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Dark Pattern Games

350 points by robotnikman 11mo ago

timeon 11mo ago
These apply also for gamified non-games. Duolingo is prime example.
- dkh 11mo ago
  I give things like Duolingo a pass because it’s not trying to trick me into doing something they want me to do but I don’t want to do. It’s trying to gamify something that I do genuinely want to do (learn/practice a language) but haven’t had the discipline or plan in place. Just like how there are apps that gamify getting through tasks, gamify chores, etc. They aren’t really dark patterns in this context.
mzajc 11mo ago
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 https://www.darkpattern.games/game/18554/0/hyperrogue.html
- 1bpp 11mo ago
  also funny how those first 3 'dark patterns' are basically just the core appeal of the genre
  - Kiro 11mo ago
    Yeah, can't take this site seriously when it lists some of my favorite mechanics as dark patterns.
    - p1necone 11mo ago
      'Competition' is listed as a dark pattern. Ya know, the core thing common to basically all games going back millenia, this site is ridiculous.
      - vintermann 11mo ago
        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.
        p1necone 11mo ago
        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.
        vintermann 11mo ago
        Yes, their summing up is not very useful. As a database of which games have which patterns, I think it can be useful.
        Bratmon 11mo ago
        The person who wrote that text and the person that coded the website need to get relationship counseling; every page on the website except that paragraph treat competition as one more bad point ok the bad points scale.
        vintermann 11mo ago
        It's all too common to make a taxonomy of potential problems and then when deciding how to sum it up just throw up your hands and say each potential problem is worth one point.
    - jasonlotito 11mo ago
      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.
      - Kiro 11mo ago
        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!
        jasonlotito 11mo ago
        > I don't agree that they are dark though. But they are. That you disagree is immaterial. > Now you really convinced me! Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is.
        Kiro 11mo ago
        No, they are not and you have no authority in this matter. > Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is. Truly, a martyr for the greater good.
        jasonlotito 11mo ago
        > No, they are not and you have no authority in this matter. I don't need it. English does as well. Your desire to change the definitions of things to suit your narrative means you are wrong. > Truly, a martyr for the greater good. Better that than a martyr for ignorance.
  - timeon 11mo ago
    Not sure what your point is. There is no addiction without appeal.
- p1necone 11mo ago
  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.
  - toast0 11mo ago
    > The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle. I don't really think Daily Rewards are a fun mechanic. Nor is Friend Spam, and Social Pyramid Scheme is rarely fun either.
    - p1necone 11mo ago
      3/16 is not great. All good bullshit is wrapped around a grain of truth, this website might be more useful if they just concentrated on the things are dark patterns regardless of context.
  - generationP 11mo ago
    Most of the dark patterns are not fun. The "psychological dark patterns" are, to some healthy degree.
- tigerlily 11mo ago
  I agree, HyperRogue's rating on this site is just baffling. It should definitely be +5.
- brulard 11mo ago
  Regarding hyperrogue, I've seen it mentioned multiple times as a fun game. I tried to play it but I had found no fun in it at all. The non-euclidean take is interesting, but it felt just like a demo of the weird-geometry engine, I've found no enjoyment in that. Graphics is rough, I've found no interesting items, enemies, mechanics or puzzles. Not sure if I just played it wrong or why my experience was different.
deadbabe 11mo ago
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.
- stavros 11mo ago
  I don't mind a trial unlock, or a one-time purchase. Any sort of currency is right out.
- acheron 11mo ago
  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.
  - deadbabe 11mo ago
    This isn’t the 90s, they can watch a video now and see if they like it.
- efnx 11mo ago
  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)
  - Greed 11mo ago
    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.
stavros 11mo ago
I made something like this a while ago, for mobile games: https://nobsgames.stavros.io 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.
yreg 11mo ago
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?
Loughla 11mo ago
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.
epsilonic 11mo ago
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
thrwaway55 11mo ago
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.
- charcircuit 11mo ago
  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.
  - thrwaway55 11mo ago
    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.
    - YurgenJurgensen 11mo ago
      Why should developers be on the hook indefinitely for content? Why can’t they just make a good game and sell it? If a game needs continuous ‘content updates’ to remain good, it simply wasn’t meant to be played forever. Not all games are. Your argument seems to be “won’t someone please think of the poor defenseless billion-dollar international megacorporations?”.
  - Aerroon 11mo ago
