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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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?
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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).
war thunder doesn't count? it's pay to win
hmm people say it's pay to progress not win
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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