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Real Life / Tropes G to M

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Tropes: A to F || G to M || N to S || T to Z

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    G 
  • Game Within a Game: Too many to count, of literally every genre. Most have no effect on gameplay as a whole, however, unless you're really good at one - and even then, it requires extreme talent and luck, or an economy system that isn't completely broken. That fact doesn't stop many players from ignoring the main game to focus on these minigames though.
    • The fact that there's an entire class built around the creation of new minigames underscores the popularity of those.
  • Gas Chamber: While they are known as very horrible ways of execution, in the recent arcs they are used to test gas mask and prepare soldier class players for the possible event of chemical warfare.
  • Gay Option: While your character has less options available in the romance sidequest if they're gay and some servers consider pursuing such an option a bannable offense, recent patches to many servers have been making it easier for same-sex characters to marry and adopt children. It's generally now considered that the option is randomly hardcoded into a certain percentage of players at character creation and trying to mod it, either internally or externally is a case of Failure Is the Only Option.
  • Genius Cripple: Professor Stephen Hawking provides the Trope Image.
  • Genre-Busting: Pretty much everything before the human race came along.
  • Genre Mashup: It is not uncommon for storylines to mix elements of different genres. For instance, much of the military fiction crosses over into science fiction, and space travel seems so far to be a subplot of the military genre. Romantic storylines will be interspersed with workplace drama and sitcom, and so on.
  • Genre Shift: invokedDepending on the season, server, and player, you can get everything from action, drama, romance (which now and then might even include an occasional brief scene of erotica and pornography), comedy, tragedy, post-modernism, in the space of a few seasons.
  • Gentle Giant: Blue Whale, which happen to be the largest confirmed race in Real Life. Whale Sharks and Basking Sharks also qualify.
  • Gentleman Adventurer: A class built around exploration achievements. It was never easy to qualify for, and the decreasing number of unclaimed achievements eventually did it in.
  • Gentleman Thief: This class was once considered one of the better ones in the game, since it allowed exploits that kept your social status high despite regular criminal activities. A series of patches to Law Enforcement have sadly nerfed it into oblivion.
  • Geo Effects: Plenty of those. Terrain, temperature, atmospheric conditions, everything can impair how things work.
  • Ghibli Hills: Some regions, but they are few and far between. And diminishing.
  • The Ghost: "She". Your character never meets her, but a lot of other characters know her, and she sure is talkative, and has an odd habit of Foreshadowing other characters' lines. She also says a lot of suggestive things, and apparently, many youth in the United States, especially young males, have had some sort of run in with her, being that most people will remember what she said at any given moment. If you ask who "she" is, you will be informed that she is, in fact, Your Mom. See also: "Them" or "They".
  • Give Me Your Inventory Item: Muggers.
  • Glass Cannon: Humans are far from the toughest creatures on the face of the planet, but have invented powerful weapons to compensate for their poor defense. Thus, a human with a shotgun has a decent chance of slaying the 'bear' monster in a fight, but if that bear manages to take the damage and keep going, despite heavy penalties to movement and HP, then it can quickly wipe out the human who attacked it.
  • Global Currency: Massively averted. Almost every server has its own currency, although these can usually be exchanged.
    • The euro, one recent step toward a multi-server currency, is as of 2011 suffering a serious crisis because all the servers treated it differently.
    • Making things worse, there are a bewildering variety of minigames, each of which has its own currency. These minigame currencies can in some cases be exchanged for Real Life money, but doing so is against the House Rules on most servers.
      • There are proposals for a global reserve currency though, so this may become true sooner than expected.
    • Bitcoin is an experimental attempt.
  • Glory Days: To most people, it was their childhood. Literally.
  • A Good Way to Die: Subverted. Dying pretty much sucks no matter how you go out. Even dying of natural causes is a downer.
    • Although, most players agree that dying in one's sleep is the most preferable. And anyone who commits a Heroic Sacrifice is usually hailed by the rest of the PCs.
  • GMPC: According to one Player's Handbook, one who was able to Fudge creation stat randomization (rolling a massive CHARISMA and HOLY /FAITH score), auto-critical Item Crafting and Swim checks, and ignore perma-death, more or less in that order.
  • God: The devs are generally assumed to be this, though whether or not they exist, or if they do, are one or many, is a matter of dispute among the characters. Likewise some claim that they are really female, or even beyond the concept of gender.
  • The Good Guys Always Win: Sadly Zig-Zagged on account of Rotating Protagonists and the lack of Plot Armor. Listing examples would be highly controversial.
  • Government Conspiracy: There are some unconfirmed theories and several confirmed ones throughout the ages. Many are extensively disproven.
  • Grand Finale: There is fan speculation on whether the series will end with one, but in the meantime many of the most memorable arcs ended with this. Probably the most recent would be the very popular World War II arc which ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki according to some but with D-Day and Hitler's suicide to others.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: Some in-game religions have a character in their lore who is the source of evil in the world. An example is Satan from the Christian faction. However, no known way of meeting these characters has been discovered yet so they will not directly threaten you.

    H 
  • Hailfire Peaks: The Iceland level is like this.
  • Happily Married: Played straight with many couples. Unfortunately averted with others.
  • Harder Than Hard: The International Baccalaureate high school program, said to exceed the difficulty of Honors and Advanced Placement classes. And of course, difficulty also depends on region
    • This Difficulty by Region results in Easy-Mode Mockery by forcing you to do it again if you switch locales to one where the school system is harder. Some universities don’t even accept IB credit, compared to AP credit. No, really.
    • Not to mention that many players don't even get the chance to enter the School career path, instead being forced into the Work or War levels with inadequate preparation or just unlucky rolls in character creation...
