Misaimed "Realism"

"Sometimes the drive for realism goes so far, it comes out the other end of a vortex and becomes completely unrealistic. The finest example being 'weapon durability' in almost every game that features weapon durability. Yes, weapons degrade with prolonged use in real life, but a length of tempered metal doesn't shatter and fall apart after a matter of minutes!"

— Stephanie Sterling, Jimquisition, "Attention To Detail, Obsession With Detail

In video games or Tabletop Games, an element of the gameplay that is supposed to make the game more realistic, but backfires by producing laughably unrealistic results instead.

This generally occurs in at least one 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.

Since Misaimed Realism leads players to expect realism but fails to deliver, it can be more harmful to Willing Suspension of Disbelief than Acceptable Breaks from Reality would have been; players will usually accept something that's unrealistic as long as they don't go in expecting total realism and as long as it makes the game more fun.

Some tropes that commonly create this effect are Breakable Weapons, Fast-Killing Radiation, Ten-Second Flashlight, Inventory Management Puzzle, Wizard Needs Food Badly, Hyperactive Metabolism, Sprint Meter, and Grappling with Grappling Rules. Contrast Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay, in which the rules may genuinely be more realistic, but the problem is that the game doesn't adequately forewarn the player they'll have to play it differently than they would other games of the genre. Compare Voodoo Shark, where attempts to fill a Plot Hole just cause more issues.

