You Should Know

Interesting. I was chatting with a lot of big name AAA designers and indie designers discussing dark patterns, and they've got a very different opinion on what constitutes a dark pattern. To them, largely, it needs to be more technical deception - like having a fake "X" button, or immediately popping up an ad over where a button was to trick you into clicking it, or bait-and-switching pricing before the user notices.

I tried to raise these kinds of patterns as problematic, and it was a mixed bag. The general vibe from them was that they'd only call it a dark pattern if it deceives the player to get more money than they were prepared to spend (or similar for ads). If the player knows what they're getting into, and they are presented with a choice to stop or continue, it's on them.

And I'll admit, while I don't go that far (and there were designers in both camps), I can at least understand how all game design is manipulation, in the same way that teaching and storytelling is manipulation, and drawing the lines can be very hard. Your job is to convince the player that they are having fun and want to keep playing. Resources in a game have no real value, only valued by the scarcity and utility of them, which the designer intentionally assigns to convince the player it's more or less valuable.

Curiously, the examples listed in the OP were exactly the patterns I see designers discuss, but don't seem to be the patterns on the website (like "illusion of control", artificial scarcity, which is like, game designs while thing).

Either way, nice to have this as a resource because honestly a lot of these elements are what I'd put in the "bad / abusive design" category rather than purely dark patterns, but still great to highlight, but I can agree that we should probably be careful blanket calling these dark patterns; examples: It mentions illusion of control being separating you into shards of leader boards so that you can be in the top 500 of a shard rather than top 200,000 world ranking or whatever, or claw machines choosing whether you successfully grab an item rather than relying on skill. How does this compare to Uncharted not letting enemies successfully shoot you in the first few seconds of an action sequence to give you time to ground yourself, or Resident Evil spawning different loot and enemies based on how good/bad you play?

I'd say, is it to extract money from you in the short term, but it's more grey than a non-designer might read into from lists like these.

It's sad that the most unhealthy games are the ones ranked as most played on the google play store 😮‍💨

Tbf, last time I checked the site it had stuff like ”random loot” listed as a dark pattern. Gacha sucks, but random loot from a boss is IMO valid game design.

The list of "Healthy Games" is a great resource to have!

If you want games just to play games I recommend downloading from f Droid. Pretty much every other game has ulterior motives be it ads or microtransactions. I haven't come across a game on f Droid yet that has either of those.

Back in uni, most of these dark patterns were taught as "game design fundamentals".

Now as I work on my indie games, I avoid using what I learned in uni.

Game design all boils down to "is it fun?" and anything else is bullshit sales tactics.

I wish the site also focused on real games, and not just mobile games.

Mobile only. Lovely resource.