  • Harmful Healing: People with the celiac's disease debuff hurt their intestines when ingesting gluten. If they stop eating gluten to heal themselves, their weight and cholesterol stats skyrocket. In a worst case scenario this may cause the diabetes status effect.
  • Have a Nice Death: A thoughtful obituary is almost a given. Some lucky souls even receive two or three post-death debriefings, with dramatic displays costing large amounts of currency. But unless beliefs about reincarnation are true, you only get to die once.
    • Some players have reported a Good Bad Bug that lets you preview the Have a Nice Death screen if you suffer serious trauma. This seems to be extremely rare though, and many consider it an Urban Legend of Zelda.
    • There's another bug in which NPCs have been known to publish an obituary for a player that hasn't died. This is particularly interesting, as players do not normally get to see their own obituaries.
  • Healing Factor: Sadly, players possess a healing factor that takes time and cannot heal all wounds, but creatures such as worms, microscopic hydras, and some other simple creatures can regenerate from decapitation. Fortunately they are too small to harm the player, or the game would become unbalanced.
  • Healthy Green, Harmful Red:
    • At stop lights, red means stop and green means go. Green is healthy because you can safely continue driving and red is harmful because we all know the health issues that come from getting T-boned by a semi.
    • Inverted with many red, edible fruits which tend to be green and unpalatable or even inedible prior to fully ripening.
  • Heart Trauma:
    • Double Subverted. If your heart suffers physical damage, you'll lose HP and eventually die, but your personality is unlikely to change. Replacing parts of the heart (or even taking out the whole thing and putting in a pump) does not alter people in any way that would be noticeable without a medical exam. However, damage to the brain(!) may cause many of the effects normally associated with this trope.
    • The psychological trauma associated with cardiological incidents can have mind altering effects.
  • Heaven: Different characters disagree on whether real life averts this trope or plays it straight. Those who believe it's played straight may disagree on whether or not it's a Fluffy Cloud Heaven, or even if there is more than one heaven.
  • Heavenly Concentric Circles:
  • The Celestial Spheres astronomical model postulates that the universe is made of rotating, concentric rings of aether. Each region contains a different level in a hierarchy of fixed celestial bodies. First came two sets of zodiac constellations, then the stars, and finally the observable planets, one per orb, with the Earth at the core. It was developed by Greek thinkers such as Aristotle, Copernicus, Plato, and Cicero.
  • The advent of photography allowed us to capture the night sky for hours on end, easily revealing the path of the stars. Or, more accurately, how Earth's rotation causes the celestial bodies to shift position (aka, diurnal motion). Long exposure times reveal what is known as the star trail, which is a collection of circular, coaxial streaks in the sky.
  • Massive planets tend to attract surrounding astronomical junk thanks to their powerful gravity fields. As the planet rotates, it drags the objects, therefore causing them to orbit in layered paths that, from afar, look like this pattern.
  • Hell: Different characters disagree on whether real life averts this trope or plays it straight. Those who believe it's played straight may disagree on whether or not it's a Fire and Brimstone Hell, or even if there is more than one hell.
  • Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Averted. Players generally do not get to choose their character's name at creation, though renaming is an option later. Some classes (such as the Writer, Musician, Exotic Dancer, Identity Thief and Gang Member classes) may also involve the use of names other than the one you were given.
  • Helmet-Mounted Sight:
    • US helicopter gunships since the early 1980s have used the IHADSS system, which can not only aim a laser designator for the AGM114 laser-guided antitank missile but also aim an autocannon in the powered turret under the helicopter's "chin".
    • The first widespread implementation in a fighter aircraft was the MiG-29 "Fulcrum" in The '80s, causing some alarm within NATO after they discovered how effective they were from ex-GDR examples of that plane, particularly in combination with the R-73/AA-11 heat-seeking missile. The US Air Force and Navy, who had been rolling them out rather tentatively until this point, were quick to catch up.
    • The F22 and F35 are/will be equipped with these. Several attack helicopters are equipped with them as well. Specifically, these aircraft, along with several older U.S. fighters like the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 will be made compatible with the new Joint Helmet-Mounted Cueing System, which when combined with the new AIM-9X model of the Sidewinder allows for some absolutely gratuitous stunts involving Roboteching.
    • A purely peaceful version is the Newton Cross Sight, which is used to aim a helmet-mounted camera, enabling the operator to properly frame climbing, skiing, or other extreme sports activities while right in the middle of them, while also leaving both hands free and keeping the operator's field of view largely unobstructed.
  • The Hero: Look in the mirror.
  • Hero of Another Story: Every single player lives out his own story, so other players in relation to him is this.
  • Hide Your Pregnancy: In-Universe. Available for female characters, but this Self-Imposed Challenge is not generally a good idea. Hits to your Social points or Relationship values are not worth the trauma and fatigue - to say nothing of the real risks: the unpatched Labor system can crash your game and prevent the noob from completing chararacter generation.
  • High School Rocks: But only for those who manage to be popular because of good looks (usually), funniness and/or some respected talent. For others, high school is four consecutive Scrappy Levels.
  • Hikikomori: Some characters with low CHA stats and levels in the Social skill set will take this class.
  • His and Hers: While often parodied in television and film, numerous products of this type can be found in the world.
  • Hit Points: Averted. Life forms are too complex to sum up their vitals in a number, but many hospitals manage to condense a few properties to numbers; though it's not a true damage tracker, they do help to provide a useful status shot.
  • Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: The developer(s) have given no indication that there are plans to introduce a Time Travel mechanic. Considering the massive amount of Retcon involved, and the high risk that powergamers would abuse the mechanic and cause a system crash, this is probably just as well. For more musing about the moral and temporal issues, visit the trope page.
  • Holy Ground: Temples, churches, Vatican City, many graveyards, the Ganges River, and many more.