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Exaggerated magnitude

Amnesia: The Bunker: Shooting with the revolver will cause sounds to be temporarily muzzled and ears to ring, which is realistic as you risk temporary deafness when you hear a strong noise inside a very confined space (like a cabinet), but the extent is exaggerated in the hallways and moreover the rooms of the bunker. More precisely, the sound itself of the revolver is a bit louder than it should be, which causes the effect. Conversely the shotgun, despite being more powerful, is not as pronounced.
In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, the game does not simply drain your life bar when you're hit and kill 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; e.g. 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 breaking and fixing his arms and legs or stitching himself up so frequently that he should look like Frankenstein's monster by the end of the game.
In many video games where your character gets tired after sprinting and needs to slow down, but they're a soldier or athlete, they will have absurdly low stamina compared to real soldiers. Ex. Call of Duty, Mass Effect. Most video game sprinters couldn't even compete in a 100 metre race.
The Campaign For North Africa, a legendarily obtuse tabletop war game, features plenty of this. The most infamous example is the "Pasta Rule": In real life, pasta was something rationed to the Italian army, and that really did create problems when Italian soldiers serving in the desert struggled to find water to boil it with. The game decides to reflect that by requiring Italy spend an extra point of water to sustain their ration supply. Beyond just being a morale-hurting frustration for individual soldiers, this means that the game depicts the Italian army's collective cohesion as being reliant on their ability to boil pasta. All in all, the sheer level of detail involved for maximum realism resulted in a game with zero recorded cases of anyone actually finishing a match; playing the game like an actual 9-5 every day would take everyone involved just over half a year.
Command & Conquer:
- Command & Conquer: Generals: The GLA's weaponized anthrax can instantly murder infantry, while their Soviet-era surplus is able to compete with modern/20 Minutes into the Future tech.
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3's Natasha has a Sniping the Cockpit ability that lets her neutralize vehicles, letting them be reclaimed by an infantryman. While this makes sense for light vehicles, it gets ridiculous with the bigger ones, especially those that explicitly have large crews, like ships, or those that don't have a crew at all, like the Future Tank.
Dark Cloud: The "Thirst" mechanic. The premise is that you need to make your characters drink water to keep their stamina going. If you run out of thirst, your characters' health starts depleting. While dehydration does kill you (faster than hunger, at that) it doesn't go quite this quick, nor is dehydration cured by simply taking a swig of water. This proved to be a Scrappy Mechanic - so its sequel changed Thirst into a status ailment that prevented you from healing.
Deus Ex:
- Many of your portable items, such as tech goggles, have a limited battery life. Since 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. They help to pass intoxicants through his system more quickly, but in doing so exaggerate the effects for a brief period.
- Similar to the Metal Gear example, cigarettes in Deus Ex are also ridiculously toxic, with each pack delivering 10% damage when consumed. It's not even limited to Denton, either; it's easily possible to kill other people by breathing secondhand smoke into their faces for about five seconds.
Dungeons & Dragons: The third-party adventure World's Largest Dungeon gives rules for if a rogue's lockpicking tools break. Not that unusual on its own, in what's meant to be a long-term dungeon crawl with little opportunity to resupply. The problem is, the rules it gives state that your average set of tools has twenty picks, and each one broken provides a -2 penalty on any checks to open locks. In 3rd Edition's default ruleset, trying to open a lock without any proper tools (though you do have to be trained in it to do so) only provides a -2 penalty. This leads to an apparent situation where, once you break two or three picks in an otherwise well-crafted set of tools, you're better off throwing them away and relying on your bare hands. On the other hand, the game also provides no rules for how and when these lockpicks are supposed to break in the first place, so it sort of cancels out.
In Duke Nukem Forever, Duke can drink beer as a power-up which temporarily increases his damage resistance but also blurs his screen and makes him act dizzy. This, of course, creates the question of how Duke Nukem, a guy built like a fridge who presumably has a lot of experience with alcohol, can get drunk off his ass after chugging one can of beer.
The Elder Scrolls:
- Merchants starting from Morrowind can recognize stolen items and will refuse to buy them from you; you'll have to find a fence. While it is meant to simulate the idea that, even in a fictional setting, people would be cautious about someone selling them suspicious items, exactly how they're able to tell the difference between a stolen sword and one that was "legitimately" looted from a freshly-murdered bandit is a mystery. It gets ridiculous when the player steals an item and tries to sell it in a city on the opposite side of the in game setting only for the NPC to refuse to accept it. Unless they can see the item description is in red text?
- NPCs in Oblivion 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 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. ...Yet, strangely, people have no problem with you walking into their store, pulling out a sword, and knocking everything off the countertop with it. Later installments have thankfully tweaked the behavior to them attempting to take back what you stole and calling for the guards only if they can't.
- In Skyrim, it seems at first that you can steal items and get away with it as long as no one is looking. However, the owner of the pilfered item may send thugs to kill you... even though successfully stealing means you weren't caught, and thus the owner should have no way of knowing it was you. In addition, thugs can be sent by people realistically incapable of hiring thugs, whether because you killed them before they had the chance or because they are someone who inherently do not have access to thugs, such as dogs, ghosts and even a character who is both a dragon and a hermit. Possibly the most extreme instance is pickpocketing a Briarheart's replacement heart (a magical Briar Heart seed in their open chest wound) which kills him on the spot, but also triggers this thug retaliation despite him being dead.
Escape from Tarkov plays up punishing, hardcore gunplay, extensive gun modification, and a massive in-game economy to trade for weapons, gear and resources. Putting aside some liberties with actual bullet and armor performance for gameplay reasons, the game overwhelms the player with dozens of different ammo types and accessories all the way down to the gas blocks, buffer tubes, and charging handles that seem to be added just because they exist in reality, ensuring only someone who has in-depth knowledge of the real parts can discern how to work with them or figure out what they need without looking up guides. The FN SCAR's stock, for example, comes in four separate pieces - the front half of the stock that attaches to the weapon, the adjustable rear half of the stock, the rubber butt pad at the end, and the cheek rest on top. There is also an absurdly in-depth healing system, including different types of injuries requiring different types of medkits or healing supplies, that the player is not instructed how to use. The most absurd however, is that the in-game currencies of rubles, euros, dollars and bitcoins are inexplicably tied to their actual real-life values, meaning that when real life economies crash - such as what happened to the ruble following economic sanctions on Russia over their invasion of Ukraine in 2022 - the in-game economy does too.
The Fable Series:
- In Fable I:
  - They tried to make a realistic economy based on supply and demand rather than Karl Marx Hates Your Guts, but the game does not account for the fact that merchants need to make a net profit from all their buying and selling. Instead they are simply programmed to put a lower value on things they currently have in their inventory and a higher value on things they currently don’t. Furthermore, these values are updated immediately after each transaction. Therefore you can sell a huge quantity of some item to a merchant, buy it all back at a lower unit price than you just sold it for (because now they have plenty), sell it to them again at a higher unit price than you just bought it back for (because now they have none), and repeat until you can afford to buy all of Albion.
  - The character morphing system causes your Hero to grow older as he spends XP to develop his skills, which would suggest a lifelong questing career with offscreen time skips if it weren't for the fact that no other character ages after the prologue. Never mind all the eternal schoolchildren running around Bowerstone: you can be older than your own mother by the time you meet her.
- Fable III's economy was similarly structured but corrected the supply-and-demand thing quite a bit. Instead, real estate flubs on realism. Residents' ability to pay on time is based what the rent is when they move in and if you raise it afterward. If a given home is too expensive for its quality, no one will move in, and if you raise the rent too much after someone moves in, they won't be able to pay and might get evicted. However, it doesn't take long for the profits of one home to pay for the next, and so on. And rent is paid every few minutes despite the in-game calendar only advancing when plot quests are completed. Just buy up all the property, run off to finish all of the side quests, and you once again eventually have a majority stake in all of Albion. This then completely breaks every "moral dilemma", which always hinges on either painfully cloying options which cost the kingdom money it needs for its defense, or options which gain the kingdom money but are so over-the-top evil it comes off as hilarious (e.g. repairing and upgrading a damaged orphanage, or turning it into a brothel), since you don't need to take the "good for the kingdom, bad for approval" choice. The intended realism also falls apart a bit when your approval rating is tied only to those choices and not affected by how much you raise the rent, meaning your citizens apparently can't put two-and-two together on their landlord being the monarch.
The Far Cry series, starting from the second game, has a healing system where the protagonist will do things like digging bullets out with a knife or reset broken bones that are actually sticking out of the arm, but will be absolutely fine a few seconds later. Unfortunately, situations arise which can be a bit jarring: not only do your arms ever appear to be the only part injured from Far Cry 3 on, the canned animations mean that the player can heal themselves after being mauled by a panther by digging out a bullet, or to bandage themselves and then immediately bandage themselves again, with that first bandage apparently having disappeared 2 seconds after you put it on.
- This also created the amusing glitch dubbed by fans as the Deadly Africanized Water. Running out of oxygen while swimming would drain your health instead, which is standard in many games, but since you can just press a button to heal you can effectively swim forever by ripping infinitely-spawning strips of barbed wire from your arms. Later games fixed this by having a proper oxygen meter and just having you outright drown when it empties.
