Comment by vintermann
14 hours 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, their summing up is not very useful. As a database of which games have which patterns, I think it can be useful.