When pressing the play/pause button on my Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600, I noticed that it sends a "G" keypress to certain applications (mostly games, I first noticed it in Lethal Company). After some googling, I found that it's a widespread issue, with people posting about it affecting games from War Thunder to Halo MCC to CSGO. With how this affects such a wide variety of software I would think that it was an issue with an underlying API that they all use. I took a look at the win32 keyboard API documentation, but that shows that there's a distinct keycode for the VK_MEDIA_PLAY_PAUSE, separate from the "G" key.
Why is the Media Play/Pause key misinterpreted by these applications as the "G" key, and can anything be done to fix it?