I see at least some of the patterns we came up with appear on the site. Happy to answer any questions about it all, I think we were the first to write about dark patterns in games, at least academically. It was 2013 so predated Overwatch loot boxes, which I am sure I would have put in there, but now they seem quite tame.
I do want to get ahead of something many of the comments here made: we were very aware that one person's dark pattern was another's benefit eg Animal Crossing's appointment mechanics make it easy to just play for a bit then put it down for the day and come back tomorrow. We went back and forth a lot about how to phrase this dichotomy, as we knew it was the stickest point of the whole plan. That's why the paper's Abstract immediately addresses it: "Game designers are typically regarded as advocates for players. However, a game creator’s interests may not align with the players’." Alignment was the key: are the players and designers in agreement, or is there tension where the designer (or, more usually nowadays, bean counters) is trying to exploit the players in some dimension?
I enjoy following academic discourse, review and collaboration give me the feeling that actual progress is being made.
So I love that you linked the rebuttal paper. In the last paragraph the authors mention that some ideas could lead to "fruitful analytic or empirical starting points" - did anyone follow up on these? From your perspective, what are the most interesting directions in this area of research today?
It’s always shocking to see one of my sites pop up on HN.
For context around my motivation to make the site. I was really addicted to a certain mobile game to the point that it was affecting my work and family life.
I stumbled upon an article about how game companies hire psychologists to make the games more addicting. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching dark patterns. It was very eye opening and by learning about the dark patterns they lost their power over me. I was able to quit playing the addictive game. I still play games, I just pick better games and the dark patterns don’t work on me anymore.
The research and education that I gave myself was so helpful in restoring balance to my life that I wanted to share it with others. Hence the website. It’s about 7 years old.
The most important part of my site is the text descriptions of the dark patterns. The crowd sourced game reviews are probably spam and rubbish and I’ve been meaning to remove them. I had written code to scrape the iOS and android stores to automatically add new games but this code broke ages ago and I never fixed it. The game listings are years out of date. I had plans to include console and pc games but never got around to it. I moved on to other projects.
I have received many emails over the years from people who say that my site has helped them stop or avoid playing addictive games. This makes me happy.
Thanks for doing this! Years of grinding in Diablo 2 and reading about the psychology of intermittent rewards has made me able to see through any game with a grinding mechanic and not play it. So naming and explaining the dark pattern can help.
You mean the new diablo 2 right? I doubt the original Diablo 2 grinding was money-earning focused. I mean the old games (as they appeared to me) were focused on "do it, sell it, make people fall in love with it while we prepare the new game". The new games are more like "make people hooked on it, while we prepare another DLC" - I've never played the new Diablo 2 so I am asking. However I used to grind Diablo 1 (and still do it sometimes with devilutionx) and while I am grinding they do not earn anything, so I feel that it's only to my guilty pleasure...
Since they mentioned intermittent reward, I take that comment to mean that they prefer to play skill-based games rather than time-sink-for-variable-reward games.
I agree with you that Blizzard didn't stand to directly earn from the D2 grind, but it's valid to not want to participate in a time-sink.
Chris Wilson released a video on this topic yesterday - "Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?". He has an interesting perspective having been the lead of Path of Exile. A free to play, decade long, popular, action role playing game.
While opinions vary on the correct use of these patterns, the video is a helpful and easy to digest, reminder of them. The video description contains additional links.
PoE seems to be an outlier, having probably the softest freemium model in existence. I dont recall having been even slightly tempted to spend money in that game.
You absolutely need to spend money in PoE to buy stash tabs. It's basically mandatory if you play regularly. The difference to most dark patterns is that the spending has a very low cap. Once you've spent $50 or so on stash tabs you are set forever and never need to spend again. So it's not so different from buying a $50 game, just that you get to try it out for free first.
$50 is exaggerating it nowadays. With async trade you could buy a single merchant tab to gain access to trade (stuff sells pretty quick with async trade!), and maybe a currency and scarab tab for the bare minimum convenience. Around $20 and you've got yourself a meaty beast of a game.
You say that, but some of the games that people point at as having harmful monetization have basically the same system of only selling cosmetic items that don't give you an advantage (e.g. Fortnite). And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit.
As far as I can tell the main difference is a younger demographic and being more pop culture adjacent. I don't think that should affect whether you consider it "bad" monetization, but I will concede that context is important with these sort of things.
They don't straddle any lines, they're well beyond it. Stash tabs are de facto required for trade. One can, technically, play without trade and complete all the game content but the ones actually capable of that are putting in tons of hours and they will definitely use extra stash space.
There isn't really a target player that plays POE for free aside from those that are just trying it out. That's all fine with me but if you're going to get into the game, you're going to pay money.
There is pretty heavy pressure to buy stash tabs once you hit the later parts of the game, but you get a LOT of time to figure out if you actually like the game before you feel it.
Containers for all the shiny loots that I cannot bear to just destroy, and the nice organised containers for all those currency types. Hits my weak spot right in the wallet.
Overall it feels like unless your game is a linear single-player game, it will fall under multiple of the site's labelled 'dark patterns'. Here are some really bad ones:
Infinite Treadmill - Impossible to win or complete the game.
