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Dark Pattern Games

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Re: Dark Pattern Games

#61

Post by luqtas »

toast0 wrote: post #41
keerthiko wrote: post #16

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…

> 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....

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#62

Post by cflewis »

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...

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#63

Post by lukewarmdaisies »

joaohaas wrote: post #47

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…

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).

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#64

Post by efnx »

Greed wrote: post #23
efnx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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.

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#65

Post by efnx »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #25
efnx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#67

Post by Nathanba »

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.

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#68

Post by elphinstone »

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.

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#69

Post by thrwaway55 »

toast0 wrote: post #46
thrwaway55 wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: Dark Pattern Games

#70

Post by thih9 »

> 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.

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