Interesting how some "dark patterns", especially of the psychological kind, are actually important elements of good game design.
For example the "illusion of control" (The game cheats or hides information to make you think you're better than you actually are) is everywhere, and it makes better games. One classic example is "coyote time" in platform games. Or for a more specific example, in Portal, at one time, you have to quickly fire a portal to avoid being crushed, it is a tense situation, and an important part of the story. So, to avoid a stupid death at the worst time, if you fire the wrong portal, it silently switches the other portal to correct your mistake.
Aesthetic Manipulations (Trick questions or toying with emotions or our subconscious desires) is the entire point of many games. We want games to play with our emotions. Take a horror game for instance, you are sitting on a couch, at home, in the least scary environment you can imagine, the game has to pull all the trick on you if you want the scares you paid for. And no one is going to tell you that getting attached to characters is a bad thing and they would rather see them as the bunch of pixels they are.
Frequency biases are all over the place too, usually in favor of the player. So much that when the game uses true randomness, it feels unfair. Good games are designed for player enjoyment, not to punish them with randomness.
It also considers competition a dark pattern, are sports a dark pattern too?
“Dark patterns” which make an actually fun game aren’t really dark patterns because they’re mutual. Players want their games to have illusion of control (even if they don’t realize it - I sound condescending here but it’s true, e.g. in the Portal example if players were to get crushed they would be more frustrated than having the game cheat them out of it).
Real dark patterns are parasitic. e.g. loot boxes: players would rather just buy the items directly, and even if they end up spending more on the loot boxes, they’re not happy about it.
When a player says “I’ve wasted 1000 hours on X game and I love it” (e.g. Factorio), it’s a good game with addictive mechanics. When a player says “I’ve wasted 1000 hours on X game and I hate it” (e.g. LoL) it’s a bad game with addictive mechanics. Now those games blend the lines - if a game gets too addicting it probably starts negatively affecting you either way.
I think this is a great way of putting it, because I think there's a real and necessary distinction here. The sophomoric relativism of "Gee aren't all games dark patterns?" feels like a smart thing to say, but is wrong for reasons that feel obvious but get kind of tedious to unpack.
As a different way of making the same point as you, I think critical differences are: (1) whether the compulsion to play serves you or the game creator, (2) whether the game mechanics serve an entertainment purpose or are grafted on to a game that would be just as fun without them, (3) whether it's designed around an "upgrade treadmill" as the core interactive structure of the game, as opposed to elements that have some degree of human craftsmanship to them (e.g. the mobile game Sorcery is fundamentally about the story).
I totally am on board with the "dark" patterns Duolingo uses to lure me in. Their gamification is better than any I've experienced, keeping me on an over 2-year streak right now.
Homing bullets in Halo was my introduction to the concept. Lesser players may not know this: but _ALL_ bullets (except sniper shots) home in Halo, not just Needler shots.
Those crazy across-the-map pistol headshots you were doing do have an element of skill, but as a console platformer with relatively poor joystick controls (compared to accurate keyboard/mouse controls), it was necessary to have this auto-aim in order for fast-paced combat to exist.
Besides, no one plays FPS games to practice joystick control or aim. The "fun" part of the game is positioning and team-dynamics.
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This isn't a dark pattern at all. Its necessary to make the "mundane" or "unfun" parts more automated, so that the players can focus on the fun parts.
It's not the bullet that "homes", it's your crosshair that has a bit of stickyness.
If someone walks by you slowly it'll grab on to them and follow it.
You need a little bit of auto aim because aiming with your thumbs (joystick) isn't as accurate as a your wrist (mouse).
It's the reason why sweep shooting works so well. Sweep your crosshairs across the screen, pull the trigger when it crosses something, it'll hold onto them slightly as it goes by.
You can still be more accurate on a PC without autoaim vs a console with.
> Besides, no one plays FPS games to practice joystick control or aim
Not really true. They do to be better among their peers, doesn't matter if there are PC players out there, irrelevant.
Auto aim is simply necessary to fix a limitation in the hardware, sometimes it gets in the way, most of the time it helps with frustration of the dead area of the joystick.
I think more broadly games are all about psychological manipulation. But I also think that means we have a much greater responsibility to make sure that remains safe and consensual. The taxonomy is therefore contextual and requires looking at the sum of any one game. Not only that but within categories different techniques can be weaker or stronger and that will vary per game.