    Well, they also list a "pay wall" as a dark pattern. I guess demo giving you a limited game for free is a bad thing now.
keerthiko 11mo ago
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.
- stackghost 11mo ago
  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 https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/30/wait-to-play.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead
swiftcoder 11mo ago
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?
- offsky 11mo ago
  Clearly reciprocity is a good part of social interaction. So it’s not necessarily a dark pattern. But it can be if games use it as a mechanism to get you hooked. Maybe by punishment or guilt, or by encouraging extra in app purchases so you can donate to your guild mates. This is addressed a bit in my FAQ. https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php
smusamashah 11mo ago
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).
- teamonkey 11mo ago
  The definition for grinding is here, where they say it’s not necessarily a dark pattern in itself: https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html
- YurgenJurgensen 11mo ago
  Most roguelites use those patterns because they are fundamentally linked to slot machines. They may not be as predatory as money sinks, but they’re optimised to be time sinks as a method of promotion via word-of-mouth, streaming or activity indicators on social media.
  - knollimar 11mo ago
    I don't think that's true that they use them because they're linked to slot machines. Sometimes variance just adds variety, which is valuabke in itself. I also don't agree if you're implying this optimization is intentional. It's often just a way to make the game longer. People don't like a game they complete quickly
swi 11mo ago
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 https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg
- protocolture 11mo ago
  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.
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    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" monetization, but I will concede that context is important with these sort of things.
    - parineum 11mo ago
      > And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit. They don't straddle any lines, they're well beyond it. Stash tabs are de facto required for trade. One can, technically, play without trade and complete all the game content but the ones actually capable of that are putting in tons of hours and they will definitely use extra stash space. There isn't really a target player that plays POE for free aside from those that are just trying it out. That's all fine with me but if you're going to get into the game, you're going to pay money.
      - 11mo ago
charlie-83 11mo ago
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.
ge96 11mo ago
war thunder doesn't count? it's pay to win hmm people say it's pay to progress not win
- protocolture 11mo ago
  Yeah war thunder gives you lots of early progress for free, and then slows it down until you are tempted to purchase currency to progress. Its not "Pay to Win" until you reach max level. Because the matchmaking always ensures theres some people of lower level, and some people of higher level (if they exist) in every match. This means that you want upgrades to overcome obstacles, but even if you buy progress, you still hit obstacles requiring upgrades. Its an infinite grind treadmill.
chriscjcj 11mo ago
First on the site's list of "Healthy Games" is a game called "Beholder." Description: "You work for a dystopian surveillance state and spy on your neighbors."
- rudolftheone 11mo ago
  Yes! That's the same which caught my eye as well, oh sweet irony! :D Or maybe it's not an irony anymore, rather a shift in societal values ;)
joaohaas 11mo ago
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. Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance. Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.
- ehnto 11mo ago
  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 satisfied. Watching Arc Raiders evolve recently is a great example. It's trying to cater to casual players. It is going well now, but the die hards are going to ruin that experience I can promise. Then the die hards will be all that remain, and they'll have to cater to them. The difference between a casual player and a die hard can be, 30hrs in a year played. And 5000 hrs in a year played. Some people play like it's their job.
  - n8m8 11mo ago
    What % of the time do you think the die-hard gamers live a healthy lifestyle? I’m thinking it’s higher than my knee jerk reaction, like 40-50%, but an important consideration. Of course people define “healthy” differently too, but obesity and mental health crises have objectively grown and correlate with rising technology use.
    - ehnto 11mo ago
      This is a hard one for me to ballpark because all my gaming friends are gym rats, so my view is probably skewed. Some of them game hours every day and make time for gym and nutrition. Unsure of there other health needs though. I think it's much harder to be healthy when 6+hrs of your day is gaming. Especially if you also have work. It takes time to eat healthy, excercise, get out into the sun and be social. At some point you must be making compromises to game 6hrs a day.
tonyhart7 11mo ago
gacha games checklist everything on this lmao
h4ny 11mo ago
I encourage everyone to read the definition on the home page: > Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer. And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example: https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many. Some of the users reviewing games on the website seem to also miss the point (inaccurate reviews), which leads to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330. It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.