  • Hollywood Board Games: Taylor Swift joked about her family getting her a new Scrabble board plus cat treats for Christmas. It's true that she enjoys the game but those gifts, without context, are what you would get for your grandmother.
  • Honest Rolls Character: Every single one. You get what you get. The character generator can absolutely screw you. A significant number of characters, perhaps as many as 40%, are killed by spontaneous miscarriages (or if it's by choice on the mother's part, abortion) before finishing generation. If the character generator decides you should be born tall, good looking, brilliant, with a wealthy, loving family, an amicable personality, prodigious talent, and no diseases, so be it. If it decides to saddle you with a chromosomal abnormality, your mother's HIV infection, and a spinal cord that sticks out a hole in your spine, you get no reroll. At best you can ally yourself with one of the health-insurance factions (and pay substantial guild dues) to have some of the penalties reduced.
  • Hope Spot: While there's life, there's hope, even if another danger may be near after surviving one.
  • Hopeless with Tech: Unfortunately, there are many players who fall under this trope.
  • Hotter and Sexier:
    • Puberty. It involves many players suddenly noticing certain things about the opposite (or same) sex that they hadn't before and vice-versa. They may also find themselves aroused by things that previously had no effect on them. This is of course averted for players with asexuality as one of their character stats.
    • Defied by some aces to get people to leave them alone by deliberately not looking attractive (though usually not ugly).
  • House Rules: Many groups of fans have come up with their own sets of rules for playing, some considerably more restrictive than others. The game may well be more fun without them, but they are convinced that following these extra rules is worth more points. Disagreements about these different play styles have led to many nasty Flame Wars.
  • "How I Wrote This Article" Article: An academic journal of psychology once published a scholarly study entitled "The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of Writers' Block". Peer reviewers commended the author for showing his results in great detail while being admirably concise. Of course, everything except the title is blank.
  • Hub City: Several, though the main ones are New York, Moscow, London, Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, Hong Kong, Washington D.C., and Berlin. Jerusalem, Istanbul, Rome, and Beijing are still secondary hubs but are no longer the focus of gameplay.
  • Humanity Is Superior: We've already conquered one planet to some degree, and there are plans on the table to add several more. Eventually.
  • Humans Are Warriors: We have several millennia of experience with warfare, and while it's not a trait we're always proud of, we are very, very good at war.
    • Whether or not a member of the military prestige class is proud of their status has a lot to do with whether or not they've had a chance to use their class features in a combat situation. Also, whether or not the Military class even is a prestige class depends on the server. In many servers, characters are forced to take the Soldier class: in a few, they're not even allowed to finish the tutorial levels first.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Mostly averted, though a few lucky characters subvert it by being Big Eaters that don't gain much weight.
  • Hyperlink Story: invoked Most of real-life is one giant story of multiple story-arcs with large casts of multiple languages without any real main characters. Some even argue that attempts to present main characters such as the "Great Man of History" fad popular in the Romantic arc is either Blatant Lies or Fanon.

    I-J 
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Although most episodes and seasons are referred to by number, often in the format "episode number-arc/act-season number", there are systems which use more poetic naming, especially with regard to the acts. Notably, the China server uses a cycle of twelve repeating animal-themed seasons, and the Islamic-based system counts the standard arcs from "forbidden" to "the one of pilgrimage".
    • Code inherited from the Ancient Roman server shows that this was attempted, naming the first few arcs for gods, but it petered out into naming the last seven for their numbers. The attempt was briefly revived when two Emperors named arcs for themselves, but this project was abandoned and the last five arcs are still named for their numbers.
  • Idiot Ball: Alcohol is often used to this end, as are the frequent appearances of Love Makes You Dumb. You don't want to combine the two.
  • I Fought the Law and the Law Won: If you commit serious and/or high-profile enough crimes, you'll suddenly find LOTS of law enforcement agencies will be out take you down any way they can.
  • Illegal Gambling Den:
    • There are a lot of Mafia-operated bookies where the Mafia loves getting people Trapped by Gambling Debts to get their hooks into indebted businesses.
    • The Yakuza is theorized to have started out as guilds of street peddlers who ran illegal gambling rings, as "ya-ku-za" is the worst possible hand in the Japanese card game oicho-kabu.
    • The Wah Mee club in Seattle started as a legitimate nightclub, but fell on hard times and became this. It culminated in three men setting up a violent armed robbery where they planned to kill everyone inside and take all the money they could grab (as it was an illegal operation, everything was cash-only). It ended with thirteen dead and a Sole Survivor (one of the club's dealers, who identified the robbers).
    • Molly Bloom ran illegal poker games for show business major figures until the FBI got her.
  • Imaginary Friend: Many players will create another fictional character as a feature. This is most common during the first dozen or so years of gameplay. It can happen at later points in the game too, but this is usually considered a sign of the "Mental Illness" status ailment.
  • Immortal Procreation Clause: Played straight with all species if infant mortality is factored in (a few long-lived species, such as trees, can reproduce in great numbers, but most of their offspring die young). If birth control is available, human birthrates actually drop as the environment gets more conducive to good health, maintaining the inverse ratio of procreation to life expectancy.
  • In-Camera Effects:
    • Even inexpensive video cameras from 2015 and possibly earlier supported selecting sepia (all shades of brown) and black-and-white through a menu on the camera's viewscreen.
    • As of 2019, Sub-$100 video cameras producing 2.7K video can provide sepia, black and white, cool (increased bluing), warm (increased yellowing) as well as shades of all blue, all red, all green, and all purple, plus a black-and-white "blur" effect. A YouTube video demonstrating all of these and some others can be found here.
  • Incendiary Exponent: Played straight in war scenes. Hilarity Ensues in chemistry lab backfires. Averted most of the rest of the time.