Likewise consequence is an important consideration. Is it bad that someone will finish a terrible game because they love the story? Probably not. Is it bad that someone spent money they can’t afford on gacha mechanics? Probably.
One thing consumers should be very aware of is that sanding off sharp corners is very much about broadening audience reach and retention not necessarily making a better game. Particularly as more games employ a GaaS model.
There was a racing game for the PS2 back when I played video games that had a drift mechanic. A friend of mine figured out that if he drifted while turning the wheel the wrong direction, the game would drift the car around the turn -- albeit facing the wrong way.
But, it didn't ask for my social graph, nor did it ask for my credit card to get me more powerful cars.
I saw a golf game I thought that would be fun to play on android. The problem is that in order to get better, you had basically shell out cash to get better clubs and more powerful balls. It didn't rely on skill as much as it relied upon how much free cash you were able to devote to the game.
I made a game for touchscreens, and a single pixel of "error" in input could be the difference between winning and losing. The game will cheat behind the scenes to try a few variations on your inputs to see if any of them can win - and it chooses the winner if it finds one.
I don't really consider this to be cheating though - it isn't like a person is capable of doing pixel perfect inputs to a touchscreen, nor is a touchscreen going to give pixel perfect finger positioning.
> Interesting how some "dark patterns", especially of the psychological kind, are actually important elements of good game design.
Right.
I really think this website is a great idea, but I'm surprised to see people reporting "dark" patterns in Lumino City, for example, when what they are actually talking about is a game so beautiful and gently maddening that you want to finish it.
It's also a big indictment of them. I remember with Rogue Legacy, a game I was into for a time, a central debate about whether it was good or bad related to whether it was "too grindy", with some insisting it was (which was bad) and others insisting it wasn't (which is good!). And yet, whatever you call it, the grind, the accumulation of upgrades is central to the experience of the game.
Dead Cells is one of my favorite games but I would agree it's too grindy. In my opinion the game can be even more addicting by speeding up the rate at which the player unlocks new weapons.
I started enjoying the game a lot more after installing a mod that makes things drop more cells.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I don't think it's a dark pattern, just a relatively poorly balanced mechanic.
Pacman is a good example - the ghosts are deliberately simple so you have a chance of avoiding them and the game is fun. I wouldn't call it a "dark" pattern unless the ghosts were also mind hacking my desire to play more with gacha techniques
Pacman is funny: one ghost was incredibly bugged and basically doesn't function right.
They fixed the glitch in "Ms. Pacman", and the game definitely feels better because of it.
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Strong Ms. Pacman players know the personalities of the ghosts. IIRC, Blinky (Red) aims at a direct path towards the player. I think the Blue-one IIRC tries to form a pincer attack. The other two I always forget (I'm not strong enough to really pick them apart at that level... but I'm strong enough to avoid most Blinky issues).
Wow, this site has a very low threshold for considering something a 'dark pattern'. If you look at the psychological section, these are all considered dark patterns:
* A leveling up system
* Badges/achievements
* Collecting things
* Getting better tools/equipment as the game progresses
That's like...most games, I think? Most single-player games at least probably have at least one of those.
edit: some of the examples listed here are hilarious
> D4DJ Groovy Mix
> "difficulty 1 through 14 is easy to learn and master, while 15 is the hardest difficulty in the game. makes people think that they have 90% of the skill of the best player but in reality it is not the case"
> Magic: The Gathering Arena
> "There are mysterious matchmaking algorithms. It isn't clear how these work. At face, they appear to match players of similar skill or deck strength."
This bar is not low at all. Anything involving reward can cause addiction and harm. All of those things you cited are just methods of scheduling rewards. You level up every X amount of time, you get an item every Y amount of time.
These things are not some unforeseen emergent feature, they are deliberately designed. What makes it malicious is the behavior these rewards are designed to create.
An RPG using a leveling system to make sure you can't survive certain challenges until you've progressed enough is not malicious at all.
An RPG that pits players against each other, imposes the same leveling system on players, rates limit their progression with a timer and allows people to reset the timer by paying money essentially turns the game into a spending competition whose goal is to see who can pay some corporation the most money. Not to mention their blatant attempt to form habits in players by giving them daily login rewards and tasks.
> An RPG using a leveling system to make sure you can't survive certain challenges until you've progressed enough is not malicious at all.