- timeon 11mo ago
  Some people criticize definition of dark patterns because they can't face their addiction.
PunchyHamster 11mo ago
Feels like some UI designers are using those lists as idea board...
generationP 11mo ago
Neat... but most good RPGs fit much of the "psychological dark patterns" listed at https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-patterns.html https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-p... . So the total scores won't be as useful as they might look like.
cflewis 11mo ago
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 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_2020_paper_189.pdf https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/156460/1/DiGRA_202...
- sally_glance 11mo ago
  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?
  - cflewis 11mo ago
    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/ http://fdg2025.org/ and the workshop I started at ICSE continues on as well: https://sites.google.com/view/icsegasworkshop2025/home 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 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.
taormina 11mo ago
For a bit of shameless plug, we're actively building a mobile and desktop game that avoids these patterns. You can learn more about Danger World at https://danger.world https://danger.world
Nathanba 11mo ago
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.
elphinstone 11mo ago
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/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/ Alternately, focus on AAA games.
thih9 11mo ago
> 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.
badatlife 11mo ago
Not an experienced web dev. Genuinely asking, why does the sticky banner with search bar at the top of the screen look like that?
- offsky 11mo ago
  It’s meant to look like an old NES game controller.
  - badatlife 11mo ago
    [dead]
willtemperley 11mo ago
I do wish more of the internet was curated reviews like this.
offsky 11mo ago
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 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.
- symbogra 11mo ago
  Thanks for doing this! Years of grinding in Diablo 2 and reading about the psychology of intermittent rewards has made me able to see through any game with a grinding mechanic and not play it. So naming and explaining the dark pattern can help.
  - p0w3n3d 11mo ago
    You mean the new diablo 2 right? I doubt the original Diablo 2 grinding was money-earning focused. I mean the old games (as they appeared to me) were focused on "do it, sell it, make people fall in love with it while we prepare the new game". The new games are more like "make people hooked on it, while we prepare another DLC" - I've never played the new Diablo 2 so I am asking. However I used to grind Diablo 1 (and still do it sometimes with devilutionx) and while I am grinding they do not earn anything, so I feel that it's only to my guilty pleasure...
tobyhinloopen 11mo ago
Thanks for creating a guide on how to create the most addictive mobile game!
mbf1 11mo ago
It's amusing to me that Roblox appears like it's a healthy game when I recognize the platform's top earning games having most of the dark patterns.
mrheosuper 11mo ago
I am wondering are there any modern, slightly complex games that does not have any dark patterns ?
- rpigab 11mo ago
  I was about to say Dwarf Fortress, but you said "modern", so I'll go with Minecraft.
  - mrheosuper 11mo ago
    Doesn't minecraft have "you have to go back to where you die to get back your item" ? I feel it's forced to play.
- gridspy 11mo ago
  Horizon Zero Dawn (the PlayStation and later steam game where you're an archer in a world of robots) 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.
donatj 11mo ago
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.
- gruez 11mo ago
  Fortnite's battlepass system is probably one the less manipulative monetization scheme out there. There's no benefit to buying the battlepass in advance (other than getting access to skins sooner), so you can just wait until you've unlocked everything you want, before buying the battlepass. This avoids the feeling of sunk cost and that you "have to" play the game to "get your money's worth" entirely.
- chmod775 11mo ago
  You're not getting your money back.
redbell 11mo ago
These patterns do really take away the feeling of joy, fun and sense of accomplishment of playing games and replace them with pain, stress, fear and probably, every negative feeling you might think of. It's sad to witness the tragic shift from "pay to play" to "pay to win". 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 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_monetization_features_in_video_games_eg_%27loot_boxes%27_and_Internet_gaming_disorder https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325479259_Predatory...)
jumski 11mo ago
The same pattern is everywhere: addictive games, addictive food, addictive social-media content. It is really sad to see how society is driven by the monetization strategies of large companies. 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.
xphos 11mo ago
I love this resource it is really good one thing I'd like to see is some education games here. I am looking at DuoLingo that thing has crazy dark patterns but i think it gets written off as educational despite most people not learning a language from it. There are other ones and clearly you cannot list everything either way awesome work
rbtbhybt 11mo ago
trddd

