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Has a game ever presented you with a choice in a way that made you think “Hey, wait a minute, what are you trying to pull here?” Or have you ever played a free-to-play game that just seemed to be designed to extract money from you first and give you a good time second or even third? Ever blanched at the news that one of your favorite games was getting a mobile game “port” and by “port” I mean “redesign to be like every other mobile game out there?” If so, you may have encountered what are known as “dark patterns” in game design.
This is a term used broadly in the context of user interface design to describe things that make it inconvenient, hard, or even impossible for users to do what they want to do if the product owner doesn’t want them to do it. This could include tricking or misleading players in the worst cases. The typical example is if you want to cancel your subscription to a streaming service, the app or website will throw all kinds of obstacles in your way, like burying the page needed to cancel and making a “Nevermind, keep my subscription!” button bright and noticeable while making the “Cancel Membership” button small, grey, and hidden in the corner. Case in point, here’s what I see when I go to cancel my Hulu subscription right now:
The actual button to cancel is down at the bottom, doing its best to remain unnoticed.
Video games, too, have dark patterns related to their user interfaces and, perhaps more to the point, their design. Don’t think we haven’t noticed, video games. Back in 2013, Jose Zagal, Staffan Bjork, and Chris Lewis were among the first to think of applying this concept to video games and developing an ontology of dark game design patterns. They developed a decent working definition, but the website www.darkpatern.games, which offers a database of games rated according to their dark pattern design principles, later arrived at the following definition on its front page:
A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.
Most people can get their heads around what’s being talked about here. It’s things that benefit the game developer/publisher, but which players don’t want or at best tolerate…
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