I agree with the distinction you're making here -- it can be used to malicious ends, but isn't always -- but saying that it's categorically a "dark pattern" is still making a judgment, and that's what the website is doing.
Note that not only does the body text make no distinction between reasonable vs malicious use of leveling systems, the examples make it clear that they consider all forms of this to be tainted:
> Galaga Wars
> "The more time you play, the more ships you get."
> DISGAEA RPG
> "Owned character progress and levelling up."
Even if you try to say, "well, it's a dark pattern that can be completely non-malicious," well, that's just shitty UX if you're gonna label things misleadingly like that.
The distinction between your two examples is not in the specific game design techniques.
In your first example the game designers are trying to make their game more enjoyable for players.
In the second example they're trying to extract more money out of players.
Listing a bunch of different game design tools that might be used to try to extract money out of people by a dishonest developer is missing the point because the specific mechanics are irrelevant, as you've pointed out with your examples.
I actually totally agree. For way longer than I should have did I avoid RPGs because of those systems, because they seemed a silly reduction of "progress". Now that I play RPGs, I still find them pointless annoyances that get in my way of enjoying the world/story.
I still don't like that Steam added achievements to my games. I wish I could disable the entire "feature".
"I personally don't like this thing" isn't the same thing as "dark pattern." There are people like you that explicitly avoid RPG's, sure, and there are people who explicitly seek them out because they enjoy that part of the mechanics.
Having 'levels' in games has been around for a long time, you can probably trace them back to the beginning days of D&D. Were the original D&D authors trying to get people addicted? Probably not, it was just something they thought players would like. And indeed, many players do.
Why don't you like achievements? I'm curious. I never cared about them in the past and for most games they are just a little nonsense side bubble that pop up sometimes. But for a few games I've sunk a ton of hours into, mostly rouge likes, they are fun to try to complete.
If you don't wish achievements to appear you can disable steam overlay or download Steam Achievement Manager and 100% all games. One of the reasons devs put them in games, especially those that track chapters completed, is to have a measure of story completion across player base.
> Getting better tools/equipment as the game progresses
These two in particular have been a consistent part of game design for a long time because they ease players into increasing gameplay complexity over time. Metroid games are a simple example: when you start off you can run, jump and shoot, and by the end of the game you're using every button on the controller (sometimes multiple at once) and probably have other abilities you can toggle on and off.
I think it's one of those things that can be good game design, but can also be abused depending on how it's done. In the end, you're still getting that sweet hit of dopamine every time you level or when you get some new cool weapon/item. Games have always exploited that to make their games more fun and addictive. It's nice that the site lists those things for people who are concerned about that or are looking to cut down on your time spent in the skinner box
Curious question, what about if you use some of these "dark" approaches for something good? Say some education app that hooks you so you can progress and learn more. Are they still called "dark patterns" in this case? Example - badges for tasks you have done or "streaks" or levels to show you how you progress and what you have achieved so far?
In my opinion, yes. Take for example DuoLingo. It is very aggressive about trying to get you to turn on notifications. They claim that if you have notifications on you're more likely to continue learning at a regular pace. That may be true (though spaced repetition seems best, and they use "streaks" of days you've interacted with the app as a metric, which is the opposite of spaced repetition). However, my understanding is that they also slip in other notifications about things you might not care about like your "rank" on the "leaderboards". (I'm trying to learn a language, not compete in the Olympics. Why do I need to compare my progress to random strangers around the world?) Some of the dark patterns go away when you subscribe, but not all. Using the app feels really gross, even though I am learning a new language. Many of the dark patterns may have positive outcomes, but it's all still to juice their metrics in the end.
You're talking about Duolingo, right? The problem with these incentives is you eventually forget you installed the app to learn a new language and you start gaming the system instead by repeating easy lessons just to avoid losing your position in diamond league.
> Curious question, what about if you use some of these "dark" approaches for something good?
All of these "dark patterns" are just tools and psychological manipulations. They're used for all kinds of positive outcomes. Gamification lets us use them to help with learning, or our todo lists, or to kick a bad habit or as part of therapy. It's not that these techniques themselves are always evil, but the potential for abuse exists and when they're used in games, it's often to keep players addicted or spending money.
Badges and achievements definitely are a dark pattern. You can tell they are because game developers have gone so overboard on them now that you are like, oh I got a badge, yes I'll claim it, no I haven't a clue what it does...
The rest of the things you identify, as you say, that's just games.