Variable Rewards - Unpredictable or random rewards are more addictive than a predictable schedule.
Can't Pause or Save - The game does not allow you to stop playing whenever you want.
Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance.
Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.
I have mixed feelings on this assessment. I definitely agree that some of these labels could be better ("can't pause or save" and "competition" are missing a lot of nuance), but some you mentioned feel reasonable on the part of the site creator (for example, "variable rewards", which is to say different reward outputs for the same performance/input, are a pretty classic Skinner box and unnecessary as a core feature to make most games work).
I'd also like to question the idea that that multiplayer games are being treated inherently "unfair" here or that these features aren't worth acknowledging as a dark pattern just because they're core to certain genres. I like Minecraft and there's variable drops and achievements and grinding and multiplayer and a bunch of other "dark patterns". I also like to straight up gamble occasionally, and I'm not a gambling addict as of the writing of this comment. It's more the awareness of things that can psychologically hook you that's important, and then you can do what you want with that (or for parents, they can attempt to restrict applications as they find appropriate).
Especially for online games, these aspects are actually quite core to long term play. I am pretty casual as far as time invested goes, but many online games have to cater to both me and the Die Hards who play their games 10x more than other players.
To the die hard players, the infinite grind is a feature, treadmills help them reach whatever insane goals the developers have to keep cooking up so that they're satisfied.
Watching Arc Raiders evolve recently is a great example. It's trying to cater to casual players. It is going well now, but the die hards are going to ruin that experience I can promise. Then the die hards will be all that remain, and they'll have to cater to them.
The difference between a casual player and a die hard can be, 30hrs in a year played. And 5000 hrs in a year played. Some people play like it's their job.
The website does label some relatively harmless elements as ‘dark patterns’, but out of your ‘really bad ones’, I don’t see ‘Competition’ as being a dark pattern.
Competition is a fundamental part of Play. Humans (and other animals) are social creatures and learn via playing and competing with others.
Can people play games by themselves? Yes.
Is competitive play bad or a dark pattern? Not at all.
I like the idea, but their ratings seem.. dubious at best. For example: Hyperrogue, which hit the frontpage a few times and which I can confidently say does not feature any dark patterns, is rated just 1.19 [0] on a 5 (best) to -5 (worst) scale.
The site says: "People like a challenge and playing against other people is often how games provide this challenge. Competition by itself is not necessarily a dark pattern. Classic games like chess and checkers, and most sports have competition. It's when competition is combined with other dark patterns that problems arise."
And this is true. In particular, competition where you gain rewards for staying on top of leaderboards, and there is a pay-to-win element. Competition isn't necessarily bad, competition can be fun, "but how is this game using competition" something you should think about before you get into a new game.
Sure but they have no room for this level of nuance on their actual ratings, it's just a checkbox for 'game has competition' which always counts as a 'dark pattern' for the purposes of the overall score.
Solo/single player games are common now, but looking at pre computer history the majority of games are sports where you're competing against others either alone or in teams and board/card/dice games where you are competing against others (and probably gambling too).
Sure there are some solitaire card games, and toys like yo-yos, kendama and the like that could be classified as games. But competition defines most of what we consider "games" up until computers were able to simulate the other players in the form of hostile/friendly npcs, computer controlled 'players' etc.
See second paragraph. 'Basically all' may have been an exaggeration, but the crux of my argument is that the concept that human beings know as a 'game' up until the advent of computer games more often than not involved competition.
You're allowed to like dark patterns. Doesn't make them any less dark. They manipulate you to get you to play more. But you are allowed to enjoy it. Trying to save your ego or pride by pretending is silly.
Yeah I think this clarifies the core issue with this kind of thinking (imo).
The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle. The important thing isn't the patterns themselves, it's that they're used to make you spend money on microtransactions.
Looking at just the mechanics divorced of any context of the surrounding business/marketing/monetization is missing the point.
3/16 is not great. All good bullshit is wrapped around a grain of truth, this website might be more useful if they just concentrated on the things are dark patterns regardless of context.
I feel like a bunch of these are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Is 'reciprocity' really a dark pattern, or is it a healthy feature of human social interaction?
Clearly reciprocity is a good part of social interaction. So it’s not necessarily a dark pattern. But it can be if games use it as a mechanism to get you hooked. Maybe by punishment or guilt, or by encouraging extra in app purchases so you can donate to your guild mates. This is addressed a bit in my FAQ.
https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php
There’s a good book that discusses dark patterns in Gambling games, making it easier to appreciate how they extrapolate to other contexts as well. The title of the book is:
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
I encourage everyone to read the definition on the home page:
> Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.
And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example:
Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many.
It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.
This feels useful even if the software don't directly tranlate to how "predatory" the game is and if scores can't be compared between games.
Sure, being unable to pause the game isn't necessarily the developer being evil, but it's good to have a website that tells you about it before you buy the game.
I think you just need to interpret a game having a low score as there being some parts of the game that you might want to know about before buying/playing rather than "this game is evil".
In the same way that, when a film is rated 18, I can check whether that means it's going to scar me for life or if it shows a nipple for 2 seconds.