From the Depths models fluid drag on vehicles with pretty surprising accuracy given its artstyle, but the viscosity of air and water is so great that the air behaves like water and the water behaves like Jello; a boat that would take kilometers to come to a stop can do so in about 20 meters, and aircraft cannot glide because they slow down far too quickly once the engines are shut down. Even the most extreme aircraft (such as a 200 meter long turbojet with a 12 meter nosecone) can barely approach the speed of sound because the drag forces become so extreme. The same applies to its ballistics, which are modeled to pretty heavy detail (shells fragment, ricochet, over-penetrate, etc), but armor is comically thick, to the point where 1-meter thick wood armor can survive a 100mm high-velocity shell; in real life, a 12.7mm bullet can go straight through it.
Fuga: Melodies of Steel involves twelve children piloting an ancient battle tank mowing down rows of enemy soldiers. Along the way, they can acquire building materials and ingredients to upgrade the tank's capabilities or cook food during specially marked Intermission spots. Understandably, reinforcing weapons and armor and cooking are time-consuming processes, so it's natural that they would take up AP. What's not as overlookable is the inclusion of a Pass/Fail percentage system that dictates if you're able to craft whatever is needed or not, despite how natural it is for not everything to turn out perfect. As a result, there are times where you could waste materials and AP multiple times over in a short time frame because of that one factor outside of your control, even with the added success boost bonuses you get by building Affinity up between crew members. Unsurprisingly, the sequel ditches Failures entirely, and instead replaces it with a Great Success chance, where material consumption will be cut down whenever it does goes off.
Several outposts in Ghost Recon Wildlands have generators that can be shut down to turn off the lights and other powered defenses but with a chance of leaving the guards on edge. The intent is evidently supposed to be that they notice the lights turning off unexpectedly, because the trigger for whether they notice anything is tied specifically to what the in-game time is when the generator shuts off - which means guards in an underground bunker where the lights are always on won't bat an eye at them turning off in the afternoon, nor will they notice lights failing to turn on if the generator's already been disabled just before the cutoff time, much less any of the other obvious signs of the power going out like automated gates opening all at once. Breakpoint makes it even more apparent by replacing emplaced machine guns and mortars with drones that serve the same purpose, as you can hack the machine guns to manually fire them at their owners even with no power... or, due to the game's more varied ability to populate outposts, find one that has several turrets and no generator to power them, just an empty space where one should be.
If we ignore the implementation of microtransactions that might have pushed the increase in car prices relative to in-game credit rewards in Gran Turismo 7, the director's comment that the changes occurred to better reflect the real-life prices of the more expensive models may fall under this; no one's going to argue against the simple fact that some cars will end up costing more than others, but fans might not respond well to the idea that the high-end cars should be that much harder to access in a video game whose appeal lies largely in the fantasy of collecting and driving said cars to begin with.
Grand Theft Auto IV aimed to have more realistic vehicle handling than its predecessors and has a fairly detailed physics system, but not a realistic one, leading to modern day cars handling worse than vehicles from the 1940s. San Andreas has very little body roll, but IV has enough to make cars flip over in relatively benign corners. Traction from tires is excessively low as well.
- In San Andreas, overeating makes CJ gain weight, and eating too much in one sitting will make him throw up. The limits at which these two effects set in, though, are ridiculous: CJ can eat about ten super-size Burger Shot meals in one sitting before hurling, but when you walk him out the door he'll have conspicuously gained about fifty pounds.
The Last of Us:
- Due to the odd crafting system, you can increase the durability of your weapons, which can boil down to taping a pair of scissors to a machete.
- If you try to fire an empty gun near enemies, they'll realistically hear the click and try to kill you while you're vulnerable. It stops being realistic when you keep tricking the same group of enemies by pulling the trigger on an empty gun and using a different gun to kill anyone who tries to exploit your perceived vulnerability.
Most of the weapons in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild are Breakable Weapons. They generally break in only a few hits (i.e. far quicker than similar weapons usually degrade in real life) and they can't be repaired. This turns really good weapons into Too Awesome to Use.
In the newer Mario Kart games, in an effort to make the computer drivers seem more human and less cheating, they will be affected when Blooper ink hits their "screen". Inexperienced players will probably be barely fazed (if at all), computer drivers swerve all over the screen as if someone blindfolded them and turned their controller or DS upside down.
Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven:
- New vehicles get introduced and then phased out over the course of the story to depict the passage of time, as the majority of the story takes place across the span of eight years. However, some vehicles are phased out rather quickly even though realistically they would still be common for a number of years after their introduction, leaving late game chapters with only a small handful of vehicles available. Even more jarring is how many of the later vehicles are introduced as rare luxury and sports cars, yet immediately become common sights throughout the city. And some special vehicles, such as taxis and police cars, only have one model available, which just calls attention to how the civilian vehicles they're based on seem to no longer exist.
- The game tries to force you to follow the rules of the road (or at least be careful when not following them). However, the system is very basic and the rules are simultaneously strictly enforced but have glaring omissions.
  - You will get pulled over for going even a little over the speed limit, and the speed limit is the same for every road regardless of size or traffic.
  - Running a red light is against the rules, but stop and yield signs don't matter at all.
  - Hitting a car or pedestrian will get you a ticket, but NPCs will never get pulled over even though it's a fairly common sight for them to get in accidents.
  - The three rules listed above are the only traffic rules. Driving on the sidewalk, leaving your car in the middle of the road, knocking fire hydrants over, and other various forms of disorderly conduct are all fair game, even though the police would realistically find you very suspicious and want to check if you're intoxicated.
- The game averts One Bullet Clips, so any reload will mean losing whatever ammo was left in that magazine. This means Tommy can't holster a partial magazine for later and pull it back out for less intense shootouts, similar to how some Tactical Shooters let you manage your ammo. The magazine will be on the ground but it's no longer a valid pick-up, potentially allowing the player to concoct a ridiculous situation of being "out of ammo" with several still-half-full magazines lying right at their feet.
Metal Gear:
- In the 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:
  - The game 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 and let them slowly heal themselves. 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. He can also do this in the middle of a firefight - or he can forego curing them entirely to get himself out of that firefight even if it requires him to run on two broken legs, because the only gameplay penalty imposed by any of these injuries is a lowering of Snake's maximum health. It also doesn't matter which order you do the steps in so long as you do all the right ones, so you could, for instance, bandage up your gunshot wound before digging the bullet out with your knife.
  - The game expands on the Stamina bar used in the previous games by having it drain over time depending on Snake's actions, requiring the player to feed him regularly to prevent negative symptoms like shakier aim and slowed healing. Late in the game, EVA gets impaled in a motorcycle accident, causing her Stamina to drop at a rapid rate, which is understandable. However, the practical result of it is that getting a serious injury makes EVA ravenously hungry - the segment of the game where the player must look after EVA largely consists of stuffing her with tens of thousands of calories of instant noodles because she can barely walk fifty feet without using up one full fourth of her Stamina gauge. Or knocking her out and dragging her around by her hair, because the stamina gain from sleeping still outdoes the stamina loss from her wound.
Tail of the Sun attempts to impose limits on how much the player can work the cavemen by giving them sleep cycles, which function by making the cavemen instantly fall asleep, no matter where they are at the time.
RuneScape actually invoked exaggerated magnitude to mess up bots at one point. When mining, sometimes the head of the pickaxe would go flying and require the player to pick it up - and if they weren't fast enough, anyone could pick it up. The idea was that this would mess up bots by throwing in something that bot software couldn't do (pick up an axe head, then go talk to another NPC to have it repaired). In actuality? It frustrated legit players moreso than messed with bots, so it was eventually removed.
Shenmue III finally gives Ryo a use for food items by giving him a Hyperactive Metabolism. Bummer is, his stamina — which also serves as his life meter — continually drains from running and even simply walking around, forcing the player to continually pound down grub to make sure Ryo doesn't get his ass rolled by entering a fight with too low of health.
Thief: Deadly Shadows has a Ragdoll Physics version of this. The much-hyped but imperfect ragdolls (a new and exciting concept in 2004) are supposed to increase the realism of falling bodies. What they end up doing in practice is 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 is reversed, is a particularly common posture.
Some of the earlier seventh-gen WWE Video Games had an effect where face paint would realistically crumble and flake off as a match went on. Unfortunately, this applied to all types of facial decals that weren't tattoos, so even stuff like lipstick or mascara would very unrealistically do the exact same same thing. Later iterations did away with the mechanic altogether.
The XCOM: Long War mod's Fatigue system causes your soldiers to require rest after going on a mission, and gives penalties and a longer recovery time if you force them to fight regardless. In the real world, soldiers of course need time to relax and spend time away from the frontlines, but they don't need several weeks or even months of downtime in order to perform well. Whereas a modern soldier can expect to spend a week on the front before rotating out for the same amount of time, a system that has been used by professional militaries since at least World War I, X-Com operatives need to take weeks of rest after going on a single mission that may only last a few minutes.