I think this is a case where it may be vary by personality.
Some people may feel compelled to get achievements even when they don't really enjoy the experience. It feels like a dark pattern to them.
Some people really enjoy the process of getting achievements, and are disappointed when they discover a new game doesn't have them. It doesn't feel like a dark pattern to them.
> Badges and achievements definitely are a dark pattern. You can tell they are because game developers have gone so overboard on them now that you are like, oh I got a badge, yes I'll claim it, no I haven't a clue what it does...
Identifying something as a dark pattern for no other reason than that it's common doesn't make any sense.
I find the explanation convincing that the reason for so many achievements in games is that Steam will report completion rates for each achievement to the developer, and developers want to know things like "what percentage of players complete the tutorial?".
I'm not sure if it's a broad definition of dark pattern or a narrow definition of game. This site probably considers sudoku, wordle, and crosswords to be games, but would probably not consider, say, Witcher to be a game...at least not a good one. I kinda see their point.
otoh I looked up a few games my kids play that I consider to be flagrantly evil (genshin, gardenscapes, emojiblitz) and they all score a "neutral" here
Oh wow. Gardenscapes is basically just every conceivable dark pattern wrapped up into a bland and friendly looking package. This database suffers badly from not having enough votes on anything, but at 20 or so voters this has more than most. Maybe the whole Gardenscapes staff? https://www.darkpattern.games/game/50/0/gardenscapes.html
So this can help parents and kids with mobile games, but let’s talk about the elephant in the room of the games we ourselves are addicted to or our kids keep coming back to play.
When I was a teen I was addicted to World of Warcraft. I played for a few years before quitting. My grades dropped, my social life was hurting, and all for just in game items? I remember how worried my parents were about my screen time and the lengths they went to try and limit it.
Some of my best friends continue to play to this day and keep telling me that they are bored with it and will quit next expansion. They are now re-playing the same game over like they did with me a decade ago as it’s now a “classic” version.
How do we help people get help they desire when these games create almost a combative, intervention needed type of situation?
There’s https://www.restartlife.com/ and other similar types of websites out there to help, but I feel like the problem is the dark patterns already have a hold on one’s behavior to the point where only that person can be the agent of change or a major event happens in their life to spark the change.
Reminds me of the studies with drug addiction and rats. IIRC some of the early studies about how certain drugs were so addictive were done with rats who basically couldn't do anything else, and when you give the rats other things to do in their life, suddenly the drugs aren't as interesting.
I think the fundamental thing about playing repetitive games like WoW forever is that the skinner box is more interesting than real life, which is more an indictment of their real life than the game. Not sure how to fix that, though, and certainly there are people who can enjoy MMO's in moderation.
This may not be true for everyone, but it was for me. In college, I was skipping classes and ignoring friends. I just stayed in my room and played WoW. Then my graphics card kicked the bucket, and the game was unplayable. So I stayed in the library and read random books, skipping classes and ignoring friends.
I wasn't addicted to WoW. I just had major depression. After dealing with that over many years, I got back into WoW. Played a lot less of it, then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park likely is the study you were thinking about, studying how the willingness/desire of rats to self-administer morphine changes depending on their living conditions.
You can't think in interventions. A person has to realise their way of life objectively and feel they are making a mistake. They don't feel WoW is a waste of time. Same thing with weight loss.
It was used in reference to a friend who has told me countlessly that they want to quit but they don't know how. I also ran into this as a teen but "woke" up from it when going to college.
Maybe it is the dark patterns of the real life that push people back into games? What help could be given to help people find worthwhile things in the "real world"?
For many people, life is just going to work and then crashing exhausted on the couch to watch Netflix. So they would quit games for the sake of watching Netflix.
I used to play team fortress 2. In TF2 whenever you hit an enemy a bell is rung.
I remember laying in bed one night and all I could hear was that bell ringing and I felt like one of pavlovs dogs.
If this is considered a dark pattern, you could consider almost anything that makes a game enjoyable to be a dark pattern. Because, y'know, a really enjoyable game might make you think about it at other times! You might even feel like going back to the game and playing it, because you enjoy it so much!
"Wow, the controls in this game are really tight, it feels amazing to play...nice try, Miyamoto, you won't get me this time!" *chucks Switch out the window*
Like Tetris is so "bad" about this, it has a syndrome named after it. Where people see how to Tetris things together outside of the game and/or have dreams about it after playing it so much.
