10 Video Games That Knew What You Were Doing

Try your luck with a threesome in The Witcher 3 and get your just desserts.

The Witcher 3
CD Projekt RED

The great benefit of video games over every other entertainment medium is their interactivity, developers often giving players a massive open-world sandbox to freely experiment within.

But even the most dynamic video game is still a heavily controlled and curated experience, the result of developers considering every last possible thing a player might get up to.

Video games are intimately aware of your behaviours throughout, and will often use this knowledge to ends both hilarious and embarrassing depending on exactly what you were trying to do.

Perhaps you'll get shamed for pirating a game, get hit in the wallet for griefing other players, or be called out by the protagonist themselves for your un-sporting approach to playing the game.

Whether you got a light, playful slap on the wrist for your acts or received a stern telling-off from a genuinely pissed off developer, these 10 video games knew precisely what you were doing and went about plainly illustrating this fact.

Across the board, these moments prove that we as gamers aren't nearly as slick as we like to think we are...

10. Pirates Can't Perform Jumps - Mirror's Edge

The Witcher 3
EA

There's nothing you can do to piss a video game developer off more than pirate their game. Cheat and troll all you like, but at least you've given them your hard-earned dough for the privilege, right?

But with video game piracy potentially impacting sales, developers have come up with creative ways to get their own back on the pirates and, above all else, make them aware that they know exactly what they're doing.

A great example is the original 2008 version of Mirror's Edge. The innovative action-platformer was centered around players performing parkour-like acrobatic manoeuvres to leap between rooftops and maintain their momentum.

However, those who played a pirate copy of the game would get a nasty surprise right out of the gate - any time they tried to take a running jump off a roof, the game would slow down to a halt.

If you kept trying to jump regardless, you would simply fall off the edge and die, giving you a Game Over.

Basically, it prevented you from progressing through the game, trapping you in the opening segment in the hope that you'd actually just give up and splash some cash on the real deal.

Contributor
Contributor

Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.