  • Infinity +1 Sword: Again, the nuclear bomb. Restricted to people who hit the maximum Job Level for Politics, and with a lot of restrictions on it even then. That said, there are persistent rumors of bugs in the code that might allow unlevelled characters to gain access to assorted Infinity Plus One Swords. None have yet been demonstrated, but the rumors alone have made many in the fan base quite upset, especially a few seasons ago.
  • In Medias Res: At the start, there is a wide cast of pre-established characters and multiple fully developed conflicts and sub-plots with little initial explanation as to how they came about.
    • Any time a player moves, changes schools, jobs, clubs, etc they are typically started off In Medias Res. Expect a lot of info dumping.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: Played straight for your first level or so. All non-twinks have the choice to avert this trope for a long time, but as your level reaches the max cap it becomes enforced again. Many players are so acquainted to this trope that they never attempt to break it. Some players on the other hand...
    • Also a non-literal example for players with the Shyness attribute, where comparatively simple social interaction becomes an Insurmountable Fence.
  • Interface Screw: A surprising number, either involuntary or self-imposed:
    • Involuntary examples: optical illusions, mental illnesses, cognitive biases, bad eyesight. Inventory items can reduce the penalties on some of these.
    • Self-Imposed Challenge examples: alcohol, hallucinogens, sleep deprivation.
    • Many items with the "Capsaicin" affix are designed to cause this in the form of feeling as though you're taking extreme damage and false "debuffs" of the afflicted part being heat burned and/or acid burned. Pepper and spice items that share this affix only affect mucus membranes in most cases (which oh so unfortunately includes your eyes). Anything to the point that it can affect other parts are weaponized as pepper-spray and a short burst is enough to inflict several debuffs to leave you in a state of Controllable Helplessness until they wear off for most people.
  • International Showdown by Proxy: See the World Cup, the Olympics, and every game of professional sports ever played.
  • In the Hood: Averted. In most environments, wearing a hood tends to draw curiosity, if not outright suspicion. If the local culture or weather makes hoods commonplace, a hood won't cause a character to stand out, but it won't make her any less noticeable, either.
    • In the Seattle server, there's a joke that locals can be distinguished from tourists by their reaction to the rain: tourists tend to grab an umbrella, locals tend to simply wear a hood.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle: A recurring mini-game in the form of school bags, camping/canoeing trips, shopping bags, holiday packing, road trips, moving into a smaller apartment, and a woman's purse (which may verge on Bag of Holding).
    • Averted by a small number of people who take vows of poverty, but this is unusual and often considered deviant.
    • At the opposite extreme, characters with very high levels of money scatter their funds across many servers in an effort to keep their Financial score from suffering 'decay'. This is, so far, an unpatched exploit.
  • Irony: A surprisingly common trope for a work that is neither satire nor comedy (though it has elements of both).
  • It Came from the Fridge:
    • Kefir grains swell, divide, and move around in milk like a macro-scale colony of cells.
    • The glob of goo (scoby, short for "symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast") used to make kombucha (fermented tea) moves around in the liquid; rising, sinking, flipping over, and occasionally gaining so much bouyancy that it looks like it's trying to escape. Some homebrewers get attached to and name theirs, treating it as a pet Blob Monster that lives entirely on room-temperature sweet tea. When put up for storage, the resultant jar of grey biomass floating in amber liquid looks like something you'd find on the set of a horror movie.
    • Any foodstuffs that aren't consumed all at once is liable to produce this, especially if it's stored in an translucent or opaque container.
    • Trope Namer (see the note under Fridge Brilliance above)
  • Item Crafting: Features an extensive system tied in with the Tech Tree — so extensive, in fact, that a viable strategy for some players is to devote themselves to gaining levels in one particular aspect and selling their craftsmanship to other players. New formulas are being discovered all the time.
  • It Makes Sense in Context: It's commoc for communities to have their own language and terms that outsiders may not get. For example, the soccerball fandom has terms like "hat trick", when a player scores three goals in a signle game.
  • Izchak's Wrath: Enter a store selling gun items, choose the rob command, and see what happens.
  • Jerkass Gods: A few people choose to blame god(s) and/or fate for how crappy their life is/was.
  • Joins to Fit In: Thousands of clubs exist for characters with similar interests to bond over these interests.
    • Especially for characters who have chosen the Musician class, this is practically necessary in order to make the class a viable career-path. That said, there are some who decide to go alone, but even they need to hire a group of other characters in order to perform and earn money.
  • Jump Physics: Applies in the pole vaulting minigame.

    K 
  • Killed Off for Real: Not just common, though some have beliefs that the dead return in some way - enough players will tell others that ghosts linger in the living world and can contact the living. Occasionally averted with last-minute desperation tactics, such as defibrillation and CPR, but it has yet to be seen that one stave off Character Death indefinitely.
  • Killer Rabbit: Many animals (and people) fall under two categories: those that don't look dangerous but can kill or injure someone at various levels, and those that do look dangerous and can kill or injure at various levels. Some people look meek but have such an "animal" inside them. Exceptions could count in gentle giants that are not provoked and many types of smaller life forms that, if not carrying diseases, lack the weaponry and/or aggression to actually cause any significant harm.
    • Subverted with rabbit characters, who can scratch and bite, but will take some time to injure you horribly, giving you time to defy this trope by calming them down or otherwise remove yourself from the situation.
    • During the early stages of the Human server there were carnivorous relatives of animals which would today be thought of as harmless or nearly harmless. Two examples being the "Killer Kangaroo" and what has been called the "Demon Duck of Doom" [1] No killer rabbits though - that we know of.
    • Played straight, however, with the 'rabies' status effect. It makes normally harmless bunnies — or puppy dogs, kitties, and so on — into fearsome carriers of guaranteed death, unless an antidote is quickly applied.