Downplayed limits

Dungeons & Dragons:
- A discussion on a fan forum referred to this as the "bag of flour problem". The issue is 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) leads 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 fight). Part of the DM's job is to roll with such ideas, rewarding player ingenuity (perhaps offering a one-time bonus for improvising) while discouraging silly abuses of mechanics (by ruling in subsequent flour throws that e.g. the opponent dodges the bag, starts throwing their own bags, or is experienced enough to ignore the distraction, or that bags of flour start having weight or even just break in your inventory).
- Attacks of Opportunity/Opportunity Attacks started out like this in Third Edition D&D, so each successive edition of the game has mostly scaled them back. The basic principle behind them is simple and understandable: In a game that uses turns for simplicity instead of real-time, there should be some kind of restriction against a character abusing the turn-based rules to simply bypass a whole group of defenders to take out a weaker target, steal an object, etc. The problems occurred with both confusing terminology and an "everything but the kitchen sink" approach as more situations were added to what could trigger an Opportunity Attack. The former describes this as a situation where the trigger creature lowers their defenses, but a more accurate description would be a situation where the trigger creature lowers their counter-attack offense: i.e., you can take a free swing at them because you're not worried about leaving an opening for them to swing back at you. The latter issue combines with the first issue confusion to where using an action triggers an attack, even though the condition where the action is made isn't changing regardless of the action. To explain, why does attempting to stand up from prone trigger a free attack, but simply lying helplessly prone does not, or attacking someone without a melee weapon in hand (e.g., crossbow or punching) triggers an Attack of Opportunity, but simply standing there unarmed doesn't?
- Fourth Edition reduced the circumstances to just attempting to move past a creature or use a ranged attack next to them, although oddly giving the defender supposedly unlimited attacks as long as it's against a new target, and Fifth Edition reduced this even further to just moving past the defending creature completely, as you can still circle around an opponent. No edition has brought up the concept of removing your ability to use Attack of Opportunity if other enemies are engaging you (e.g. if you have five creatures engaging you, how can you possibly get a free swing at a different one?), but most likely it's due to the rules getting just too complex at that point.
Lancer in its early versions had the Tokugawa frame gain rather significant stat bonuses if its reactor was stressed twice. This meant players would *deliberately* overheat their Tokugawa, or ask the GM to just allow them to deploy with two less reactor stress so it was easier for them to get the bonus. Obviously, in a real combat situation, a vehicle operator would avoid putting undue amounts of stress on their vehicle unless it was absolutely necessary since in most cases your performance would degrade rather than get a boost. The Tokugawa was eventually revamped so that it got its stat bonuses whenever it gained the Exposed condition, whether it be inflicted by the enemy or voluntarily applied by the player themselves through a special action.
War Thunder is the epitome of realistic applications without their boundaries.
- The greatest factor in air battles is the rotating third person view camera, paired with enemies getting identification markers that also show up on a miniradar. This means that you can get a situational awareness that was simply impossible to achieve in combat, allowing you to perform stunts and tactics to incredibly effective levels compared to their real life efficacy. For example, most kills in real life came after a surprise attack that a pilot did not see, but in-game you can anticipate enemies diving on your 6.
- Aircraft that pull out excessive Gs in real life will suffer from metal fatigue that will require long sessions of maintenance, if not rendering the plane unusable after landing. In-game, you do not have to worry about this, so you can do tight maneuvers that in real life would be highly discouraged. The same for damage sustained while fighting: it's not a problem if in real life any vehicle would be out of combat for months just to repair, and you can afford to be more aggressive.
- You can also bring much less fuel (which makes your plane more maneuverable) as the front is nearby. If you really need to chase an opponent to secure a kill, you might even ignore it sometimes, particularly if the match is going to end anyway in a minute, since you do not have to worry if you can't return to the base anymore. In real life, many fights were quickly disengaged after a brief exchange due to fuel running out, because you had to fly for hours to get to the combat zone.
- There are many vehicles that are represented in an "idealized" version where all their mechanical issues that historically prevented their adoption or widespread deployment here have been solved. For example, aircraft that in real life suffered of engine fires due to poor materials, tanks that were too heavy and burnt their transmission under repeated stress, armor and other components assumed to be of high manufacturing quality.
  - Since during WW2, the Soviet Union lacked a proper navy compared to other nations, the game naval mode resorts to projects of capital ships that were laid down but not ultimately built.^note The problem is, the Soviet Union didn't have the materials or the technology to produce steel with the necessary quality to sustain the shock of naval high caliber cannons firing, so if battlecruisers like the Kronshtadt were completed, its guns would have quickly worn down until their breaking point due to precocious metal fatigue. This in-game is not modeled and such ships behave like their western counterparts with equivalent mass, armor, and firepower.

