Video Game Cruelty Potential/Live-Action TV

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Examples of Video Game Cruelty Potential in Live-Action TV include:

  • Spaced mentioned this in an episode where Tim is playing Tomb Raider. When Brian notes that Lara Croft is drowning and asks if that's the point, Tim replies that it "Depends what kind of mood you're in."
  • The Star Trek holodeck gives the characters to plenty of chances to do horrible things to their in-universe fictional worlds.
    • One Star Trek: Voyager episode features Tuvok strangling a hologram of Neelix to death.
    • In an episode of Deep Space Nine, Nog invites Jake Sisko to spend their day looting and pillaging a city in the holodeck.
    • Another episode centered around a Holodeck Malfunction with a James Bond theme. In order to buy time so they could rescue the crew, Bashir pushes the "submerge the world" button, drowning all but the highest mountaintops. Everyone is just shocked at this, including the villain who was planning on doing it.
    • In The Next Generation, after Data inexplicably experiences anger during a fight with a Borg drone, he creates a Holodeck program where he kills the drone repeatedly in an attempt to replicate the emotion.
    • In a very intentional case, Seska sabotaged the Holodeck into a death trap that reprogrammed itself to torture its occupants.
  • Community features an episode with Troy and Abed playing a war game that turns out to award points for killing innocent civilians, as they learn when they start playing with a guy who is unbeknownst to them an actual war criminal.
    • Another has a Legend of Zelda-esque shopping trip turn into the brutal murder of the shopkeep and his wife, the shop being burned down, and their daughter now forced to marry or live in the woods.