Comment by keerthiko
7 hours 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.
> 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....
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
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Dead
>"Wait To Play"[0].
Yeah I used to enjoy those games. But I dont think thats necessarily what they are referring to here.
>Another common in-game timer is related to "harvesting" or "research". You may send your character off to harvest some resources, but you have to wait an arbitrary amount of time before this task is completed. This forces you to stop playing and wait for the timer to expire. Often there is a way to pay money or watch an advertisement to accelerate or skip the timer.
>Games that prevent you from playing them whenever you want are trying to get you to space out your playing throughout the day. This is a much better way for you to develop a habit of playing the game, and also a way to prevent players from reaching the end of a short game or getting burnt out on a repetitive game in a relatively short amount of time.
In a modern wait to play, you can bypass the restriction by spending money, or you are simply bounced back into ads multiple times during the day as you log in at every increment to press the next button.