Partial enforcement

Age of Empires has a limit on the number of units a vehicle can carry, which is realistic. But as illustrated by Awkward Zombie, this maximum number is always the same regardless of how large the individual units are: a ship may have enough room for ten war elephants, but removing one of those war elephants will only free up enough room to add one foot soldier.
Amnesia: The Bunker:
- You can detonate explosive barrels with grenades or shots, but you cannot do that for the dynamite. Justified Trope, as otherwise it would be impossible to leave the titular bunker.
- Dropped grenades and fuel canisters (and bottles) are also immune to shots and explosions. You can only ignite fuel on the ground.
- And you can only pour fuel from a canister, bottles can only be thrown.
- Zigzagged with fuel availability. You need it to power up the generator and fuel canisters around are rare to enforce resource management, but the fuel storage in maintenance has an infinite supply. However, refuelling the generator with a fuel bottle will consume the bottle as well instead of leaving it empty, and albeit plenty they are limited.
The Battlefield series tries to create realism by averting certain tropes like Crew of One or No "Arc" in "Archery", but depending on the game, plays other unrealistic ones like One Bullet Clips or Regenerating Health straight.
Bloodline (2005) has a rather ludicrous example in one of the quests. After unlocking a door, trying to use it just results in the protagonist saying "It's just to turn the doorknob, and I'm in". The solution is to point the cursor right on the doorknob and use it, not the door. The misaimed part is that this never happens with any door in the game again.
Call of Duty:
- Your bullets can penetrate some cover, but not all. This is especially odd with the addition of the "Full Metal Jacket" attachment that increases your weapon's ability to penetrate cover, even though all military weapons in real life use FMJ rounds by default.
- CoD tries to create some realism with reloads by making a reload from empty take longer, as your character will have to charge the weapon to chamber the first round of the new magazine, but otherwise plays One Bullet Clips as straight as an arrow (mid-mag reloads don't give you an extra bullet, your reserve ammo is a flat number that's only decreased by exactly how many bullets you fired from the last mag, etc).
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn: GDI Mission 12 tasks you with rescuing Dr. Mobius from a damaged base under siege by Nod forces. The initial sequence shows the transport helicopter being shot down by SAM sites right on top of the base, beyond a river. Then you must use your initial small force to wipe out all SAM sites in the map before another helicopter can come. To complete the mission objectives you must go destroy all of them, even those far away on the northern edge of the map. This is realistic because, in real life, SAM batteries have a very wide range and, unless there is cover offered by hills or mountains, Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) missions would target all of them in an operational area. However, in-game the range of SAM sites is ridiculously short and only the initial four SAM sites surrounding your starting base would be of any potential threat to your aircraft - in fact, it would easily be possible to pick up Mobius in the first minute with the first helicopter the game sends, remaining well out of range of even those starting SAMs, since it doesn't need to land within their range to pick him up and the win condition shows it flying out the same way it came in. Instead, you're forced to watch as it deliberately steers away from your base and primary objective and towards the SAM sites to force a situation in which they're a threat, and the game won't spawn another until every SAM is destroyed. This is seen again in GDI Mission 2 of Tiberian Sun, which tasks you to destroy every SAM site in the area to allow civilians to safely evacuate the area, even though their (increased from the last game but still woefully short) range means that not all of them are reasonably a threat to the civilian transports.
Condemned:
- Condemned: Criminal Origins includes a trio of weapons that also act as impromptu keys to certain types of doors. The key word is "certain", since the only way to open these doors is with the specific weapon the game deems suitable for the purpose: only the fire axe can be used to break down wooden doors (and even then only some wooden doors), only the sledgehammer can break padlocks, and only the shovel can cut the power to keypads, when realistically the fire axe should be able to perform all three functions on its own.
- Firearms used as melee weapons break after hitting people with them maybe ten times. This works both from a gameplay standpoint (firearms are meant to be hard to conserve, considering most enemies go down in one or two bullets) and a realism standpoint (guns are obviously designed just to propel bullets down their barrels at lethal velocities, so repeatedly smacking it across people's faces won't do its ability to actually fire any favors), but melee weapons do not have any such restriction; one can find an old and rotted 2x4 in the first minute of a level and take out every enemy in that level without it ever snapping in half, dropping it only as necessary for one of the above three obstacles. Condemned 2: Bloodshot fixed this and allows melee weapons to break as well, with the exception of the punch-dagger you can unlock (the game doesn't count it as one because it's an upgrade to your Good Old Fisticuffs).
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, even though such hits still disable them. This often leads to players looking silly as they hop around like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
In Deadly Premonition, the game plays out in real time if you let it (e.g. it takes one hour for the time to go from 2300 to 2400), but you can skip ahead by sleeping or smoking cigarettes. This isn't a bad thing, as there are plenty of sidequests and trading cards to collect, which makes that extra time come in handy.
- A less convenient example is your car. Unlike most open-world games, your car can actually run out of gas and you have to go to the gas station to fill it back up, and if you run out of fuel far away from any other cars, then you have to use a road flare to restore your car's damage and fuel. What makes this especially glaring is that during certain areas (chapter 5) and in checkpoint races, your car cannot take any damage and has unlimited fuel.
- There's also the weapons system: like the Condemned series, melee weapons will gradually wear out from use until they break, forcing you to get new ones... or just use your starting pistol which has unlimited ammo, or unlock unlimited ammo for the other firearms as well, or unlock special melee weapons which are unbreakable.
Deus Ex attempts to simulate ballistics with its bullet-firing weapons, but still uses Hitscan mechanics to determine what they hit, unlike most every other game that simulates ballistics by having guns fire actual projectiles with travel time and bullet drop. Rather, when you hit a target in Deus Ex, the game takes the point where a bullet flying in a straight line would have hit and then retroactively shifts the point of impact downwards, proportionally to the distance you hit them from, to fake the effect of bullet drop. This mechanism makes it impossible to compensate for bullet drop in any way that actually matters. For instance, trying to aim above a distant enemy and using gravity to make the bullet hit them in the head won't work, because if you aren't directly pointing your weapon at something the game considers a viable target, then gravity is not applied to the shot: it flies over their head to hit the exact spot you were pointing at. Conversely, if the initial hitscan trace says that you hit the target, then the game cannot shift the final point of impact off of or otherwise outside the hitbox, even if there's something between you and the target that should intercept the bullet. This means that you can aim at a target's feet and hit them straight on even at distances where aiming for the chest will achieve the same result from bullet drop, or shoot at the chest of a target hiding behind a waist-high wall and have the bullet somehow curve around that wall to hit them in the legs.
Dungeons & Dragons:
- 1st edition AD&D gives female characters a penalty to strength. While this could be considered more realistic since males tend to be physically stronger than females on average, the decision to enforce this in a fantasy world where you can be a non-human race and use magic just comes across as the rules being sexist for no reason. Gary Gygax himself would later state that he regretted implementing this rule and admitted that he never actually enforced it at his table. Later editions would get rid of stat differences between sexes.
- The optional rule for "fumbles", which cause a character to become stunned or hurt themselves whenever they roll poorly. Because your number of attack rolls per turn increases in proportion to your fighting ability, this results in supposed Master Swordsmen frequently Stun Locking themselves or cutting off their own limbs. Also, most spells require the defender to make all the rolls required in determining its effect, meaning that this rule makes spellcasters stronger while hurting everyone else.
In older versions of Dwarf Fortress, which parts of the target an attack hit had no relation to where these body parts are located: it was entirely possible for a single crossbow bolt to hit a goblin in both the left kidney and the right ear. This was fixed in v0.31, which drastically overhauled the combat mechanics and started simulating a proper body plan, though it wasn't until v0.40, a year and a half later, that the new mechanics actually worked properly (but that's another trope).
Elite Dangerous is obsessively detailed in its modeling of faster-than-light space travel, taking account of gravitational lensing and providing a 1:1 scale galaxy to explore. Which makes it particularly jarring that space combat is done with weapons that have an effective range of only two kilometers.
The Fallout series allows you to heal yourself by chowing down on food, but especially in the 3D games makes a distinction between freshly-prepared food and what's been sitting unattended in an abandoned grocery store or kitchen for 200 years. However, outside of Hardcore or Survival modes, whether food is raw meat freshly extracted from a wasteland creature or a two-century-old pack of chips, any possible negative effects of eating it as-is are simply abstracted as the food in question irradiating you by a tiny amount that can easily be ignored and even more easily undone.
Far Cry 2, as part of its extensive fire system, simulates backblast for the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, starting fires directly behind the player when fired and, in a pinch, allowing for quick kills at extremely close range by turning around and firing in the opposite direction of a threat, immediately burning them to death without the player catching themselves in a close-range explosion. However, this only applies to the Carl Gustav, which is only available in the second half of the map, several hours of gameplay after the point where their only option for a rocket launcher is the RPG-7 which doesn't simulate any of this.
F.A.T.A.L. has this all over the place, with most of the examples doing more to illustrate the... prurient interests of the game's writers than actually build realism. In one specific (work-safe) 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 gallbladder but missing all the organs your weapon would have had to pass through to hit it), and the fact that there are no corrections for organs that your character would not have (meaning you can hit a man right in the ovaries).
Ghost Recon Wildlands, rather than going the usual direction of Hollywood Silencer that bad guys can never hear, includes a "noise reduction" stat on every weapon, which determines the distance at which enemies can hear it being fired and, within that distance, how close they have to be to immediately recognize it as gunfire and go on alert right away versus simply becoming suspicious and investigating the general area. However, enemies gain such ridiculously sensitive hearing when they go on alert that the noise reduction stat becomes useless after that point - it's possible to fire into an enemy base and kill one of them from a distance at which they can't even hear an unsuppressed sniper rifle, then switch to the completely-silent crossbow after the body gets discovered and watch as those same enemies not only hear it from the same distance, but pinpoint the exact location it was fired from and march directly towards it.
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.
Jurassic Park: Trespasser made use of one of the first extensive physics systems in a video game, but because it was one of the first they hadn't worked out all the kinks.
- As one example, physics-based puzzles in the game never get much more involved than pulling a box next to an object to climb onto it or retrieving an object from a high place by throwing another object at it to knock it down, because there is no friction coded into the physics system, making it impossible for more extensive interactions because everything will invariably slide off of each other.^note
- There's also a system to give objects a specific mass, which affects how they can be handled, but these tend to be much lower than they should be, meaning that while Anne can't hoist a steel girder over her head like she can a baseball bat, she can still get one end off the ground and drag it along wherever she wants to place it.
