Dark Pattern Games
Postedabout 2 months agoActiveabout 2 months ago
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Dark PatternsGame DesignAddiction
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Dark Patterns
Game Design
Addiction
The Dark Pattern Games website catalogs and analyzes manipulative design patterns in mobile games, sparking a discussion on the ethics of game design and the impact of dark patterns on players.
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- 01Story posted
Nov 16, 2025 at 2:38 PM EST
about 2 months ago
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Nov 16, 2025 at 9:22 PM EST
7h after posting
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8 comments in 15-18h
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Nov 18, 2025 at 6:48 AM EST
about 2 months ago
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ID: 45947761Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 8:47:02 PM
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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...
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?
My read from the paper was that Deturding was getting at in his rebuttal was my paper that was getting really popular for citing (now over 500) when really it was some Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. And it was! We all had backgrounds in pattern research, but even things like the Gang of Four are just Stuff Made Up By Some Guys. He reviewed my book that I span off from my thesis which contained the patterns so he was intimately aware of it all. We were friendly, if not capital-F friends, and I was interested in what he wrote for my academic career. He's a smart guy.
My co-authors and I never intended for the paper to be a be-all-and-end-all at 2013. Much of the non-AI research work in games at that time was "well, what if we poked at this avenue of research? what if we poked at that avenue?" And we did that by coming up with papers that were supposed to trigger conversation. It was not a good idea to go down a research avenue for 5 years only to find out no-one cared or someone had an idea that would have changed the direction dramatically had you just gotten something out there in year 1. So we thought hard about what we wrote, but we didn't do legwork tying it back to behavioral economics or something like that (my thesis attempted that to varying degrees of success).
I gave up some time ago trying to track where all the citations were coming from, but it did seem it was being cited because other people cited it. It wasn't really related to many of the papers, and certainly I didn't see anything directly building from it. And that's really what the rebuttal was saying: stop citing this paper unless you're building from it and making it more rigid in its foundations. It's not got the strong analytic/empirical basis that science is about. Which is 100% true, but was 100% known and somewhat by design.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390642492_Dark_Patt...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396437975_All_'Dark...
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.
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.
Multiplayer? I loved the asymmetrical co-op ones like It Takes Two, The Past Within, Tick Tock: A Tale For Two.
Give me an experience that is thoughtful and enjoyable over one that is intended to frustrate any day. The Seance of Black Manor, The Return of the Obra Dinn, The Outer Wilds, Star of Providence, Disco Elysium, etc. etc.
Though a few nitpicks:
- on the identified patterns themselves. Grind, infinite treadmill aren't inherently dark. Lots of games grind is filler, or even the game, I play lots of incremental/idle games which are in some respects grind/infinite incarnate. Grind tends to only be truly dark pattern when used as a tool to promote micro-transactions.
- Social Obligation / Guilds are also not inherently dark or even the fault of the developer. Pretty much any multiplayer game will see that kind of obligation develop from first principles. Also sometimes "that's the game" Only if the developer is specifically leveraging aspects of that to further addiction would it be considered dark vs a facet of the game itself.
- Low vote skew: Scoring something based on only a few inputs is a problem for any review service but here I think it has potential to skew results in both directions. It would be more fair to weigh votes below a certain threshold (maybe 10) less and maybe even use a different color to indicate a game that's leaning light/dark but doesn't have enough data.
Just like how there are apps that gamify getting through tasks, gamify chores, etc. They aren’t really dark patterns in this context.
You might be interested to watch this video entitled Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 , which has been referenced by many YouTube analysis, and for good reason.
Also, this paper was a nice read for me: Predatory monetization schemes in video games and internet gaming disorder (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325479259_Predatory...)
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 have a close friend who buried his depression under a pile of games built around these temporal reward loops. He’s not working and still living with his parents at 40.
Thank you for sharing this - awareness of these patterns needs to be spread.
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.
You can learn more about Danger World at https://danger.world
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