Dark Pattern Games

350 points by robotnikman 11mo ago

timeon 11mo ago

These apply also for gamified non-games. Duolingo is prime example.

dkh 11mo ago
I give things like Duolingo a pass because it’s not trying to trick me into doing something they want me to do but I don’t want to do. It’s trying to gamify something that I do genuinely want to do (learn/practice a language) but haven’t had the discipline or plan in place. Just like how there are apps that gamify getting through tasks, gamify chores, etc. They aren’t really dark patterns in this context.

mzajc 11mo ago

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 https://www.darkpattern.games/game/18554/0/hyperrogue.html

1bpp 11mo ago
also funny how those first 3 'dark patterns' are basically just the core appeal of the genre
- Kiro 11mo ago
  Yeah, can't take this site seriously when it lists some of my favorite mechanics as dark patterns.
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    'Competition' is listed as a dark pattern. Ya know, the core thing common to basically all games going back millenia, this site is ridiculous.
    - vintermann 11mo ago
      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.
      - p1necone 11mo ago
        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.
        vintermann 11mo ago
        Yes, their summing up is not very useful. As a database of which games have which patterns, I think it can be useful.
      - Bratmon 11mo ago
        The person who wrote that text and the person that coded the website need to get relationship counseling; every page on the website except that paragraph treat competition as one more bad point ok the bad points scale.
        vintermann 11mo ago
        It's all too common to make a taxonomy of potential problems and then when deciding how to sum it up just throw up your hands and say each potential problem is worth one point.
  - jasonlotito 11mo ago
    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.
    - Kiro 11mo ago
      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!
      - jasonlotito 11mo ago
        > I don't agree that they are dark though. But they are. That you disagree is immaterial. > Now you really convinced me! Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is.
        Kiro 11mo ago
        No, they are not and you have no authority in this matter. > Convincing you isn't important to me. Correcting you is. Truly, a martyr for the greater good.
        jasonlotito 11mo ago
        > No, they are not and you have no authority in this matter. I don't need it. English does as well. Your desire to change the definitions of things to suit your narrative means you are wrong. > Truly, a martyr for the greater good. Better that than a martyr for ignorance.
- timeon 11mo ago
  Not sure what your point is. There is no addiction without appeal.
p1necone 11mo ago
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.
- toast0 11mo ago
  > The venn diagram between 'mechanics that make games fun' and 'dark patterns' (as described by this site) is basically a circle. I don't really think Daily Rewards are a fun mechanic. Nor is Friend Spam, and Social Pyramid Scheme is rarely fun either.
  - p1necone 11mo ago
    3/16 is not great. All good bullshit is wrapped around a grain of truth, this website might be more useful if they just concentrated on the things are dark patterns regardless of context.
- generationP 11mo ago
  Most of the dark patterns are not fun. The "psychological dark patterns" are, to some healthy degree.
tigerlily 11mo ago
I agree, HyperRogue's rating on this site is just baffling. It should definitely be +5.
brulard 11mo ago
Regarding hyperrogue, I've seen it mentioned multiple times as a fun game. I tried to play it but I had found no fun in it at all. The non-euclidean take is interesting, but it felt just like a demo of the weird-geometry engine, I've found no enjoyment in that. Graphics is rough, I've found no interesting items, enemies, mechanics or puzzles. Not sure if I just played it wrong or why my experience was different.

deadbabe 11mo ago

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.

stavros 11mo ago
I don't mind a trial unlock, or a one-time purchase. Any sort of currency is right out.
acheron 11mo ago
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.
- deadbabe 11mo ago
  This isn’t the 90s, they can watch a video now and see if they like it.
efnx 11mo ago
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)
- Greed 11mo ago
  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.

stavros 11mo ago

I made something like this a while ago, for mobile games: https://nobsgames.stavros.io 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.

yreg 11mo ago

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?

