I wish I could explain deconstruction a little better, but the only really good examples for them I know are the ones above, they're hard to pull off because you have to be very familiar with the source material.
Usually a deconstruction is targeted at a certain genre. A genre will always have its own set of tropes, which over time tend to be blindly upheld by anyone who makes another entry in that genre, like RPG portraits, killing stuff for XP and gold, magic girl transformations, and humans in general.
A deconstruction takes these tropes, and asks
why. Kind of like how a philosopher questions everything in and outside life. Rather than the player going about his business as usual, he's presented with the (unintended) consequences of his actions, everything the player took for granted could fall apart, and the end result is that the game feels 'unusual'.
In games, a common theme amongst deconstructions seem to be that of murder. We murder to get past an obstacle, we murder for a greater cause, we murder to increase arbitrary values, we murder for better equipment to materialize on the opponent's corpse, we murder because the other person was an asshat, we murder for competition, and we murder for fun. There's no way around it, players love to murder. In the current society of real life this would be considered barbaric, but hey, it's just a video game, man. Murder in games is one of the most popular subjects for deconstruction, as to win a game you must usually pass some kind of obstacle, usually in the form of a big mean ork wielding a giant axe or a friendly blue slime, which we then vanquish through might or magic.
So what happens when someone looks at all the murdering we do, and asks
why? The first case in videogames for someone to do that would probably be Lord British's Ultima IV, where rather than the player being crowned a hero on top of a pile of corpses, the player must act as a paragon of virtue to be crowned a hero, which does not include being a bloodthirsty mass murderer. (Older) RPGs would give the player options to pass an obstacle without having to resort to a fight, but that does not necessarily make them a deconstruction of their genre, neither does having the main villain say: "YOU ENJOY ALL THE KILLING, DON'T YOU?" in an attempt to make the player feel guilty. Sure, Ultima IV's virtues could be considered a morality system (which hasn't been trumped by any other game to this very day), but it was groundbreaking and unheard of when it was released.
Just having a morality system does not really deconstruct the genre. There's more to deconstruction than just painting a line where your avatar is evil and good. This is also not to be confused with innovation, where you add entirely new elements to the design, deconstruction is more about subverting that which is already established, as its name implies. In Ultima IV, the virtues would drastically change the way you played. In Undertale, the difference between FIGHT and MERCY would greatly change many aspects of the game. But the most important thing is that deconstructions never took their tropes for granted. The last word one would use to describe a deconstruction would be 'generic', because a deconstruction does not nicely play along with its genre.
I'm probably way off the mark though.