  • Kill It with Fire: Trope Namer; a form of Applied Phlebotinum called "fire" has been adapted into various forms of Depleted Phlebotinum Shells (flaming arrows, black powder bombs, flamethrowers, napalm, fuel-air bombs and laser-guided thermobaric missiles, to name just a few) in order to kill them all.
    • In one of the earlier seasons the Toba volcanic event caused a near reboot of the human server. Many non-human players were also affected.
    • On a higher scale some have speculated that the earlier Chicxulub cosmic event ended the dinosaur story arc.
  • Kill It with Water: Trope Namer. According to some, the Game Master decided after the first few seasons that the characters and plot were going completely Off the Rails. The GM felt that the best course of action was to drop a flood on everyone except for a few of the characters; just enough for a Reboot.
    • Ironically, water is a key component for every lifeform in the entire series and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
  • Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: So far, this has held true in Real Life, from slings and stones, to bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, cannons and shells (and guns and bullets), and more recently, guided missiles. And in the future, mass drivers like railguns and Gauss cannons provide a logical path for even further advancement of kinetic weapons. Energy Weapons have also existed for quite a while, in the form of fire, and recently a couple of experimental lasers as well, but have never been so prominent.
    • The top-tier move "Rod From God" has been found in the code, but no one has unlocked it yet.
  • Kudzu Plot: So complicated, even the characters 'in charge' don't know what the hell's going on most of the time. Whether the author(s) do(es) themselves is hotly debated among the fans (apart from the issue of whether the author/s even exist). Entire academic disciplines are dedicated to making just a little sense of the storyline.

    L 
  • Laborious Laziness: Who hasn't torn their room apart looking for a missing TV remote control when they could just walk over to the TV and change the channel that way?
    • This is void, of course, for some "too modern" TVs that require the remote to operate on them.
    • Many players have also reported spending hours looking for the keys to their car just to drive down to the grocery store for a few daily supplies, when it would have been much faster (and easier) just to walk instead. Of course, this often turns into a "Shaggy Dog" Story, since often the keys turn out to have been in the exact place the player expected them to be in, only they missed them the first time they looked.
  • Lampshade Hanging: Art, especially comedy. And this wiki, of course.
  • Late for School:
    • Most players are late for school at least once in their play-through.
    • Averted with (most) players who choose the homeschooling path.
  • Law of Conservation of Detail : Played With. There are so many details that some have to avert this trope, but can be an Enforced Trope if characters are macgyvering resolutions to their personal arcs, and at other times a Defied Trope, such as when an important-seeming detail like a religion-themed item turns out to be purely aesthetic. Played straight in the math level.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Some characters believe they can talk to the other god/being/whatevertheycallittoday. Also, this is not a page about a TV series or an MMORPG.
  • Leave the Camera Running: A continuous trope.
  • Left Stuck After Attack: Many kinds of bees have jagged stingers; when they sting, they'll often be stuck on something they're stung, and they have to sacrifice their abdomen to escape, which is often fatal.
    • Many dogs breed in this way, although they don't lose any body parts in the process. However, they do get stuck for up to an hour after the fact and report intense pain if they attempt to pull out.
  • Lemony Narrator: Sadly, many forms of mental illness take on this trope.
  • Lensman Arms Race: Humanity's entire story arc has seen us go from crude rafts and sticks with sharp stones attached to nuclear weapons and space flight.
    • Evolution. The winners survive.
    • Parasitism. The game of move-countermove between parasites and disease-causing organisms and their victims is stunningly complex. Some players spend their whole lives in a class studying the defenses of one species, the human immune system, and all those players have to have very high INT stats just to get the class.
    • Antibiotics. Penicillins break cell walls. Beta-lactamases break penicillins. And we're off to the races.
  • Lethal Joke Character: It's one way to interpret a (relatively) hairless biped with smaller fangs per body size, a generally less practical version of claws, about no poison whatsoever bar bodily waste, a lack of natural weapons such as horns, incredibly long and perhaps dangerous physical development, a muscle tone and a movement speed that are outclassed often enough, if not lethargic, not-so tough skin, no thick fur, about no special defenses, and (until very recently) a quite high risk for character creation, has achieved this status with nothing more than the ability for its thumbs to have oppositional movement and a large brain. Technology and a potentially limitless Tech Tree have given this race the chance to either unmake its world or survive its end. Not to mention there have been numerous cases of such beings enduring more than expected and even accounts of them getting an advantage in direct combat against other species in the animal kingdom. Ever notice every, or should we say about every player reading this page has this character type?
    • Interestingly, although they have Strength and Speed scores that are fixed at low levels, humans can train up their Endurance stat to exceed that of most land animals. Few choose to cultivate this skill outside of a few hobbyists and the few diehards who stick to the Hunter-Gatherer class.
  • Lethal Lava Land: Many places, most notably Hawaii, Japan and Sicily.
  • Let's Play: There are over millions of videos depicting these, as well as other mediums.
  • Level Grinding: It can take decades of grinding to achieve levels in most Prestige Classes.
    • Most skills require some Level Grinding to raise to the point where they are at all useful, though there are exceptions.
  • Life Will Kill You: Unfortunately, statistics regarding life expectancy indicate this to be one defining feature of real life.
  • Lightning Can Do Anything: Captive, artificially-generated lightning is used to run various machines, from children's toys to supercomputers.
  • Like Reality, Unless Noted: The Trope Namer. Played straight to the most part, except for the 'unrealistic' bits...
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: The Nerd class has a really hard time going through the early levels, especially High School and the PVP, while "jocks" can mostly go around doing what they like unhindered, but eventually the jocks tend to end up working for the nerds.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: Played straight with gestation, but otherwise averted. All textures and cutscenes load instantaneously. Even the splines reticulate so fast you'd barely notice them at all. It turns out the video engine runs faster than the viewer is physically able to perceive it - which seems like a real waste of processing power.