This is missing an entire popular category that I would call "base biological instincts" pattern: Where they put sexual content into the game. Practically the entire app is solely around extracting money from people by triggering their sexual instincts.
> When you see something in a game like, "Defeat 20 enemies to unlock this achievement", the game is giving you an artificial goal and trying to get your brain to put that on its internal to-do list of tasks it needs to finish.
Not sure about this one. The “defeat 20 enemies” task could be a pointless checkbox, but it could also be an excuse for a fun quest. I could see this pattern not being “dark”, when applied in a user friendly way.
Then again, this is from an article about app badges and I never saw a game use those in a user friendly at all.
I like this. I'm currently working on a (simple) iOS game, mostly because I got fed up with all of the dark patterns that are so highly prevalent on the market.
I'm even thinking about naming it something like `Pay Upfront: Strategy Game` to underline the single purchase model, but perhaps it's silly to go that far?
The premise of this site seems to be that anything designed to make the game "addictive" is a dark pattern — this is contradictory to the concept of "dark pattern" in products in general, which I would define as "when an interface biases users towards action that is more in the interest of the business controlling the interface than the user's goals for using the software."
When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that. A "slightly dark" pattern would be combining core addictive gameplay junctures with microtransactions (retry/next level/upgrade) — but in this economy this just feels like a basic mobile game business model. A moderately darker pattern would be making the game increasingly frustrating while still addictive, unless you perform a microtxn (eg: increasing difficulty exponentially, and charging money for more lives/retries or forcing more ads).
A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
> When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that.
I disagree. Being addictive leads to it being hard to stop playing when you are done, and sometimes hard to avoid playing, which leads to playing even when you would like to be doing something else.
it's even worse than that. an adult meta questioning their addiction is much light than some kid being pulled into a grindy game that is often violent AND competitive; which by now scientific literature already knows it reduces pro-social behavior [0]
when i was 10, an old neighborhood showed me how the late game of Tibia was like and how that wouldn't ever change and how dumb i would be if i not paid the premium account, which would lead me there much faster and being obligatory if i wanted to make war/pvp. i politely refused invitations for playing WOW when i was in high-school with other friend i made and i'm greatful for that. i would never read so many books and watch so many films on that timeframe if i was grinding levels on the same area killing the same monsters, watching the same animation
Yes, not everything here is a dark pattern. The one that stood out to me was "Wait To Play"[0].
In the before times, there was a browser-only MMO called Urban Dead[1] which had a cap on the number of actions any player could take in a single 24-hour period. This was to avoid giving undue influence/advantage to players who could play more during the day and disadvantaging people who e.g. had to work during the day and could only play in the evenings. I played a lot of UD in its heyday and thought it worked really well.
That said,
>A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
There are lots of "true dark patterns" that are not deceptive UI elements. Loot boxes that require expensive keys comes to mind. Same with brutal grinds that can only be bypassed by pay-to-win booster items.
These are still kind of bad, because it encourages a routine of playing every day. If I work 5 days a week and want to play only on weekends, I might get capped out when I do what to play. So it shifts the advantage to daily scheduled tasks instead of being able to play when I want to play.
Yeah I used to enjoy those games. But I dont think thats necessarily what they are referring to here.
>Another common in-game timer is related to "harvesting" or "research". You may send your character off to harvest some resources, but you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time before this task is completed. This forces you to stop playing and wait for the timer to expire. Often there is a way to pay money or watch an advertisement to accelerate or skip the timer.
>Games that prevent you from playing them whenever you want are trying to get you to space out your playing throughout the day. This is a much better way for you to develop a habit of playing the game, and also a way to prevent players from reaching the end of a short game or getting burnt out on a repetitive game in a relatively short amount of time.
In a modern wait to play, you can bypass the restriction by spending money, or you are simply bounced back into ads multiple times during the day as you log in at every increment to press the next button.
It does not look like all patterns described here are meant to be taken as a rule. If your game don't have any of the patterns this website suggests, it won't automatically become a good game.
Grind or collecting items is suggested as a dark pattern. Dead cells is an amazing game and it has both of these. Most rogue lites use these both patterns heavily.
I don't see grinding as a hard no. I don't mind repeating if game makes feel I am making progress and getting something in return which dead cells do amazingly well. Grind needs some better definition on the website probably. Same for collecting items (what about coins in Mario).
Any game with any in-app purchase at all already feels unhealthy, even if its just a trial unlock.
The healthiest games are consistently ones where you pay one large amount upfront, and then are never bothered about money again, because there is nothing else to buy. The developers are so confident you will enjoy it they don't bother with free trial offers. If you really don't like it, you just return for a full refund. Feels good.
How would you feel about a free game spending one frame per second mining a cryptocurrency? This would be as an alternative to a one-time purchase (and as an alternative to ads). So, you could play a full game for free, indefinitely, and have a small portion of compute do mining, and at any time you could pay a one time fee (purchase) to turn off mining forever.
I feel the same way about crypto as I do about those herbal supplements at gas stations. It's not that they're inherently problematic, but everyone involved turns out to be scammers consistently enough that automatic distrust is a fantastic rule of thumb.