Such a terrible game. Should never have been created. /s
I think there is a more genuine take. The bell is not what makes TF2 enjoyable. The fact that GP is thinking about the bell instead of his game session brings into question whether or not it's a dark pattern.
I recall having to quit Illyriad [1] because the PvP politicking was so intense it was undermining my ability to function IRL. That's pretty common in that game.
There's a couple of bona-fide dark patterns in that game, but the developers definitely tilt towards serious gaming, and overall the game is the opposite of cow-clicker addictive patterns.
Happened to me with both Bejewelled and Candy Crush. I went to sleep with jewels and candies moving around and matching up. That’s where I drew the line.
Happened to me with FIFA in college. I could see balls passing and common patterns of crosses/attacks/corners playing on the back of my eyelids. I realized I had drilled the football patterns into my neurons.
China is taking draconian measures to protect people from game addiction. While I generally don't agree with their politics I feel they are doing the right things to protect the society.
I feel the occidental states are not doing enough to protect people from game addiction and protect children from tablet addiction and bad contents.
These thing are slowly eroding our society and making people more miserable when they are not able to help themselves against all these forms of addiction.
Video games and tablets are not eroding our societies.
Children’s usage of video games and tablets is their parents job, not the national government’s.
I don’t know what country you’re in, but the thought of whoever is in control of mine “protecting” anyone from bad contents, let alone children, is enough to send chills down one’s spine.
That is a blank check on info consumption and the sheer naivety required to entertain that idea for more than a second is bewildering.
Are you a parent? If you are, what degree of control do you think you have over what your child is exposed to during the times when they’re not with you?
Not saying I like the draconian levels that China is going to on this, but a lot of how your kid turns out is based on what they’re exposed to by their peers, and so some things are societal/population level problems. Parents can broadly try to affect this by controlling the school their kids go to, but that’s a very blunt instrument at best, generally much more expensive than less great schools, and a huge amount of work to redo. If they’re already struggling due to eg high housing costs relative to their wages (another one of our societal issues), then the parents are going to have a really uphill challenge trying to curate their children’s’ experience.
It takes a village, and if your village is not working well, you’re going to have a hard time as a parent. This whole idea of nuclear families as independent units was never true and needs to die.
>Children’s usage of video games and tablets is their parents job, not the national government’s.
Confucianism would disagree and most East-Asian countries have been running on some version of it for a few thousand years, so you might want to reevaluate why that idea is so bewildering to you.
Honestly I find the idea bewildering that parents are supposed to be the sole authority on these matters, because 1. works out pretty badly for people who don't have stable parents, which is quite a lot of them nowadays, 2. neglects virtually all institutional knowledge collected over long periods of time
I do think there is a place for state institutions to fund research and public-good marketing campaigns on these issues. Maybe to go so far as campaigns explaining these behaviors are unhealthy and potentially dangerous in optional school programs. In short, state intervention in child rearing, short of major abuse, should be limited to optional education.
I hate absolute ratings (e.g. 5/5 with 1 vote being ranked higher than 4.99/5 with 100 votes).
All the top games seem to have 1 report giving everything positive ratings so that other fabulous games with more ratings but say a 4.97 rating are lost.
I believe computing (or even knowing about) the Wilson score is beyond the capabilities of your typical full-stack developer, but one could at least have the common sense to hide ratings until an item has a sufficient number of them (say, 10).
Relevant plug for Lichess mobile app (I am not affiliated). It's a free chess app that allows for rated play against opponents. Tens of thousands of concurrent games. No ads or payments (I don't remember if I paid, but I would be happy to support). No bells, no whistles, just chess.
I have a pseudo addictive personality and mobile phone games P2W have gotten me to shell out more than I'd care to admit. I've stopped playing all such mobile games and my "nicotine gum" game was getting back to my roots (elementary school chess team): mobile chess from Lichess.
Lichess is amazing and I use it every day. Completely free, no ads, and runs 100% on donations. They publish their costs, it takes ~420K a year to keep Lichess running and the primary developer of Lichess takes home about ~56K a year. https://lichess.org/costs
You wouldn't have paid for Lichess but you can donate to keep the site alive (and get some neat wings). You can also view their costs over at https://lichess.org/costs
1. It's not extremely clear that the search field is usable
2. Feature request (probably for medium term, I get this is a very new project): The 4 boxes up top giving a breakdown of different dark patterns is cool, but it would be cooler to filter granularly. e.g. some might not care too much to avoid such things as grinding or "complete the collection", but would still like to avoid others.