- The mass assigned to an object is also what determines the damage dealt by melee weapons - but then came the problem that stowing one would cause it to constantly hurt the player character because it clips into their hitbox, causing the developers to assign a quick fix of removing mass from every melee weapon that had this problem... making all but two of them functionally useless.
The developer of Killing Floor 2 who added the rocket launcher to the game clearly thought about what they were doing, but could have done with a little bit more consideration. The weapon has back-blast (dangerous exhaust from the rocket firing is expelled from the back of the weapon) and the rockets take time to arm (they can't explode immediately after being fired), which are both features of real life anti-tank weapons. However, since friendly fire isn't part of the game, and the Demolitions class is resistant to explosives, all the back-blast does is clear the area around the user instead of making the weapon really dangerous to use indoors. And due to Wreaking Havok physics, dead or stunned Zeds don't have quite as much weight or inertia as they should, so all the arming time feature does is comically launch enemies into the air before they explode, especially ones that jump in front of the player when they fire.
- In a combination of Reality Is Unrealistic and Cowboy BeBop at His Computer, reviewers reported that the weapon was deliberately coded as being unreliable, claiming that the rockets can be duds or launch backwards. This is a pretty fair assumption to make, since these features are more common in games more realistic than ones about zombies, which they might not have played.
The Last of Us:
- Enemies who notice your gun will yell "He/She's got a gun!" and the whole group will be more cautious as a result. Weirdly, this sometimes happens after you've loudly killed several enemies with a shotgun in the same room.
- The Grounded difficulty tries to make the game more realistic, but does it by simply removing your HUD outright, which leads to the unrealistic scenario of not being able to tell that you're on the verge of bleeding out or drowning.
Realism Mode in Left 4 Dead 2 is supposed to make the game more realistic by removing the outline that normally appears around your allies to help you find them. A common consequence is that players will be unable to find their screaming ally nearby because a small object is blocking their view in the darkness even though, realistically, your ears would tell you where the sound is coming from. Made even sillier by the fact that zombie players can still see the outlines of the humans, and the given explanation is that they have good hearing.
Madden NFL includes coaches challenges. Coaches challenges in real life are designed to cover for mistakes made due to human error by human officials. The in-game officials, being part of the same computer simulation as the game being played, do not err in this way (outside of bugs). However, the game still includes coaches challenges and officials are specifically programmed to make mistakes to give you an excuse to challenge. Simulating human error is one piece of realism the series could certainly do without.
Max Payne 3:
- The Laser Sight realistically jumps around when you try to aim with it. Interesting, but in a Heroic Bloodshed-inspired work where the Made of Iron One-Man Army liberally uses Leap and Fire with Guns Akimbo, it looks rather out of place.
- The three-gun system, for much of the same reasons. In the first two games, Max could stuff an entire armory into his trenchcoat with no problems. In 3, he's limited to carrying two one-handed guns and one two-handed gun, and he has to drop the two-handed gun to use the one-handed ones akimbo. Again, interesting, but in a game where half the fun is killing your enemies as stylishly as possible in Bullet Time, it doesn't fit and severely limits your arsenal. This logic also has flaws in it such as Max being limited specifically to two pistols and one rifle, instead of being able to eschew a rifle in favor of another pair of handguns or machine pistols. Also, the only reason you have to drop your longarm to go akimbo is because nobody in Brazil uses slings, not even well-equipped paramilitaries and cops, making it impossible for Max to simply stow the longarm on his back the way he stows handguns in his shoulder holsters.
Metal Gear:
- Metal Gear Solid
  - Nobody Poops is explained as Snake having been shot up with a cocktail of drugs that has temporarily shuttered his digestive functions. In fact, in an early scene, Snake explains he was able to smuggle his cigarettes in by having swallowed the packet, taking advantage of the lack of stomach acids. This doesn't really do a lot to explain how the game's healing mechanic is based around him eating food.
  - This game introduced a system where firearms incorporate magazines with a specific maximum ammo capacity that need to be replaced when emptied, compared to previous games where Snake could fire his gun non-stop as long as he had ammo for it in his inventory. However, MGS also introduced a "quick reload" mechanic where, as long as you have enough spare ammo to do so, equipping a gun immediately replaces any missing bullets in the magazine. This especially stands out because the game even tracks the bullet in the chamber for appropriate weapons, but since actual reloads are only triggered by completely emptying the gun, the only way to actually take advantage of this is via quick reload; conversely, properly emptying a magazine makes it appear in Snake's inventory so that he can throw it as a distraction, even though reloading animations show him visibly discarding the empty magazine on the ground. Moreover, all of this only applies to bullet-firing weapons: the Stinger and Nikita launchers still let him shoot repeatedly without stopping to reload as long as he has rockets in reserve.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
  - The game takes place over a longer period of time than MGS1 (over the course of about three or four days) and yet Snake's digestive functions are limited to eating and vomiting, making his totally-uncommented-upon inability to poop seem more notable than usual, especially since there's an early radio conversation that discusses what Snake should do about concealing his wastes. Evidently, we're supposed to assume he just takes his breaks when you save and turn off the game.
  - The game has a system for tracking time in regards to things like food in your inventory spoiling, based on actual playtime, including how long it's been between saving your game and loading that save, but in gameplay terms the actual passage of time is still dependent entirely on the plot. This means it's possible to rush through the game as quickly as possible and end up having unpreserved gavial meat stay edible for the best part of two days, then save after killing a rabbit and have it go bad in what appears to be the space of five seconds because you saved right after and didn't play again for a week.
  - It also comes up in regards to the boss fight with The End, a soldier who's so old that it's possible to essentially skip the battle by saving in the midst of it and waiting for him to simply die of old age. The thing is, it has to be at least one week since saving, and specifically during that fight - you can load it six days and twenty-three hours after you saved and you'll instead get the result where he ambushes you mid-nap and drags you back to a cell, and you can leave a save within that cell unplayed for years without it having any effect on him. This is also ignoring that there is an in-story time limit of one week for Snake to accomplish his mission before the Soviet military unleashes Armageddon over the events of the prologue, so realistically Snake doesn't have the time to be skipping that fight except by grabbing a sniper rifle and shooting The End in his sleep when the opportunity presents itself the night before.
Metroid: Other M, in an effort to justify the Bag of Spilling, establishes that Samus still has all her abilities from Super Metroid, but just isn't using them in order to cooperate with the military's investigation of a spaceship that suffered some crew-killing disaster. It's made clear that the person in charge of the investigation (her former CO before she became a bounty hunter) doesn't trust her not to go Cowboy Cop like she did when she was much younger, so Samus doing this to establish some level of trust with them makes sense narratively; especially since she could easily damage large swathes of the facility and accidentally kill the rest of the team or any hidden survivors if she isn't careful (Power Bombs in particular are noted to be extremely dangerous, and aren't unlocked for use until well after everyone else on the station is confirmed dead). What doesn't make sense is that completely defensive abilities are also disabled until you're given explicit permission; the most infamous instance of this is the "Hell Run" through Sector 3, where you're forced to traverse a high-temperature area for a prolonged period of time before you're allowed to activate the ability whose sole purpose is to prevent heat damage, compared to other installments which have never forced players to go through a high-temperature area without grabbing that ability first, and the only reason a player would do so is because they're skipping it.
Minecraft: The Wild Update introduced frogs to the game, and was originally slated to introduce fireflies. Originally, the frogs were supposed to eat fireflies, but it was later pointed out that fireflies are poisonous to frogs, so Mojang scrapped fireflies, so as to not encourage young children to feed fireflies to frogs in real life. However, as a compromise, frogs can now eat magma cubes, which would logically be even more dangerous to frogs.
In No One Lives Forever, the tutorial notes that the player character, Cate Archer, would not have much luck hauling dead bodies out of sight while in the field, due to her slight frame and relatively low upper-body strength (as an alternative, they devise a powder which dissolves bodies altogether). All well and good, but they provide no explanation for how she is able to carry around a dozen weapons with hundreds of bullets and numerous gadgets on her person, especially since only so many of those gadgets are disguised accessories she can wear on her person. The sequel would take this to its logical conclusion and let Cate carry bodies out of sight, with the body-dissolving powder instead acting as a quicker but limited manner of hiding bodies in stealth.
"Desert Bus" from Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors is a Deconstructive Parody of this, with an already boring idea for a game (driving an old bus from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas and back) being rendered nigh-unplayable by stupid and misguided attempts to make it more "realistic". The trip happens in real time, but you’re not allowed to do anything that a real bus driver might do to make the trip go quicker, like listen to music or driving faster. You can't even pause the game; the manual itself proclaims that this is because you wouldn't have a pause button in real life. Other self-proclaimed "realistic" elements are clearly just there to enforce the Fake Difficulty, like having the bus constantly veer to the right for no reason but to keep you from simply putting a weight on the drive button. Lastly, the game would have you believe that there's nothing but empty desert between Tucson and Vegas, and if your bus crashes, you have to wait for a tow truck from Tucson to get you back on the road. In reality, you would pass through or near several small towns and the city of Phoenix along the way.
In Pokémon, a traded Pokémon has a high likelihood of ignoring you if you don't have the right badge. Mechanically, this is so you can't easily beat the game by just having a friend trade you a high-level Pokémon. Lore-wise, this is justified by the idea that you haven't "proven" yourself to them as a capable trainer either by catching them personally (meaning you were strong or clever enough to beat them) or beating a strong enough opponent (with a badge or other object serving as clear proof of your abilities). Fair enough. Except this rule remains firmly in place despite the series having progressively added several ways for you and your Pokémon to bond and become True Companions outside of battling; meaning no matter how friendly or affectionate your Pokémon is with you otherwise, it won't improve their chances of listening to you in a fight if you haven't got the right badge. While this still makes sense to an extent — just because you like someone doesn't mean you'll listen to their advice — it can result in the odd scenario of the traded Mon avoiding attacks, shrugging off status effects, and tanking hits that would have knocked them out, all because it "was in sync with you" or "didn't want you to be upset", but continuing to loaf around or fall asleep because they doubt your tactical knowledge.
Project Zomboid:
- After a set period of time (about an in-game month by default), the waterworks and power will go out, forcing the player to scavenge for further water sources. However, water never evaporates or goes stagnant, which means that it's theoretically possible to spend that entire month stockpiling water in as many random pots and pans as you can find and live off of that later on. There is a water purity mechanic, but it's relatively simple: any water drawn from any place that was previously connected to the waterworks will always be pure and safe to drink, barring you intentionally tainting it with bleach or something, while water drawn from natural sources or catching rainwater will always instantly give you food poisoning unless you boil it first. There are also some strange limits on what you can use to hold water, e.g. being able to have a whole cupboard's worth of filled cups but not able to simply fill a bathtub, and, at least before an update, what containers you can use to purify water by boiling it, e.g. a saucepan full of water could be boiled but tin cans set out in the rain would have to be poured out into that saucepan. That's also not accounting for outright glitches (such as that a gravity-fed tap will always provide purified water even when it's drawing from a rain-filled barrel) and nerfs (such that, as of Build 42, the small handful of wells now always give contaminated water, making the areas that have them much less appealing as build locations).
- Carry weight is an important mechanic, but it is almost entirely tied to weight reduction granted by backpacks and containers you can wear or carry, and the stat is fixed. This means it works properly for actually wearing packs, under the logic of different types of packs being able to distribute the weight of their contents differently to make it easier to carry more, but any sense of realism goes out the window the second you simply carry a pack as a separate item. This means that, for instance, carrying a military bag filled with 27 weight units will only weigh 4 when worn or carried, ostensibly because it uses the US military's old ALICE system to distribute weight more evenly, while a school bag carrying only 15 weight units will weigh 6 when worn or carried - depending entirely on the bag used, it's possible to carry 70 units of weight on you, one worn and one in hand, without issue, or carry two bags with much less stuff in them and be over-encumbered from having a weapon on you. That's also not getting into the general abstraction of the weight system, where those two bags can carry more stuff than the trunk of a car because weight reduction only applies to bags - or that damaging a car leads to its maximum carry weight degrading, meaning a car filled to near-capacity that's been banged up enough will let you take a case of ammo or can of food out of it, but then won't let you put it back in until you remove enough other stuff to go under its now-reduced weight limit.
- The game has a system for growing, hunting for and preserving food, but many of the involved mechanics are arbitrary to the point of inspiring several mods to fix the issues - for instance, the only way of preserving food that does not involve a refrigerator (and a generator, once the main power goes out) is by pickling it in vinegar in a specific type of jar, and seeds to grow food can only be acquired from seed packets looted from stores and farms, not from the plants themselves once you've already grown a crop.
- The game's mood system is similarly noted as flawed because of its limited and arbitrary implementation: one's character can go from having worked the grill at the nearest Spiffo's to casually bashing in the skulls of dozens of zombies with no emotional or psychological effect, but then become depressed from eating something they cooked in the microwave, or even bored from staying inside all day waiting for a nearby horde of zombies to pass by.
Ready or Not presents realistic scenarios that SWAT teams would have to respond to, such as robberies gone wrong, active shooter events, or full on terrorist attacks. However, while the situations are realistic, how the game expects you to handle them isn't. The "optimal" way to play to get an S-rank involves having to not only save every civilian on the map, but also to non-lethally neutralize and arrest all enemies, with you being penalized for killing any enemy even in cases where it's clearly justified self defense or defense of others. What this causes is that players that aim for S-rank must actively nerf themselves by using weaker nonlethal weaponry against hardened criminals and terrorists who are determined to fight to the death, something no sane SWAT team in real life would do.
Red Faction allows you to blow up walls in the way... but only some walls, making it very obvious when you abruptly can't.
Most pawns in RimWorld suffer from negative buffs if they wear clothes looted from a corpse, which would make sense for health perspectives if the body was rotting, but this happens regardless of the body's freshness, even if the person died immediately before being stripped. Also, wearing clothes looted from a living pawn doesn't have such effect, even if the pawn was dying. You may think stripping a dying person from their clothes would be more disturbing than taking clothes from a dead person...
Rock Revolution, in an attempt at imitating the highly-successful Rock Band and Guitar Hero series' full-band gameplay, came with a drum kit controller which was intended to be "the most realistic drum peripheral on the market" according to Konami. This was done by having more pads to hit than their competitors, six of them as opposed to Rock Band's four and Guitar Hero's five, and arranging them in a layout that more closely resembled that of a real drum kit. However, the pads representing the cymbals were still just awkwardly-positioned and shaped pads, as opposed to actual elevated cymbals like Guitar Hero's drum kit. Meanwhile, the "realistic" layout just made it hard to tell which pad you're supposed to hit for each on-screen input, while Rock Band and Guitar Hero's drums have neatly-lined elements that are easier to associate with each lane.
The original PlayStation 2 release of Rumble Roses features a Heel/Face alignment system that allows you to unlock each character's alternate persona by fulfilling preset criteria during a match. Obviously, it's two personas to one girl, so making one available disables the other until you go back and re-unlock it again, effectively cutting the playable roster in half. That's realistic enough, but then it turns out that the game also features Mirror Matches, with no stipulations or attempts to Hand Wave how it's impossible for, say, Reiko Hinomoto to fight her alter ego Rowdy Reiko, but she can fight a copy of herself to your heart's content. Even Konami must have noticed how dumb this was, because one Official PlayStation Magazine demo disc included a save file for the game that removed this ridiculous restriction and unlocked the full roster in all match types (one of the only legitimate "patches" for a PS2 game, in fact).
In Sid Meier's Pirates!, there's an aging mechanic that reduces the Hero's fighting skill as he gets older, which is largely seen as a Scrappy Mechanic on account of it applying to only the Hero. Everyone else in the game stays at the same age from start to finish, most egregiously with the Hero's long-lost grandfather (who is always the last of the relatives to be rescued) and the Big Bad (who, on higher difficulties, may eventually become unbeatable as a result).
The first and second S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games feature weapon and armor degradation. Makes sense, as guns which keep getting fired get worn out, and armor that keeps taking hits eventually gets destroyed, but in the first game of the series there is no way to repair weapons and armor (outside of a glitch, which only repairs armor^note or a Game Mod). It's one thing that your character can't repair his gear in the field, but the Zone is full of arms dealers and gun-toting Stalkers, and despite this there's not a single gunsmith in sight. A gunsmith to repair weapons is finally introduced in the second game.
Stardew Valley has an energy bar that is depleted as you perform energy-intensive actions, and continuing to perform them after it's empty will cause you to collapse from exhaustion. All well and good, except two major activities - sprinting and combat - are exempt from this, so you can do things like kill 50 monsters without breaking a sweat only to collapse right after because you whacked a rock with a pickaxe one time. Even more oddly, the energy bar only determines whether you are able to sprint, but not for how long - you can't sprint at all if you have no energy, but if you do then you can sprint all day without depleting it. You will also collapse from exhaustion the moment the clock strikes 2 AM, even if you have a full energy bar.
Among 4X RTS games, Star Ruler is fairly realistic, with Newtonian motion, no Space Friction, instantaneous continuous-beam energy weapons rather than the painfully slow bolts normally used, and with "speed" effectively being "how fast you can accelerate", like on a real spacecraft. However, relativity is not implemented, which results in the game having, once you research enough, lasers that travel faster than the speed of light, and it being possible to exceed the speed of light by simply accelerating long enough.
The video game adaptation of TekWar has a mechanic where, if you kill too many enemies in a level, William Shatner will chew you out for it and basically accuse you of Police Brutality. This makes sense on its face: your character is meant to be a police agent, and people don't tend to look fondly on cops who gun down dozens of people in the pursuit of a single suspect, especially when nonlethal methods are available. The problem is that, unlike games like Deus Ex that are designed to make a Pacifist Run feasible, TekWar's levels are structured like a typical shooter, with large numbers of enemies that shoot you on sight, few opportunities for stealth, and few of your weapons being considered "nonlethal" (with only the starting pistol fitting the bill out of the guns). The game also doesn't distinguish what kinds of people you kill: gunning down civilians for no reason is counted equally to firing back against heavily-armed gangsters who are currently shooting you. Even the biggest anti-police advocate would cut some slack in the latter case.
Total Annihilation: In certain levels you are said that air units are disabled because you are in a planet with no atmosphere, which is very realistic... except that you are playing a game set in a sci-fi setting where the two major factions have absurd technology and have been engaging in a galactic-wide war for thousands of years. That they can't deploy the most humble spaceship capable of travelling in the vacuum sounds like an Arbitrary Mission Restriction.
War Thunder has many "realistic" gameplay mechanics that are wildly inconsistent, though some of this can be laid at the feet of limitations in its engine, given that said engine is from a game that originally released in 2009.
- In ground-based modes where everyone is in a tank or other wheeled/tracked vehicle, crew members can more or less freely switch between the positions of driver and gunner, making sure to keep both positions filled even in cases where crewmembers start dying. In air-based modes where everyone is in some variety of aircraft, however, even if the player is using a plane with more than one pilot, taking out any one of them will cause the game to act as though all of them were killed, sending your plane down.
- Shell penetration is all over the place, to the point there's a YouTube channel dedicated to demonstrating the weird physics involved, such as losing the entire crew to a shell fragmenting after penetrating halfway through the tracks and side-skirt of a tank in such a way that the in-game protection analysis simulation outright says is not possible.
- Helicopters are notorious in their ability to keep flying after absurd amounts of damage, especially compared to fixed-wing aircraft: whereas an airplane can and will go down any time a wing is shot off, the engine catches fire, or the fuel tank leaks, helicopters can keep flying and even scoring kills with their tail rotor ripped off and the whole thing on fire.
- Air battles near or over the ocean often include AI-controlled destroyers and PT boats for you to destroy, but the game arbitrarily restricts you from damaging them unless you hit them with bombs, rockets, torpedoes, or cannons of 20mm caliber at minimum; in real life, armor-piercing and/or incendiary .50-cal rounds — though all but useless against modern-day tanks and aircraft — are still routinely used to harass destroyers in real naval battles, with noticeable results.
- As is always possible in a game touting realism, random bugs can completely screw over those attempts, such as that attempts to use bushes and other foliage as cover can be stopped dead in their tracks by a player running the game at ultra-low settings where that foliage isn't rendered, or a glitch that completely silences some players' cannons.
- An infamous inversion caused by the fans' antics rather than the developers': players trying to win arguments on the forums about what the true specifications of real life vehicles are have repeatedly posted classified technical documents for those vehicles to prove their claims. The devs refuse as a matter of policy to use this leaked information to improve the accuracy of in-game vehicles (even if it means knowingly keeping inaccuracies in the game) because they don’t want to encourage or be held liable for this fan behavior. Moderators removing the information and telling the posters that the dev team won't look at them to avoid legal consequences hasn't stopped it from happening half a dozen times, and it quickly reached the point that, when people started posting fake stories of defense contractors asking the families of potential employees whether they play War Thunder as part of a security background check, a very high number of people thought it was true.