This comment makes me feel so sad. I lack the words to describe what critical essence this question is missing, but technology used to mean a hacker ethos of just doing things because they seemed cool and worth doing and even just the ask of this feels parasitic by comparison. Sign of the times.
Eh, I think this falls right into the traditional hacker ethos of doing what seems cool, it's just that what you think is cool may be different than what I think is cool.
I want to make games, but I know how much time that takes, so I understand that to make something cool I need funding to be able to focus on that cool thing. Crypto can be a tool in this case, and I personally would prefer mining to watching ads.
Hackers are great and analyzing systems and figuring out what they might support, despite the original designer's intentions.
Nah that’s going too far. 90s shareware was sold exactly that way — free trial and pay if you want more — and there were plenty of great creative games in that category.
Yeah war thunder gives you lots of early progress for free, and then slows it down until you are tempted to purchase currency to progress.
Its not "Pay to Win" until you reach max level. Because the matchmaking always ensures theres some people of lower level, and some people of higher level (if they exist) in every match. This means that you want upgrades to overcome obstacles, but even if you buy progress, you still hit obstacles requiring upgrades. Its an infinite grind treadmill.
This site feels like this it's made by people that misunderstand games and genres and can't stand the concept of live service games which surprise takes money to run.
Saw one where powercreep is considered unhealthy
...if you played a competitive card game without power creep you'd quit because the first meta would be the only meta. Controlled power creep is healthy for game longevity.
Some games have enough room for new meta to develop even though there have been no updates.
That doesn't mean that's the only way to be a good game, and I don't necessarily have an issue with powercreep. If it's mild and expected, powercreep can also be a way to handicap... If you're introducing new people to a game, maybe you let them use current cards and you use 5 year old cards (or whatever), they get to practice with current cards, get to experience old cards, you get some nostalgia from your old decks, and you don't have to sandbag, because they've got an advantage.
That doesn't come across in the sites scoring at all however and I wish it did.
Using Arknights an an example it has a power creep as 5/10 despite being possible to clear current endgame with only 4* operators, which are essentially guaranteed as a free to play.And the bulk of them being added at the games release.
I think what they would want to see is the cards all be free. That way powercreep does not make a purchase less valuable, does not make people gamble for cards they want, and not give an advantage to people who want to spend more money to get good cards.
I agree that is what it would take to get a high score on their site but I think it's an unrealistic expectation to suggest that the developer should be on the hook indefinitely for content. Each card game set is functionally a new game with some costs amortized thanks to it's previous sets.
We have seen the forever sticker price in mega hit indies ala Stardew Valley or Terraria but I don't think that is really healthy to expect for gaming as a whole and is more that small teams hit a home run.
I'm a co-author of the first paper cited in the citations page, "Dark Patterns in the Design of Games" http://www.fdg2013.org/program/papers/paper06_zagal_etal.pdf
I see at least some of the patterns we came up with appear on the site. Happy to answer any questions about it all, I think we were the first to write about dark patterns in games, at least academically. It was 2013 so predated Overwatch loot boxes, which I am sure I would have put in there, but now they seem quite tame.
I do want to get ahead of something many of the comments here made: we were very aware that one person's dark pattern was another's benefit eg Animal Crossing's appointment mechanics make it easy to just play for a bit then put it down for the day and come back tomorrow. We went back and forth a lot about how to phrase this dichotomy, as we knew it was the stickest point of the whole plan. That's why the paper's Abstract immediately addresses it: "Game designers are typically regarded as advocates for players. However, a game creator’s interests may not align with the players’." Alignment was the key: are the players and designers in agreement, or is there tension where the designer (or, more usually nowadays, bean counters) is trying to exploit the players in some dimension?
So yeah, happy to answer questions about it.
PS I would be remiss not to mention the rebuttal paper "Against Dark Game Design Patterns" https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/156460/1/DiGRA_202...
I enjoy following academic discourse, review and collaboration give me the feeling that actual progress is being made.
So I love that you linked the rebuttal paper. In the last paragraph the authors mention that some ideas could lead to "fruitful analytic or empirical starting points" - did anyone follow up on these? From your perspective, what are the most interesting directions in this area of research today?
It’s always shocking to see one of my sites pop up on HN.
For context around my motivation to make the site. I was really addicted to a certain mobile game to the point that it was affecting my work and family life. I stumbled upon an article about how game companies hire psychologists to make the games more addicting. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching dark patterns. It was very eye opening and by learning about the dark patterns they lost their power over me. I was able to quit playing the addictive game. I still play games, I just pick better games and the dark patterns don’t work on me anymore. The research and education that I gave myself was so helpful in restoring balance to my life that I wanted to share it with others. Hence the website. It’s about 7 years old.
The most important part of my site is the text descriptions of the dark patterns. The crowd sourced game reviews are probably spam and rubbish and I’ve been meaning to remove them. I had written code to scrape the iOS and android stores to automatically add new games but this code broke ages ago and I never fixed it. The game listings are years out of date. I had plans to include console and pc games but never got around to it. I moved on to other projects.