Readit News
For example the "illusion of control" (The game cheats or hides information to make you think you're better than you actually are) is everywhere, and it makes better games. One classic example is "coyote time" in platform games. Or for a more specific example, in Portal, at one time, you have to quickly fire a portal to avoid being crushed, it is a tense situation, and an important part of the story. So, to avoid a stupid death at the worst time, if you fire the wrong portal, it silently switches the other portal to correct your mistake.
Aesthetic Manipulations (Trick questions or toying with emotions or our subconscious desires) is the entire point of many games. We want games to play with our emotions. Take a horror game for instance, you are sitting on a couch, at home, in the least scary environment you can imagine, the game has to pull all the trick on you if you want the scares you paid for. And no one is going to tell you that getting attached to characters is a bad thing and they would rather see them as the bunch of pixels they are.
Frequency biases are all over the place too, usually in favor of the player. So much that when the game uses true randomness, it feels unfair. Good games are designed for player enjoyment, not to punish them with randomness.
It also considers competition a dark pattern, are sports a dark pattern too?
Real dark patterns are parasitic. e.g. loot boxes: players would rather just buy the items directly, and even if they end up spending more on the loot boxes, they’re not happy about it.
When a player says “I’ve wasted 1000 hours on X game and I love it” (e.g. Factorio), it’s a good game with addictive mechanics. When a player says “I’ve wasted 1000 hours on X game and I hate it” (e.g. LoL) it’s a bad game with addictive mechanics. Now those games blend the lines - if a game gets too addicting it probably starts negatively affecting you either way.
As a different way of making the same point as you, I think critical differences are: (1) whether the compulsion to play serves you or the game creator, (2) whether the game mechanics serve an entertainment purpose or are grafted on to a game that would be just as fun without them, (3) whether it's designed around an "upgrade treadmill" as the core interactive structure of the game, as opposed to elements that have some degree of human craftsmanship to them (e.g. the mobile game Sorcery is fundamentally about the story).
Those crazy across-the-map pistol headshots you were doing do have an element of skill, but as a console platformer with relatively poor joystick controls (compared to accurate keyboard/mouse controls), it was necessary to have this auto-aim in order for fast-paced combat to exist.
Besides, no one plays FPS games to practice joystick control or aim. The "fun" part of the game is positioning and team-dynamics.
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This isn't a dark pattern at all. Its necessary to make the "mundane" or "unfun" parts more automated, so that the players can focus on the fun parts.
If someone walks by you slowly it'll grab on to them and follow it.
You need a little bit of auto aim because aiming with your thumbs (joystick) isn't as accurate as a your wrist (mouse).
It's the reason why sweep shooting works so well. Sweep your crosshairs across the screen, pull the trigger when it crosses something, it'll hold onto them slightly as it goes by.
You can still be more accurate on a PC without autoaim vs a console with.
> Besides, no one plays FPS games to practice joystick control or aim
Not really true. They do to be better among their peers, doesn't matter if there are PC players out there, irrelevant.
Auto aim is simply necessary to fix a limitation in the hardware, sometimes it gets in the way, most of the time it helps with frustration of the dead area of the joystick.
Likewise consequence is an important consideration. Is it bad that someone will finish a terrible game because they love the story? Probably not. Is it bad that someone spent money they can’t afford on gacha mechanics? Probably.
One thing consumers should be very aware of is that sanding off sharp corners is very much about broadening audience reach and retention not necessarily making a better game. Particularly as more games employ a GaaS model.
But, it didn't ask for my social graph, nor did it ask for my credit card to get me more powerful cars.
I saw a golf game I thought that would be fun to play on android. The problem is that in order to get better, you had basically shell out cash to get better clubs and more powerful balls. It didn't rely on skill as much as it relied upon how much free cash you were able to devote to the game.
At that point, it wasn't fun anymore.
I don't really consider this to be cheating though - it isn't like a person is capable of doing pixel perfect inputs to a touchscreen, nor is a touchscreen going to give pixel perfect finger positioning.
Right.
I really think this website is a great idea, but I'm surprised to see people reporting "dark" patterns in Lumino City, for example, when what they are actually talking about is a game so beautiful and gently maddening that you want to finish it.
