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.
Dark Pattern Games
11–20 of 141 posts
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#14Any 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 refun…
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)
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#15There’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
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#16The 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.
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#17This 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.
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#18I 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?
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
'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 lea…
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.
Re: Dark Pattern Games
#20It 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).