I have received many emails over the years from people who say that my site has helped them stop or avoid playing addictive games. This makes me happy.
Thanks for doing this! Years of grinding in Diablo 2 and reading about the psychology of intermittent rewards has made me able to see through any game with a grinding mechanic and not play it. So naming and explaining the dark pattern can help.
You mean the new diablo 2 right? I doubt the original Diablo 2 grinding was money-earning focused. I mean the old games (as they appeared to me) were focused on "do it, sell it, make people fall in love with it while we prepare the new game". The new games are more like "make people hooked on it, while we prepare another DLC" - I've never played the new Diablo 2 so I am asking. However I used to grind Diablo 1 (and still do it sometimes with devilutionx) and while I am grinding they do not earn anything, so I feel that it's only to my guilty pleasure...
Since they mentioned intermittent reward, I take that comment to mean that they prefer to play skill-based games rather than time-sink-for-variable-reward games.
I agree with you that Blizzard didn't stand to directly earn from the D2 grind, but it's valid to not want to participate in a time-sink.
Chris Wilson released a video on this topic yesterday - "Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?". He has an interesting perspective having been the lead of Path of Exile. A free to play, decade long, popular, action role playing game.
While opinions vary on the correct use of these patterns, the video is a helpful and easy to digest, reminder of them. The video description contains additional links.
---
"Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?" - https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg
PoE seems to be an outlier, having probably the softest freemium model in existence. I dont recall having been even slightly tempted to spend money in that game.
You absolutely need to spend money in PoE to buy stash tabs. It's basically mandatory if you play regularly. The difference to most dark patterns is that the spending has a very low cap. Once you've spent $50 or so on stash tabs you are set forever and never need to spend again. So it's not so different from buying a $50 game, just that you get to try it out for free first.
$50 is exaggerating it nowadays. With async trade you could buy a single merchant tab to gain access to trade (stuff sells pretty quick with async trade!), and maybe a currency and scarab tab for the bare minimum convenience. Around $20 and you've got yourself a meaty beast of a game.
You say that, but some of the games that people point at as having harmful monetization have basically the same system of only selling cosmetic items that don't give you an advantage (e.g. Fortnite). And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit.
As far as I can tell the main difference is a younger demographic and being more pop culture adjacent. I don't think that should affect whether you consider it "bad" monetization, but I will concede that context is important with these sort of things.
> And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit.
They don't straddle any lines, they're well beyond it. Stash tabs are de facto required for trade. One can, technically, play without trade and complete all the game content but the ones actually capable of that are putting in tons of hours and they will definitely use extra stash space.
There isn't really a target player that plays POE for free aside from those that are just trying it out. That's all fine with me but if you're going to get into the game, you're going to pay money.
There is pretty heavy pressure to buy stash tabs once you hit the later parts of the game, but you get a LOT of time to figure out if you actually like the game before you feel it.
Containers for all the shiny loots that I cannot bear to just destroy, and the nice organised containers for all those currency types. Hits my weak spot right in the wallet.
Did you ever get to endgame? I cant imagine playing without stash tabs
No I have heaps of hours across 2 accounts and never even heard the phrase stash tab.
Overall it feels like unless your game is a linear single-player game, it will fall under multiple of the site's labelled 'dark patterns'. Here are some really bad ones:
Infinite Treadmill - Impossible to win or complete the game.
Variable Rewards - Unpredictable or random rewards are more addictive than a predictable schedule.
Can't Pause or Save - The game does not allow you to stop playing whenever you want.
Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance.
Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.
Chess:
- infinite treadmill: theoretically you can play all possible moves but not in a lifetime.
- variable rewards: sometimes you stumble upon (or try) a tactic that works.
- can't pause or save: except when you maybe play against a computer which is not the point of the game
- grinding: you need to play the same openings many many times to encounter all the responses that will let you know if your "build" is worthy
- competition: nothing to add
I have mixed feelings on this assessment. I definitely agree that some of these labels could be better ("can't pause or save" and "competition" are missing a lot of nuance), but some you mentioned feel reasonable on the part of the site creator (for example, "variable rewards", which is to say different reward outputs for the same performance/input, are a pretty classic Skinner box and unnecessary as a core feature to make most games work).
I'd also like to question the idea that that multiplayer games are being treated inherently "unfair" here or that these features aren't worth acknowledging as a dark pattern just because they're core to certain genres. I like Minecraft and there's variable drops and achievements and grinding and multiplayer and a bunch of other "dark patterns". I also like to straight up gamble occasionally, and I'm not a gambling addict as of the writing of this comment. It's more the awareness of things that can psychologically hook you that's important, and then you can do what you want with that (or for parents, they can attempt to restrict applications as they find appropriate).
Especially for online games, these aspects are actually quite core to long term play. I am pretty casual as far as time invested goes, but many online games have to cater to both me and the Die Hards who play their games 10x more than other players.
To the die hard players, the infinite grind is a feature, treadmills help them reach whatever insane goals the developers have to keep cooking up so that they're satisfied.
Watching Arc Raiders evolve recently is a great example. It's trying to cater to casual players. It is going well now, but the die hards are going to ruin that experience I can promise. Then the die hards will be all that remain, and they'll have to cater to them.