    • Played straight during the "School" and "Employment" arcs if your character has the "Heavy Sleeper" trait, as well as any location where server capacity is limited and you have to wait for a lengthy time for service (known as "queues" or "lines" in one common form)
  • Long-Runners: 12,000 years of human civilization measured from the start of the Neolithic, with many Missing Episodes along the way. 13.7 billion years back to the presently held beginning though, the Big Bang, which itself could be questionable. Several other series set in the Real Life-verse are also Long-Runners - stromatolites, jellyfish, sharks and spiders to name just a few. Some long-running fan-favorites, including the dinosaurs and mammoths were eventually Killed Off for Real... but spin-off and Expy characters such as birds and elephants were kept around.
    • And of course, bacteria, some of the very first characters to appear, still make up more than half of the cast list.
  • Love Dodecahedron: But usually not Played for Laughs.
  • Love Hurts, but also Love Redeems, and sometimes frequently Love Makes You Crazy. All of these may be experienced by the same character at various points, in some cases multiple times.
  • Luck-Based Mission: If you pick the Gambler or Entrepreneur class, there are a lot of these that affect how much money you have. But at least they tend to keep you alive, unlike the Soldier class during wartime. However, if you have money, it's well-known that you can more easily turn luck toward your favor. To be honest, though, the entire game is like this—everything from finding a job to attaining fame to surviving the Plague.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: Entirely possible with certain weapon or object interactions with players. Such interactions generally cause an instant Permadeath and can lead to psychological debuffs for other players who witness them or their aftermath.

    M 
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Favorite tactic of militaries across the world, heavily used in air and naval combat. Combined with nukes to make a superweapon called the ICBM, and the Cluster Bomb to make the staggeringly destructive MIRV warhead. The Macross Missle Massacre has become less popular as newer strategies emerged. Especially in light of recent developments in the manner of war.
  • Magic A Is Magic A: The 'laws' of physics are long-standing models which operate reliably enough for the practitioners to 'act' as if they were true. We're still a long way from direct manipulation of the system code.
  • Magical Computer: Most notable aversion... even if some seem not to realize this.
  • Magical Realism: May or may not be explainable by the psychiatry profession.
    • Or the paranormal investigator class.
  • Magikarp Power: Thanks to a process called "Puberty", which begins the prestige class minigame, even the wimpiest young player can develop into a hardcore badass.
    • See that kid mutilating classic rock songs on his new guitar? Remember his name.
    • See that Troper over there? Remember his name too.
    • You know that nerd you always pick on in class? Someday he will be your boss.
      • Unless, of course, the one picking on that nerd realizes grinding mental, physical, and social stats are all possible in this setting and prevent crippling overspecialization.
    • A single group of players, thanks to the talent trees unlocked by thumbs with oppositional movement and large brains, could wipe dozens of servers out forever, maybe even eliminate every player in existence.
  • Make the Bear Angry Again: The 21st century seasons, especially the high-point in the Southern Ossetia arc in the middle of season 2008, and taken to new heights in the Ukraine arc of 2022.
  • Malignant Plot Tumor: Quite a few. By no means a complete list:
    • A band of refugees, thieves, debtors, runaway slaves and whoever get it into their heads to build a small town around seven hills in Italy. Then an Etruscan prince insulted one of their women, with results that were less than pleasant for the Etruscans. As a result the most famous empire in history is formed, and most of the most powerful nations in the world call themselves a Res-pub-lic-a
    • The execution of a certain minor Jewish leader in first-century Judea, eventually sparked off one of the great world religions.
    • A Wacky Wayside Tribe of Arab nomads in-between Persia and Rome during the Ancient World arc go on to dominate half the known world (and invent another major religion) during the Medieval arc.
    • Dividing up the Middle East seemed almost like an afterthought at the close of World War I, but it has led to no end of headaches in recent seasons.
    • A handful of rebellious British North American colonies ended up establishing the Modern World arc's superpower.
    • The Japan server for the most part was concerned only with its minigame until around 150 seasons ago, then featured prominently in the World War II story arc and remains one of the more influential forces in the game today. Players on it insist it be kept to players who started out with it only, and constant PvP incidents have led to it causing friction with the other Asian servers.
    • See even wider-reaching examples under Lethal Joke Character and The Singularity.
  • Mandatory Motherhood: Until recently, it was nearly impossible to get very far on the Sex Life quest chain without automatically starting the Parenting quest chain. These days, many servers have implemented options that let you choose if and when to initiate the latter, irrespectively of where you are on the former. Some bugs remain that can make the game default to the old behaviour, though.
  • The Many Deaths of You:
    • Averted, in that death is usually one-time and permanent. However, there are a lot of different ways to do it.
    • Suffocation, bleeding out, decapitation, broken neck, cancer, drowning, heart attack, stroke, dismemberment, impalement, being hit by a car, Immolation (Burning to death), deadly predators, murder, suicide, murder-suicide, AIDS/HIV, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, falling from too high a height, shock, crushed, being too hot, being too cold, lethal injection, and gassed. That is just the tip of the massive iceberg that is death. Also includes death by ice-berg.
  • Massive Multiplayer Scam: The P-P-P-Powerbook prank involves an eBay scammer being shipped a binder covered in glued-on keyboard keys, and paying about 600 dollars for it to boot.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Depending on which fanon you subscribe to.
  • Meaningful Funeral: Every character sees at least one, most likely.
  • Meaningful Name: Generally subverted. Even on servers where new characters's names' meanings are taken into consideration at registration, it can be hard to tell whether this isn't a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, as undeveloped characters are quite suggestible. Can be Double Subverted by characters who inherited their name from seasons where this trope was Played Straight, who also coincidentally inherited the relevant trait.
