Dark Pattern Games

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.

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

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

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?

I made something like this a while ago, for mobile games: 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.

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.

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.