The difference between a casual player and a die hard can be, 30hrs in a year played. And 5000 hrs in a year played. Some people play like it's their job.
The website does label some relatively harmless elements as ‘dark patterns’, but out of your ‘really bad ones’, I don’t see ‘Competition’ as being a dark pattern.
Competition is a fundamental part of Play. Humans (and other animals) are social creatures and learn via playing and competing with others.
Can people play games by themselves? Yes.
Is competitive play bad or a dark pattern? Not at all.
I like the idea, but their ratings seem.. dubious at best. For example: Hyperrogue, which hit the frontpage a few times and which I can confidently say does not feature any dark patterns, is rated just 1.19 [0] on a 5 (best) to -5 (worst) scale.
[0] https://www.darkpattern.games/game/18554/0/hyperrogue.html
I agree, HyperRogue's rating on this site is just baffling. It should definitely be +5.
also funny how those first 3 'dark patterns' are basically just the core appeal of the genre
Yeah, can't take this site seriously when it lists some of my favorite mechanics as dark patterns.
'Competition' is listed as a dark pattern. Ya know, the core thing common to basically all games going back millenia, this site is ridiculous.
The site says: "People like a challenge and playing against other people is often how games provide this challenge. Competition by itself is not necessarily a dark pattern. Classic games like chess and checkers, and most sports have competition. It's when competition is combined with other dark patterns that problems arise."
And this is true. In particular, competition where you gain rewards for staying on top of leaderboards, and there is a pay-to-win element. Competition isn't necessarily bad, competition can be fun, "but how is this game using competition" something you should think about before you get into a new game.
Sure but they have no room for this level of nuance on their actual ratings, it's just a checkbox for 'game has competition' which always counts as a 'dark pattern' for the purposes of the overall score.
Yes, their summing up is not very useful. As a database of which games have which patterns, I think it can be useful.
Competition is not core to all games by any means. You could argue that challenge is core to games, for a particular definition of ‘challenge.’
Solo/single player games are common now, but looking at pre computer history the majority of games are sports where you're competing against others either alone or in teams and board/card/dice games where you are competing against others (and probably gambling too).
Sure there are some solitaire card games, and toys like yo-yos, kendama and the like that could be classified as games. But competition defines most of what we consider "games" up until computers were able to simulate the other players in the form of hostile/friendly npcs, computer controlled 'players' etc.
Single-player games very much existed before computers: puzzles, solitaires, etc.
See second paragraph. 'Basically all' may have been an exaggeration, but the crux of my argument is that the concept that human beings know as a 'game' up until the advent of computer games more often than not involved competition.
Plenty of games simply don't feature competition.
You're allowed to like dark patterns. Doesn't make them any less dark. They manipulate you to get you to play more. But you are allowed to enjoy it. Trying to save your ego or pride by pretending is silly.
I don't agree that they are dark though.
> Trying to save your ego or pride by pretending is silly.
Now you really convinced me!
Yeah I think this clarifies the core issue with this kind of thinking (imo).
The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle. The important thing isn't the patterns themselves, it's that they're used to make you spend money on microtransactions.
Looking at just the mechanics divorced of any context of the surrounding business/marketing/monetization is missing the point.
> The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle.
I don't really think Daily Rewards are a fun mechanic. Nor is Friend Spam, and Social Pyramid Scheme is rarely fun either.
3/16 is not great. All good bullshit is wrapped around a grain of truth, this website might be more useful if they just concentrated on the things are dark patterns regardless of context.
Most of the dark patterns are not fun. The "psychological dark patterns" are, to some healthy degree.
I feel like a bunch of these are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Is 'reciprocity' really a dark pattern, or is it a healthy feature of human social interaction?
Clearly reciprocity is a good part of social interaction. So it’s not necessarily a dark pattern. But it can be if games use it as a mechanism to get you hooked. Maybe by punishment or guilt, or by encouraging extra in app purchases so you can donate to your guild mates. This is addressed a bit in my FAQ. https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php
I made something like this a while ago, for mobile games: https://nobsgames.stavros.io
Unfortunately, the manual part of it (reviewing user submissions) is too much for one person (me), but it should be fairly useful still.
There’s a good book that discusses dark patterns in Gambling games, making it easier to appreciate how they extrapolate to other contexts as well. The title of the book is:
Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
Author: Natasha Dow Schüll
I encourage everyone to read the definition on the home page:
> Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.
And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example:
https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html
Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many.
Some of the users reviewing games on the website seem to also miss the point (inaccurate reviews), which leads to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330.
It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.
Neat... but most good RPGs fit much of the "psychological dark patterns" listed at https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-p... . So the total scores won't be as useful as they might look like.
This feels useful even if the software don't directly tranlate to how "predatory" the game is and if scores can't be compared between games.
Sure, being unable to pause the game isn't necessarily the developer being evil, but it's good to have a website that tells you about it before you buy the game.
I think you just need to interpret a game having a low score as there being some parts of the game that you might want to know about before buying/playing rather than "this game is evil".