  • Meat Moss: Biofilm. There's also a cave formation known as "Snottites", which are long strings of Meat Moss feeding on toxic cave water. They filter out all the nutrients and water, and leave a drop of pure sulphuric acid to drip down.
  • Medium Awareness: Well... we do have this page.
  • Mega Neko: Lots! Lions, tigers, cougars, jaguars, leopards ... but they rarely make good pets.
  • Meganekko: Also well-represented. Glasses are popular enough that people wear them when they don't even need them.
  • Memetic Mutation: In-Universe. The primary medium for these to occur in. For instance, if someone says "Magneto was right" outside the Marvel universe, chances are good they will be a player character in Real Life.
  • Meta Fiction: The philosophy genre gets more meta with every iteration. It started with fanfics about the ideas behind the code and evolved into fan discussions about what a Player Character even is.
  • Metaplot: An enormous number of independent stories exist in the Real Life universe, but metaplots about world affairs happen sometimes (such as the two world wars and the Cold War).
  • Minigame: There's all sorts of these scattered around, but they require a fair chunk of in-game currency to play. Some of these even contain minigames within themselves! It's even possible for the player to take a path which allows them to design new mingames. You can learn about the tropes of these minigames here.
  • Minigame Zone: These, called arcades, used to be very popular in the 80s. Some restaurants even have these.
  • Min-Maxing: Largely averted, as the most successful people are usually those who have bothered to build up their Charisma alongside whatever technical knowledge needed, and a great many people who have focused on building knowledge at the expense of social networking haven't done as well.
    • For the most common objectives, this is true. However, there are plenty of alternate objective and victory conditions allowing for many different min maxing options.
  • Mind Screw: This very article to anyone who takes this seriously that reality is a TV show or an MMORPG. (Which we all know isn't true)
    • Philosophy. Quantum physics. Relativity.
    • Many things about economics make no sense either.
    • Psychology, especially depth psychology (ie Freud and Jung).
    • The inability to access in-game help or get a response from the mods or devs has become a Mind Screw in the eyes of some players, who join the Atheism faction or opt out of the religious aspect of the game entirely.
    • Any scenario where a player doesn't know who to trust, or who, if anyone, is telling the truth. Lots of he-said-she-said can result in mind screw, though players with sufficiently good investigative stats can serve as Mind Screwdrivers.
    • The tactic known as "gaslighting" involves one player inducing this by convincing another that his or her recollection of previous gameplay is inaccurate. Because of the potential impact on the subject, this is generally considered an extremely unethical strategy.
  • A Minor Kidroduction: Downplayed, each character's tutorial section is usually at least 10% of their entire playtime..
  • Mishmash Museum: It's possible that the entire Earth is one (inhabited by crazed custodians who regularly smash the exhibits.)
    • Under the terms of Henry Clay Frick's will, his New York mansion was made a museum (the Frick Collection on East 70th Street), but none of the paintings were moved or removed (nor were labels added); thus the works are arranged according to the robber baron's aesthetic sense.
    • The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California.
    • The Science Museum of Minnesota has an entire exhibit designed this way on purpose. It contains a traditional Hmong house, an Egyptian mummy, a phrenology machine, a giant dead polar bear, and many prehistoric tools, among other things.
    • The Redpath museum in Montreal is home to several stuffed animals, fully articulated skeletons of Gorgosaurus and Dromaeosaurus, an Egyptian mummy, a seashell collection, a mineral collection, some trilobite fossils, a samurai suit of armour, a fossil of an aquatic lizard, Chinese shoes made for bound feet, charts showing the dinosaur family tree and the phylogenetic tree of all life on Earth, an anaconda skeleton, a Triceratops skull, a banner made out of human teeth, skeletons of two whales, a sea lion and a turtle and a giant origami pterosaur, all in about two and a half floors of space. In other words, it looks exactly, inside and out, like every natural history museum stereotype ever. It's awesome.note 
    • The Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford is a Victorian Anthropology museum with its exhibits grouped by function, so the cases of 'things used as currency' are next to the 'Things used as Armour', the Chinese pigeon whistles are near the Hawaiian feather cloaks, and the whole place is dominated by a totem pole. I'm pretty sure there is a secret 'Artifacts Of Doom' collection somewhere in here.
    • Ripley's Odditorium located on Hollywood Boulevard of Ripley's Believe It or Not! fame.
    • The Greybull Museum out in Wyoming fits this trope perfectly. it has taxidermied animals, historical artifacts, and fossils scattered all over the museums with no sense of organization whatsoever. A fossilized turtle shell is on the exact opposite side of the section with Coryphodon tusks and belimnite shells, both of which are opposite the corner with the sauropod femurs.
    • Hungarian Count Istvan Szechenyi once commented that the National Museum features his father's portrait between a snake and a crocodile.
    • Sir John Soane's Museum in London is another excellent example of the 1800s urge to collect all sorts of anything (medieval objects, large and small sculpture, books, stained glass, Egyptian scarabs, various gems et al.) and then just bequeath your whole house to the city of London to remain a museum in perpetuity. Sir John further distinguished himself by creating a catalogue of his holdings on three separate occasions (1830, 1832 & 1835). Thus, the building and its collection are amongst the best-documented in the world. And most importantly: the deal includes leaving all of the objects exactly where Soane placed them when he acquired them.
    • Hearst Castle, which is designed and furnished according to the, ahem, "eclectic" tastes of American newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst. Tourists think it's pretty; architecture buffs think it's horrifying.
  • Misplaced Wildlife: Invasive species and zoos.
  • Missing Episode: invokedThe reason why the "Archaeologist," "Anthropologist," "Paleontologist," "Forensic Scientist" and other similar classes are available. There appear to be no ways to revisit any previous level, nor to stream video footage of those levels in play.