Loughla 11mo ago

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.

epsilonic 11mo ago

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

thrwaway55 11mo ago

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.

charcircuit 11mo ago
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.
- thrwaway55 11mo ago
  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.
  - YurgenJurgensen 11mo ago
    Why should developers be on the hook indefinitely for content? Why can’t they just make a good game and sell it? If a game needs continuous ‘content updates’ to remain good, it simply wasn’t meant to be played forever. Not all games are. Your argument seems to be “won’t someone please think of the poor defenseless billion-dollar international megacorporations?”.
- Aerroon 11mo ago
  Well, they also list a "pay wall" as a dark pattern. I guess demo giving you a limited game for free is a bad thing now.

keerthiko 11mo ago

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.

stackghost 11mo ago
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 https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/30/wait-to-play.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead

swiftcoder 11mo ago

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?

offsky 11mo ago
Clearly reciprocity is a good part of social interaction. So it’s not necessarily a dark pattern. But it can be if games use it as a mechanism to get you hooked. Maybe by punishment or guilt, or by encouraging extra in app purchases so you can donate to your guild mates. This is addressed a bit in my FAQ. https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php https://www.darkpattern.games/faq.php

smusamashah 11mo ago

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).

teamonkey 11mo ago
The definition for grinding is here, where they say it’s not necessarily a dark pattern in itself: https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html
YurgenJurgensen 11mo ago
Most roguelites use those patterns because they are fundamentally linked to slot machines. They may not be as predatory as money sinks, but they’re optimised to be time sinks as a method of promotion via word-of-mouth, streaming or activity indicators on social media.
- knollimar 11mo ago
  I don't think that's true that they use them because they're linked to slot machines. Sometimes variance just adds variety, which is valuabke in itself. I also don't agree if you're implying this optimization is intentional. It's often just a way to make the game longer. People don't like a game they complete quickly

swi 11mo ago

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 https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg

protocolture 11mo ago
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.
- p1necone 11mo ago
  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" monetization, but I will concede that context is important with these sort of things.
  - parineum 11mo ago
    > And PoE's stash tabs straddle that line a bit. They don't straddle any lines, they're well beyond it. Stash tabs are de facto required for trade. One can, technically, play without trade and complete all the game content but the ones actually capable of that are putting in tons of hours and they will definitely use extra stash space. There isn't really a target player that plays POE for free aside from those that are just trying it out. That's all fine with me but if you're going to get into the game, you're going to pay money.
    - 11mo ago

charlie-83 11mo ago

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.

ge96 11mo ago

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

protocolture 11mo ago
Yeah war thunder gives you lots of early progress for free, and then slows it down until you are tempted to purchase currency to progress. Its not "Pay to Win" until you reach max level. Because the matchmaking always ensures theres some people of lower level, and some people of higher level (if they exist) in every match. This means that you want upgrades to overcome obstacles, but even if you buy progress, you still hit obstacles requiring upgrades. Its an infinite grind treadmill.

chriscjcj 11mo ago

First on the site's list of "Healthy Games" is a game called "Beholder." Description: "You work for a dystopian surveillance state and spy on your neighbors."

rudolftheone 11mo ago
Yes! That's the same which caught my eye as well, oh sweet irony! :D Or maybe it's not an irony anymore, rather a shift in societal values ;)

joaohaas 11mo ago

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. Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance. Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.

ehnto 11mo ago
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 satisfied. Watching Arc Raiders evolve recently is a great example. It's trying to cater to casual players. It is going well now, but the die hards are going to ruin that experience I can promise. Then the die hards will be all that remain, and they'll have to cater to them. The difference between a casual player and a die hard can be, 30hrs in a year played. And 5000 hrs in a year played. Some people play like it's their job.
- n8m8 11mo ago
  What % of the time do you think the die-hard gamers live a healthy lifestyle? I’m thinking it’s higher than my knee jerk reaction, like 40-50%, but an important consideration. Of course people define “healthy” differently too, but obesity and mental health crises have objectively grown and correlate with rising technology use.
  - ehnto 11mo ago
    This is a hard one for me to ballpark because all my gaming friends are gym rats, so my view is probably skewed. Some of them game hours every day and make time for gym and nutrition. Unsure of there other health needs though. I think it's much harder to be healthy when 6+hrs of your day is gaming. Especially if you also have work. It takes time to eat healthy, excercise, get out into the sun and be social. At some point you must be making compromises to game 6hrs a day.

tonyhart7 11mo ago

gacha games checklist everything on this lmao

h4ny 11mo ago

I encourage everyone to read the definition on the home page: > Definition: A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer. And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example: https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many. Some of the users reviewing games on the website seem to also miss the point (inaccurate reviews), which leads to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330. It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.

timeon 11mo ago
Some people criticize definition of dark patterns because they can't face their addiction.