I started enjoying the game a lot more after installing a mod that makes things drop more cells.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I don't think it's a dark pattern, just a relatively poorly balanced mechanic.
> For example the "illusion of control" is everywhere, and it makes better games.
But what is a better game? A game that is enjoyed by most people, good retention or maybe a bit of both?
I'm also curious to see your take on what a dark pattern is.
They fixed the glitch in "Ms. Pacman", and the game definitely feels better because of it.
----------
Strong Ms. Pacman players know the personalities of the ghosts. IIRC, Blinky (Red) aims at a direct path towards the player. I think the Blue-one IIRC tries to form a pincer attack. The other two I always forget (I'm not strong enough to really pick them apart at that level... but I'm strong enough to avoid most Blinky issues).
* A leveling up system
* Badges/achievements
* Collecting things
* Getting better tools/equipment as the game progresses
That's like...most games, I think? Most single-player games at least probably have at least one of those.
edit: some of the examples listed here are hilarious
> D4DJ Groovy Mix
> "difficulty 1 through 14 is easy to learn and master, while 15 is the hardest difficulty in the game. makes people think that they have 90% of the skill of the best player but in reality it is not the case"
> Magic: The Gathering Arena
> "There are mysterious matchmaking algorithms. It isn't clear how these work. At face, they appear to match players of similar skill or deck strength."
These things are not some unforeseen emergent feature, they are deliberately designed. What makes it malicious is the behavior these rewards are designed to create.
An RPG using a leveling system to make sure you can't survive certain challenges until you've progressed enough is not malicious at all.
An RPG that pits players against each other, imposes the same leveling system on players, rates limit their progression with a timer and allows people to reset the timer by paying money essentially turns the game into a spending competition whose goal is to see who can pay some corporation the most money. Not to mention their blatant attempt to form habits in players by giving them daily login rewards and tasks.
I agree with the distinction you're making here -- it can be used to malicious ends, but isn't always -- but saying that it's categorically a "dark pattern" is still making a judgment, and that's what the website is doing.
Read the webpage yourself if you don't believe me: https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/24/invested-endowed-va...
Note that not only does the body text make no distinction between reasonable vs malicious use of leveling systems, the examples make it clear that they consider all forms of this to be tainted:
> Galaga Wars
> "The more time you play, the more ships you get."
> DISGAEA RPG
> "Owned character progress and levelling up."
Even if you try to say, "well, it's a dark pattern that can be completely non-malicious," well, that's just shitty UX if you're gonna label things misleadingly like that.
In your first example the game designers are trying to make their game more enjoyable for players.
In the second example they're trying to extract more money out of players.
Listing a bunch of different game design tools that might be used to try to extract money out of people by a dishonest developer is missing the point because the specific mechanics are irrelevant, as you've pointed out with your examples.
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I still don't like that Steam added achievements to my games. I wish I could disable the entire "feature".
Having 'levels' in games has been around for a long time, you can probably trace them back to the beginning days of D&D. Were the original D&D authors trying to get people addicted? Probably not, it was just something they thought players would like. And indeed, many players do.
> Getting better tools/equipment as the game progresses
These two in particular have been a consistent part of game design for a long time because they ease players into increasing gameplay complexity over time. Metroid games are a simple example: when you start off you can run, jump and shoot, and by the end of the game you're using every button on the controller (sometimes multiple at once) and probably have other abilities you can toggle on and off.
I like the concept and think this is a topic that deserves more attention, but the definition is broad to the point of meaninglessness
All of these "dark patterns" are just tools and psychological manipulations. They're used for all kinds of positive outcomes. Gamification lets us use them to help with learning, or our todo lists, or to kick a bad habit or as part of therapy. It's not that these techniques themselves are always evil, but the potential for abuse exists and when they're used in games, it's often to keep players addicted or spending money.
The rest of the things you identify, as you say, that's just games.
(I think this website is a very, very good idea)
Some people may feel compelled to get achievements even when they don't really enjoy the experience. It feels like a dark pattern to them.
Some people really enjoy the process of getting achievements, and are disappointed when they discover a new game doesn't have them. It doesn't feel like a dark pattern to them.
Identifying something as a dark pattern for no other reason than that it's common doesn't make any sense.
I find the explanation convincing that the reason for so many achievements in games is that Steam will report completion rates for each achievement to the developer, and developers want to know things like "what percentage of players complete the tutorial?".