In the same way that, when a film is rated 18, I can check whether that means it's going to scar me for life or if it shows a nipple for 2 seconds.
This is missing an entire popular category that I would call "base biological instincts" pattern: Where they put sexual content into the game. Practically the entire app is solely around extracting money from people by triggering their sexual instincts.
Thanks for creating a guide on how to create the most addictive mobile game!
> When you see something in a game like, "Defeat 20 enemies to unlock this achievement", the game is giving you an artificial goal and trying to get your brain to put that on its internal to-do list of tasks it needs to finish.
Not sure about this one. The “defeat 20 enemies” task could be a pointless checkbox, but it could also be an excuse for a fun quest. I could see this pattern not being “dark”, when applied in a user friendly way.
Then again, this is from an article about app badges and I never saw a game use those in a user friendly at all.
Even mainstream gaming sites cannot review even a fraction of the mobile games market; you've created for yourself a truly Sisyphean task.
A better approach might be to highlight the fraction of mobile games that deserve more recognition for avoiding dark patterns, like this site does:
https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/
Alternately, focus on AAA games.
I like this. I'm currently working on a (simple) iOS game, mostly because I got fed up with all of the dark patterns that are so highly prevalent on the market.
I'm even thinking about naming it something like `Pay Upfront: Strategy Game` to underline the single purchase model, but perhaps it's silly to go that far?
Not an experienced web dev. Genuinely asking, why does the sticky banner with search bar at the top of the screen look like that?
It’s meant to look like an old NES game controller.
I'm sending this to all of my young family members. To them, some of these dark patterns are just a natural part of using technology. It's not great.
I do wish more of the internet was curated reviews like this.
The premise of this site seems to be that anything designed to make the game "addictive" is a dark pattern — this is contradictory to the concept of "dark pattern" in products in general, which I would define as "when an interface biases users towards action that is more in the interest of the business controlling the interface than the user's goals for using the software."
When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that. A "slightly dark" pattern would be combining core addictive gameplay junctures with microtransactions (retry/next level/upgrade) — but in this economy this just feels like a basic mobile game business model. A moderately darker pattern would be making the game increasingly frustrating while still addictive, unless you perform a microtxn (eg: increasing difficulty exponentially, and charging money for more lives/retries or forcing more ads).
A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
> When someone plays a game, the user's goal could be expected as "having fun for as much time as they want to." Being addictive is usually in service of that.
I disagree. Being addictive leads to it being hard to stop playing when you are done, and sometimes hard to avoid playing, which leads to playing even when you would like to be doing something else.
it's even worse than that. an adult meta questioning their addiction is much light than some kid being pulled into a grindy game that is often violent AND competitive; which by now scientific literature already knows it reduces pro-social behavior [0]
when i was 10, an old neighborhood showed me how the late game of Tibia was like and how that wouldn't ever change and how dumb i would be if i not paid the premium account, which would lead me there much faster and being obligatory if i wanted to make war/pvp. i politely refused invitations for playing WOW when i was in high-school with other friend i made and i'm greatful for that. i would never read so many books and watch so many films on that timeframe if i was grinding levels on the same area killing the same monsters, watching the same animation
[0] https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-136-2-151.pdf [0] https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=... [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341394317_Prosocial... [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/prosoci... [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2704015/ [0] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2020.29205....
Yes, not everything here is a dark pattern. The one that stood out to me was "Wait To Play"[0].
In the before times, there was a browser-only MMO called Urban Dead[1] which had a cap on the number of actions any player could take in a single 24-hour period. This was to avoid giving undue influence/advantage to players who could play more during the day and disadvantaging people who e.g. had to work during the day and could only play in the evenings. I played a lot of UD in its heyday and thought it worked really well.
That said,
>A "true dark pattern" would be sneaking things like push notification permissions, tracking permissions, recurring subscription agreements, etc. under an interface that looks similar to something the user doesn't read carefully and tries to get past out of habit, such as an interstitial ad with a "skip" button — but with a below-the-fold toggle button defaulted to "agree" and a "Confirm" button styled to look like the "skip" button at first glance.
There are lots of "true dark patterns" that are not deceptive UI elements. Loot boxes that require expensive keys comes to mind. Same with brutal grinds that can only be bypassed by pay-to-win booster items.
[0] https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/30/wait-to-play.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead
You're talking about a completely different pattern that just happens to be possible to describe with the same three words.
These are still kind of bad, because it encourages a routine of playing every day. If I work 5 days a week and want to play only on weekends, I might get capped out when I do what to play. So it shifts the advantage to daily scheduled tasks instead of being able to play when I want to play.
>"Wait To Play"[0].
Yeah I used to enjoy those games. But I dont think thats necessarily what they are referring to here.
>Another common in-game timer is related to "harvesting" or "research". You may send your character off to harvest some resources, but you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time before this task is completed. This forces you to stop playing and wait for the timer to expire. Often there is a way to pay money or watch an advertisement to accelerate or skip the timer.
>Games that prevent you from playing them whenever you want are trying to get you to space out your playing throughout the day. This is a much better way for you to develop a habit of playing the game, and also a way to prevent players from reaching the end of a short game or getting burnt out on a repetitive game in a relatively short amount of time.
