121–130 of 141 posts
The Battle Pass in Fortnite having actual V-Bucks in it, the currency you spend to buy the pass, is some sort of psychological manipulation I don't fully understand. It works on me. Something about the idea that if I play enough I'll get most(?) of my money back really tickles my brain in the right way to keep me playing.
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 learnin…
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. Grind…
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 satisfie…
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 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?
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
But they are. That you disagree is immaterial.
> Now you really convinced me!
Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I honestly have no idea; I left academia 12 years ago now. I do know that game research continued (e.g. the conference I published that paper in continues: http://fdg2025.org/ and the workshop I started at ICSE continues on as well: https://sites.google.com/view/icsegasworkshop2025/home ), but I'm not aware of anyone working in the patterns work right now. My read from the paper was that Deturding was getting at in h…
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/390642492_Dark_Patt...
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396437975_All_'Dark...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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" monetiz…
The relationship between EXP and levels in each season only really reward you if you have a battle pass - so the more you play the more the pass seems like an attractive purchase. Once you have the pass, you're then encouraged to play more than you might otherwise want to in order to max out the time-limited rewards.
I am wondering are there any modern, slightly complex games that does not have any dark patterns ?
There are probably a lot of open world RPGs which are all good.
The linked site lists a lot of patterns that any game with an RPG like unlock system or item collection system will contain, like (some) grinding and Endowed value. Personally I feel that this is only a dark pattern when it goes beyond motivation for fun and into "I can't stop playing" addictive qualities.