When I was a teen I was addicted to World of Warcraft. I played for a few years before quitting. My grades dropped, my social life was hurting, and all for just in game items? I remember how worried my parents were about my screen time and the lengths they went to try and limit it.
Some of my best friends continue to play to this day and keep telling me that they are bored with it and will quit next expansion. They are now re-playing the same game over like they did with me a decade ago as it’s now a “classic” version.
How do we help people get help they desire when these games create almost a combative, intervention needed type of situation?
There’s https://www.restartlife.com/ and other similar types of websites out there to help, but I feel like the problem is the dark patterns already have a hold on one’s behavior to the point where only that person can be the agent of change or a major event happens in their life to spark the change.
I think the fundamental thing about playing repetitive games like WoW forever is that the skinner box is more interesting than real life, which is more an indictment of their real life than the game. Not sure how to fix that, though, and certainly there are people who can enjoy MMO's in moderation.
I wasn't addicted to WoW. I just had major depression. After dealing with that over many years, I got back into WoW. Played a lot less of it, then.
For many people, life is just going to work and then crashing exhausted on the couch to watch Netflix. So they would quit games for the sake of watching Netflix.
"Wow, the controls in this game are really tight, it feels amazing to play...nice try, Miyamoto, you won't get me this time!" *chucks Switch out the window*
Such a terrible game. Should never have been created. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect
There's a couple of bona-fide dark patterns in that game, but the developers definitely tilt towards serious gaming, and overall the game is the opposite of cow-clicker addictive patterns.
[1]: https://elgea.illyriad.co.uk
Going to sleep, I had the levels blinking through my eyes for 20 minutes before my mind could finally find some rest.
I also have Minecraft dreams if I've been playing a lot.
I feel the occidental states are not doing enough to protect people from game addiction and protect children from tablet addiction and bad contents.
These thing are slowly eroding our society and making people more miserable when they are not able to help themselves against all these forms of addiction.
Children’s usage of video games and tablets is their parents job, not the national government’s.
I don’t know what country you’re in, but the thought of whoever is in control of mine “protecting” anyone from bad contents, let alone children, is enough to send chills down one’s spine.
That is a blank check on info consumption and the sheer naivety required to entertain that idea for more than a second is bewildering.
Not saying I like the draconian levels that China is going to on this, but a lot of how your kid turns out is based on what they’re exposed to by their peers, and so some things are societal/population level problems. Parents can broadly try to affect this by controlling the school their kids go to, but that’s a very blunt instrument at best, generally much more expensive than less great schools, and a huge amount of work to redo. If they’re already struggling due to eg high housing costs relative to their wages (another one of our societal issues), then the parents are going to have a really uphill challenge trying to curate their children’s’ experience.
It takes a village, and if your village is not working well, you’re going to have a hard time as a parent. This whole idea of nuclear families as independent units was never true and needs to die.
Confucianism would disagree and most East-Asian countries have been running on some version of it for a few thousand years, so you might want to reevaluate why that idea is so bewildering to you.
Honestly I find the idea bewildering that parents are supposed to be the sole authority on these matters, because 1. works out pretty badly for people who don't have stable parents, which is quite a lot of them nowadays, 2. neglects virtually all institutional knowledge collected over long periods of time
I do think there is a place for state institutions to fund research and public-good marketing campaigns on these issues. Maybe to go so far as campaigns explaining these behaviors are unhealthy and potentially dangerous in optional school programs. In short, state intervention in child rearing, short of major abuse, should be limited to optional education.
All the top games seem to have 1 report giving everything positive ratings so that other fabulous games with more ratings but say a 4.97 rating are lost.
https://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8idr1WZ1A7Q
I have a pseudo addictive personality and mobile phone games P2W have gotten me to shell out more than I'd care to admit. I've stopped playing all such mobile games and my "nicotine gum" game was getting back to my roots (elementary school chess team): mobile chess from Lichess.
Anyone reading who loves Lichess consider becoming a patron - https://lichess.org/patron
Two small bits of UI feedback:
1. It's not extremely clear that the search field is usable
2. Feature request (probably for medium term, I get this is a very new project): The 4 boxes up top giving a breakdown of different dark patterns is cool, but it would be cooler to filter granularly. e.g. some might not care too much to avoid such things as grinding or "complete the collection", but would still like to avoid others.