In a modern wait to play, you can bypass the restriction by spending money, or you are simply bounced back into ads multiple times during the day as you log in at every increment to press the next button.
For a bit of shameless plug, we're actively building a mobile and desktop game that avoids these patterns.
You can learn more about Danger World at https://danger.world
Feels like some UI designers are using those lists as idea board...
It does not look like all patterns described here are meant to be taken as a rule. If your game don't have any of the patterns this website suggests, it won't automatically become a good game.
Grind or collecting items is suggested as a dark pattern. Dead cells is an amazing game and it has both of these. Most rogue lites use these both patterns heavily.
I don't see grinding as a hard no. I don't mind repeating if game makes feel I am making progress and getting something in return which dead cells do amazingly well. Grind needs some better definition on the website probably. Same for collecting items (what about coins in Mario).
The definition for grinding is here, where they say it’s not necessarily a dark pattern in itself: https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html
Any game with any in-app purchase at all already feels unhealthy, even if its just a trial unlock.
The healthiest games are consistently ones where you pay one large amount upfront, and then are never bothered about money again, because there is nothing else to buy. The developers are so confident you will enjoy it they don't bother with free trial offers. If you really don't like it, you just return for a full refund. Feels good.
How would you feel about a free game spending one frame per second mining a cryptocurrency? This would be as an alternative to a one-time purchase (and as an alternative to ads). So, you could play a full game for free, indefinitely, and have a small portion of compute do mining, and at any time you could pay a one time fee (purchase) to turn off mining forever.
(Edit: added stuff in parens)
I feel the same way about crypto as I do about those herbal supplements at gas stations. It's not that they're inherently problematic, but everyone involved turns out to be scammers consistently enough that automatic distrust is a fantastic rule of thumb.
I think that's definitely a prevalent sentiment. There are enough scams that the stereotype is probably well earned.
This comment makes me feel so sad. I lack the words to describe what critical essence this question is missing, but technology used to mean a hacker ethos of just doing things because they seemed cool and worth doing and even just the ask of this feels parasitic by comparison. Sign of the times.
Eh, I think this falls right into the traditional hacker ethos of doing what seems cool, it's just that what you think is cool may be different than what I think is cool.
I want to make games, but I know how much time that takes, so I understand that to make something cool I need funding to be able to focus on that cool thing. Crypto can be a tool in this case, and I personally would prefer mining to watching ads.
Hackers are great and analyzing systems and figuring out what they might support, despite the original designer's intentions.
Nah that’s going too far. 90s shareware was sold exactly that way — free trial and pay if you want more — and there were plenty of great creative games in that category.
This isn’t the 90s, they can watch a video now and see if they like it.
I don't mind a trial unlock, or a one-time purchase. Any sort of currency is right out.
First on the site's list of "Healthy Games" is a game called "Beholder."
Description: "You work for a dystopian surveillance state and spy on your neighbors."
war thunder doesn't count? it's pay to win
hmm people say it's pay to progress not win
Yeah war thunder gives you lots of early progress for free, and then slows it down until you are tempted to purchase currency to progress.
Its not "Pay to Win" until you reach max level. Because the matchmaking always ensures theres some people of lower level, and some people of higher level (if they exist) in every match. This means that you want upgrades to overcome obstacles, but even if you buy progress, you still hit obstacles requiring upgrades. Its an infinite grind treadmill.
This site feels like this it's made by people that misunderstand games and genres and can't stand the concept of live service games which surprise takes money to run.
Saw one where powercreep is considered unhealthy ...if you played a competitive card game without power creep you'd quit because the first meta would be the only meta. Controlled power creep is healthy for game longevity.
Some games have enough room for new meta to develop even though there have been no updates.
That doesn't mean that's the only way to be a good game, and I don't necessarily have an issue with powercreep. If it's mild and expected, powercreep can also be a way to handicap... If you're introducing new people to a game, maybe you let them use current cards and you use 5 year old cards (or whatever), they get to practice with current cards, get to experience old cards, you get some nostalgia from your old decks, and you don't have to sandbag, because they've got an advantage.
That doesn't come across in the sites scoring at all however and I wish it did.
Using Arknights an an example it has a power creep as 5/10 despite being possible to clear current endgame with only 4* operators, which are essentially guaranteed as a free to play.And the bulk of them being added at the games release.
I think what they would want to see is the cards all be free. That way powercreep does not make a purchase less valuable, does not make people gamble for cards they want, and not give an advantage to people who want to spend more money to get good cards.
I agree that is what it would take to get a high score on their site but I think it's an unrealistic expectation to suggest that the developer should be on the hook indefinitely for content. Each card game set is functionally a new game with some costs amortized thanks to it's previous sets.
We have seen the forever sticker price in mega hit indies ala Stardew Valley or Terraria but I don't think that is really healthy to expect for gaming as a whole and is more that small teams hit a home run.
Well, they also list a "pay wall" as a dark pattern. I guess demo giving you a limited game for free is a bad thing now.
They explicitly call that out as okay if the game is upfront with the existence of it.
gacha games checklist everything on this lmao