PunchyHamster 11mo ago

Feels like some UI designers are using those lists as idea board...

generationP 11mo ago

Neat... but most good RPGs fit much of the "psychological dark patterns" listed at https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-patterns.html https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-p... . So the total scores won't be as useful as they might look like.

cflewis 11mo ago

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 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_2020_paper_189.pdf https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/156460/1/DiGRA_202...

sally_glance 11mo ago
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?
- cflewis 11mo ago
  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/ http://fdg2025.org/ and the workshop I started at ICSE continues on as well: https://sites.google.com/view/icsegasworkshop2025/home 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 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.

taormina 11mo ago

For a bit of shameless plug, we're actively building a mobile and desktop game that avoids these patterns. You can learn more about Danger World at https://danger.world https://danger.world

Nathanba 11mo ago

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.

elphinstone 11mo ago

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/ https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/ Alternately, focus on AAA games.

thih9 11mo ago

> 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.

badatlife 11mo ago

Not an experienced web dev. Genuinely asking, why does the sticky banner with search bar at the top of the screen look like that?

offsky 11mo ago
It’s meant to look like an old NES game controller.
- badatlife 11mo ago
  [dead]

willtemperley 11mo ago

I do wish more of the internet was curated reviews like this.

offsky 11mo ago

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 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.

symbogra 11mo ago
Thanks for doing this! Years of grinding in Diablo 2 and reading about the psychology of intermittent rewards has made me able to see through any game with a grinding mechanic and not play it. So naming and explaining the dark pattern can help.
- p0w3n3d 11mo ago
  You mean the new diablo 2 right? I doubt the original Diablo 2 grinding was money-earning focused. I mean the old games (as they appeared to me) were focused on "do it, sell it, make people fall in love with it while we prepare the new game". The new games are more like "make people hooked on it, while we prepare another DLC" - I've never played the new Diablo 2 so I am asking. However I used to grind Diablo 1 (and still do it sometimes with devilutionx) and while I am grinding they do not earn anything, so I feel that it's only to my guilty pleasure...

tobyhinloopen 11mo ago

Thanks for creating a guide on how to create the most addictive mobile game!

mbf1 11mo ago

It's amusing to me that Roblox appears like it's a healthy game when I recognize the platform's top earning games having most of the dark patterns.

mrheosuper 11mo ago

I am wondering are there any modern, slightly complex games that does not have any dark patterns ?

rpigab 11mo ago
I was about to say Dwarf Fortress, but you said "modern", so I'll go with Minecraft.
- mrheosuper 11mo ago
  Doesn't minecraft have "you have to go back to where you die to get back your item" ? I feel it's forced to play.
gridspy 11mo ago
Horizon Zero Dawn (the PlayStation and later steam game where you're an archer in a world of robots) 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.

donatj 11mo ago

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.

gruez 11mo ago
Fortnite's battlepass system is probably one the less manipulative monetization scheme out there. There's no benefit to buying the battlepass in advance (other than getting access to skins sooner), so you can just wait until you've unlocked everything you want, before buying the battlepass. This avoids the feeling of sunk cost and that you "have to" play the game to "get your money's worth" entirely.
chmod775 11mo ago
You're not getting your money back.

redbell 11mo ago

These patterns do really take away the feeling of joy, fun and sense of accomplishment of playing games and replace them with pain, stress, fear and probably, every negative feeling you might think of. It's sad to witness the tragic shift from "pay to play" to "pay to win". 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 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_monetization_features_in_video_games_eg_%27loot_boxes%27_and_Internet_gaming_disorder https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325479259_Predatory...)

jumski 11mo ago

The same pattern is everywhere: addictive games, addictive food, addictive social-media content. It is really sad to see how society is driven by the monetization strategies of large companies. 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.

xphos 11mo ago

I love this resource it is really good one thing I'd like to see is some education games here. I am looking at DuoLingo that thing has crazy dark patterns but i think it gets written off as educational despite most people not learning a language from it. There are other ones and clearly you cannot list everything either way awesome work

rbtbhybt 11mo ago

trddd