  • Missing Man Formation: Frequently used to honor fallen members of the Pilot class.
  • Mistaken for Pregnant: Every woman of childbearing age is apparently pregnant when there's a sign of a full belly. One should never mind such possible explanations of bloating, gas, obesity/being overweight, eating a big meal, or any medical situation that does not involve pregnancy.
  • Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Bad Bosses who cross the line often have this happen to them.
  • Money, Dear Boy: invokedSome players would do anything just to get a lot of money (even taking it from other players without the other one's knowledge, something illegal in most servers).
  • Money for Nothing: Averted. There's just so much stuff to be bought with the in-game currency that you will never have too much money. Oh sure, the other players may say you do, especially indulging in Conspicuous Consumption, there's always charities to give that money to.
  • Money Sink: Some of which are required to survive. Real estate is a popular one whose necessity for survival is somewhat debatable, as is haute couture fashion.
  • Mook Maker: The infamous Ant Queen. Sometimes she is a neutral party who only fights other insect-type enemies, but many players will treat her like an enemy if her children appear in their homes.
  • Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Played with: The vast majority avert this trope, but those that play it straight tend to gain extreme levels of infamy.
  • Mordor: Often the result of warfare, strip-mining, and/or chemical contamination. Reducing a playzone to this status is much faster than restoring them to their previous condition, but this doesn't seem to matter to the characters involved.
  • More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Sharks have three rows; certain deep-sea fish are even worse.
  • Mr. Imagination: Everyone is this to some degree, or 99% if you believe Rene Descartes.
  • Mugging the Monster: Happens to members of the criminal class who aren't careful in selecting their prey, especially if they mess with someone who possesses self-defense items, or invested in self-defense skills, or is of a prestigious class. One of the very rare instances of Laser-Guided Karma, a trope that Real Life generally doesn't use.
  • Multiple Endings: Every character has a different way their different chapters and adventures close, though people say the very, very end is an 'equalizer' - and even that has a large amount of possibility. In general a character has many, many Bad Ending and Downer Ending options.
  • Munchkin:
    • The "Scientist" and "Engineer" classes, whose class abilities consist of memorizing the complex equations and rules that govern Real Life so they can squeeze every last possible advantage out of them, including figuring out even more of the rules. Unlike other munchkins, though, their work carries with it the potential for respect and prestige.
    • The "Theologian" and "Philosopher" classes also work along these lines and were the Trope Codifiers for the first several thousand seasons. In fact, the Scientist and Engineer classes developed from these two older classes and there was significant overlap until roughly 250 seasons ago. Theologians and Philosophers are still very common today. For minigames and some PvP events, the "Attorney" class is very useful (and also related to the others, although somewhat more distantly).
    • Stephen Hawking is a particular instance of this. After getting hit with a particularly bad Debuff that dropped all physical stats to near 0, he compensated by grinding his INT through the roof.
  • Murphy's Bullet:
    • President Ronald Reagan was a real-life version of this trope. When John Hinckley shot at him, he missed with every shot —the bullet that actually hit Reagan ricocheted off the security glass of his presidential limo and struck him in the side. Until Reagan started coughing up blood while being rushed away in the limo, no one even knew he'd been shot.note 
    • The Napoleonic Wars:
      • This is the reason Napoleonic warfare was developed. If the soldiers didn't stand together to mass their fire (and bayonets), they'd have been sitting ducks for cavalry charges, since early muskets were so inaccurate they often missed at near point-blank range. Same thing for early rocket artillery.
      • "The soldier's musket, if it is not too badly calibrated, which is very often the case, can strike a man at a distance of 80 yards and even up to 100 yards. But a soldier has to be very unlucky even to be wounded at a distance of 150 yards, this on condition that his adversary aims well. As for firing on a man at a distance of 200 yards, you might as well aim at the moon hoping to strike it."
      • Gunsmiths of the time actually could make more precise weapons, but they were agonizingly slow to reload, as the tight fit of a bullet to bore would require a time-consuming inch-by-inch ramming of the bullet into place, along with precision workmanship being costly. Given the widespread use of poorly-trained mooks as soldiers, and the persistence of a standard battle formation originally developed in ancient Greece, it was more practical to use a cheap weapon whose bullet could be more quickly loaded, and to heck with accuracy.
    • Modern warfare:
      • This situation is usually caused by soldiers using automatic weapons and being scared for their own lives, (1) they don't worry as much about aiming, and (2) the recoil from the previous round throws off their aim anyway.
      • This is also the reason why staying calm is paramount in videogames with realistic recoil, such as Counter-Strike or Battlefield 1942.
    • The actual strategic purpose of full-auto is basically to make a scary noise so the enemy will be too busy hiding to shoot back. Works well if you have an ammo truck following you, but for a small fireteam it's a good way to get stuck in enemy territory with empty guns.
    • To pilots, this is known as the "Golden BB", a shot that should not have done anything but somehow managed to hit something vital. Pilots of the P-51 Mustang in World War II joked that their plane could be shot down by any sharp-eyed boy with a plinking gun, due to the liquid cooling system the engines used.
    • Some really stupid people like to fire guns into the air during celebrations. When the bullets come down, they're still pretty dangerous if they happen to hit someone. Straight up, they hit terminal velocity and slow down as they fall. Any kind of an angle and the rifling spin are still in play.
  • Must Have Caffeine: Coffee is second only to petroleum for gallons consumed per year, since it gives great buffs to Alertness.
  • My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours: A necessary skill if you ever have to fight your corner before a court or tribunal. Members of the "Lawyer" class may be enlisted to employ this skill on your behalf, but this can be extremely resource intensive.
  • Myth Arc: Somewhat of a subversion, considering the plot has grown so convoluted that some are beginning to question if there even is one, though some religions would beg to differ.

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