Non Game Examples

An ongoing source of contentious in martial arts and combat sports is how "realistic" a discipline is and how effective it would be in a real fight.
- Certain disciplines such as Mixed Martial Arts (but also kickboxing, freestyle wrestling, submission grappling etc.) put emphasis on their training with full physical contact and match-proven actions, which train people into fight for real with what is shown to work, as opposed to "traditional" disciplines with stylized moves (e.g. like forms or "kata") and sometimes even absence of sparring. The argument is, you might learn a sequence of actions that in theory work with a collaborative partner that lets you "disarm" or "neutralize" them, but when you try to apply them against a partner who does not cooperate, in most cases they fail - either because they are inherently ineffective, or because you have no experience in exchanging hits with someone used to it.
- The counterargument is that in a real life brawl or aggression you do not warm up, you do not have gloves, you do not have a referee, you do not have a mattress, you do not have weight categories nor time to prepare, etc. Above all, you do not have rule restrictions (like "do not gouge your opponent eyes" or "do not bite") nor apply techniques conceived for a prolonged 1vs1 match. A real fight needs to be quick and short, aiming to run away, expecting multiple opponents hitting you in the back. There are many jokes about Brazilian jiujitsu practitioners that spontaneously go on the ground because of habit, a tactic which in a honest duel is very effective, but in the street could be suicidal.
- Another source of flame wars is how realistically effective can be many infamous "disabling techniques" taught in self-defense courses where you mimic moves to hit vulnerable parts like eyes or the groin. Some look more choreographic (up to ridiculous levels), while others seem more practical. The problem is that you cannot really test most of them as you are not supposed to hurt your sparring partner for real, even if you didn't have the psychological self-restriction to not injure people (and you would need to be crazy to go look for criminals in the slums to test out what you learnt in a gym).
Smart television screens come with a feature commonly called "motion smoothing", which is supposed make the display feel smoother and more lifelike whenever things are moving on-screen, similar to a soap opera. However, it has been roundly criticized as having the opposite effect, as it interferes with the natural framerate of a show or game so that it looks decidedly unnatural instead. It's especially apparent in shows or films featuring frenetic action, where the effect may work on things in focus but ignore everything else, causing a Special Effect Failure. If the feature is turned on while playing a video game it can end up inducing input lag, making it harder to control the game.

In-Universe examples:

Literature

Dungeon Crawler Carl: Most of the game's minor functions are based on what would be easiest for the crawlers, if only because it's not entertaining to watch, for example, a doctor manually stitch up every wound. Far easier to just let people drink a magic potion most of the time. However, there are a few random elements that suddenly turn excessively realistic, forcing crawlers to study hard to learn the system. Most mechanical engineering (but not all of it) requires actual engineering knowledge, and alchemy is exactly like real-world chemical science except with weirder effects, complete with running things through multiple complex devices and sometimes having to wait days for a potion to settle. And then there's the hair growth tonic, which involves a fold-out chart on how to apply it, complete with different instructions for the exact type of hair being grown based on the intended location.
Shangri-La Frontier: Sunraku and Pencilgon first met in a VRMMO called United Rounds that was so obsessed with the "realism" of its setting (a dying kingdom struggling against monster invasion) that drop rates were abysmal, basic gathering quests took hours, and following the main quest was an exercise in futility. Instead, the players turned the game into a murderhobo lootfest where they killed all the NPCs and each other for their stuff.
Player: A rock has a 40% drop rate?!

Web Video

This tendency in games is Parodied in Half-Life: Alyx but the Gnome is Too Aware. The Gnome has dozens of Stat Meters, from a hunger meter to a cigarette meter, all of which are constantly draining. He even has a meter meter.

Misaimed "Realism"
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