdale crew.
** {{spoiler|Ironically, the kid pretending to be Omar goes on to ''kill'' Omar in the fifth season.}}
* In early episodes of ''[[
* One ''[[Alfred Hitchcock Presents]]'' story follows a boy playing Cowboys and Indians and what happens when he borrows his father's gun for playing.
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
* In an early ''[[
** Also straighter examples in the 50s strips, with jokes about [[Infinite Ammo]], the science fiction fad replacing cowboys and Indians with spacemen and monsters overnight, and so on.
** Subverted in [http://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1951/11/06 this] really early strip.
* In ''[[
** They also play more traditional Cowboys and Indians in the house, much to Calvin's mother's chagrin. A recurring trope is Calvin's attempts to cheat, such as insisting that Hobbes missed when he's shot and zapping Hobbes with his cattle prod when Hobbes declares his gun's out of bullets.
* There's a ''[[Mafalda]]'' strip where all the kids are much too busy to play their usual game of [[Cowboys and Indians]] at the park, so they play Global Thermonuclear War instead--a much shorter game which consists of saying "boom" and dropping dead in unison. Punchline: "This modern life demands ever briefer forms of entertainment."
* In one ''[[Bloom County]]'' strip, Olivia and Opus are playing Cowboys and Indians until told by the cockroach that it's politically incorrect. They go through a series of other villains ranging from [[Star Trek
* In ''[[
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'':
** When Mario first meets Gaz in ''[[
*** ...then again, Gaz may have just been getting Mario out of the way so he could introduce Geno to the plot.
** Part of Wario's [[Backstory]], according to old ''Nintendo Power'' comics, was that he played Cops and Robbers (Western variant) with Mario as a kid, but never got to play the Sheriff role.
* ''[[The Legend of Zelda:
** And as the page quote indicates, Majora expects Link to just run around and let Majora attack him. Instead, the [[Eleventh-Hour Superpower|Fierce Deity's Mask]] gives Link the power to [[Curb Stomp Battle|defeat the demon in a few hits]]. Link is not playing along.
* An unusual variant occurs in ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'' when Vivi watches a couple of Lindblum kids playing a war between Lindblum and Alexandria. Rather than see one side as good and the other as evil, Vivi finds himself comparing his fellow black mages to the toys the kids are playing with, thinking that they're [[Not So Different]].
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== [[Web Comics]] ==
* In ''[[
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[Samurai Jack]]'': After establishing himself as potent threat to their once all-powerful overlord, kids started to pick up a game where they dressed in robes and beat an unlucky kid with a Aku-ish haircut over the head with sticks.
* ''[[Justice League]] Unlimited'', "Patriot Act": After the second-stringers such as Vigilante, Shining Knight and Green Arrow manage to fend off the Shaggy Man, the kids of Metropolis want to play as them, the [[Seven Soldiers|Seven Soldiers of Victory]].
* The ''[[
** There's also "Fun Times With Weapons", where they play ninjas vs [[Super Villain]], then ninjas vs other ninjas.
* In the [[Merrie Melodies]] cartoon ''Robin Hood Makes Good'' (1939), three... um... well, let's just call them sciuridae for now, are preparing to play [[Robin Hood]]. One gets the impression that the largest always gets to be Robin Hood, while the smallest is stuck as the Sheriff. Not much roleplay is involved; the "sheriff" doesn't even do anything before the two others mount their attack. The two "heroes" are caught by a predator, but the little one manages to rescue them. They start a new game, the bigger one beginning to assume the role of Robin again, when the small one says: "Whooooo's gonna be Robin Hoooood?" (The cartoon is by [[Chuck Jones]], who in later years might've considered it an [[Old Shame]] along with the Sniffles the Mouse character.)
* In ''[[The Simpsons (
** Another episode had the kids playing Cowboys and Indians. Bart gives Lisa the [[Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom|"Indian" name]] of "Thinks-Too-Much".
== Other ==
* Evoked in a cartoon of H. T. Webster's entitled "The Passing of a Idol", where the children all want to play gangsters instead of cops and are overheard by a passing policeman.
* Legend has it this trope was once ingeniously invoked to discredit the Ku Klux Klan; a journalist who'd infiltrated them gave details of secret meetings, passwords, titles etc to the writers of [[The Adventures of Superman (
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