For context around my motivation to make the site. I was really addicted to a certain mobile game to the point that it was affecting my work and family life. I stumbled upon an article about how game companies hire psychologists to make the games more addicting. This led me down a rabbit hole of researching dark patterns. It was very eye opening and by learning about the dark patterns they lost their power over me. I was able to quit playing the addictive game. I still play games, I just pick better games and the dark patterns don’t work on me anymore. The research and education that I gave myself was so helpful in restoring balance to my life that I wanted to share it with others. Hence the website. It’s about 7 years old.

The most important part of my site is the text descriptions of the dark patterns. The crowd sourced game reviews are probably spam and rubbish and I’ve been meaning to remove them. I had written code to scrape the iOS and android stores to automatically add new games but this code broke ages ago and I never fixed it. The game listings are years out of date. I had plans to include console and pc games but never got around to it. I moved on to other projects.

I have received many emails over the years from people who say that my site has helped them stop or avoid playing addictive games. This makes me happy.

I see at least some of the patterns we came up with appear on the site. Happy to answer any questions about it all, I think we were the first to write about dark patterns in games, at least academically. It was 2013 so predated Overwatch loot boxes, which I am sure I would have put in there, but now they seem quite tame.

I do want to get ahead of something many of the comments here made: we were very aware that one person's dark pattern was another's benefit eg Animal Crossing's appointment mechanics make it easy to just play for a bit then put it down for the day and come back tomorrow. We went back and forth a lot about how to phrase this dichotomy, as we knew it was the stickest point of the whole plan. That's why the paper's Abstract immediately addresses it: "Game designers are typically regarded as advocates for players. However, a game creator’s interests may not align with the players’." Alignment was the key: are the players and designers in agreement, or is there tension where the designer (or, more usually nowadays, bean counters) is trying to exploit the players in some dimension?

So yeah, happy to answer questions about it.

PS I would be remiss not to mention the rebuttal paper "Against Dark Game Design Patterns" https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/156460/1/DiGRA_202...

While opinions vary on the correct use of these patterns, the video is a helpful and easy to digest, reminder of them. The video description contains additional links.

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"Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?" - https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg

[0] https://www.darkpattern.games/game/18554/0/hyperrogue.html

Infinite Treadmill - Impossible to win or complete the game.

Variable Rewards - Unpredictable or random rewards are more addictive than a predictable schedule.

Can't Pause or Save - The game does not allow you to stop playing whenever you want.

Grinding - Being required to perform repetitive and tedious tasks to advance.

Competition - The game makes you compete against other players.

Unfortunately, the manual part of it (reviewing user submissions) is too much for one person (me), but it should be fairly useful still.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas

Author: Natasha Dow Schüll

You might be interested to watch this video entitled Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 , which has been referenced by many YouTube analysis, and for good reason.

Also, this paper was a nice read for me: Predatory monetization schemes in video games and internet gaming disorder (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325479259_Predatory...)

> Definition: 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.

And also the detailed descriptions of each of the dark patterns, for example:

https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/12/grinding.html

Quoting just the short descriptions of the dark patterns without considering the definition above is effectively mischaracterizing the intent of the website and not using the tool as intended, and all the patterns seem like they can be/are just enjoyable mechanics to many.

Some of the users reviewing games on the website seem to also miss the point (inaccurate reviews), which leads to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45947761#45948330.

It is increasingly often the case in predatory games that a very subtle combination of the mechanics listed make them dark patterns collectively, so it's also important to consider the patterns in groups.

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.

Sure, being unable to pause the game isn't necessarily the developer being evil, but it's good to have a website that tells you about it before you buy the game.

I think you just need to interpret a game having a low score as there being some parts of the game that you might want to know about before buying/playing rather than "this game is evil".

In the same way that, when a film is rated 18, I can check whether that means it's going to scar me for life or if it shows a nipple for 2 seconds.

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 have a close friend who buried his depression under a pile of games built around these temporal reward loops. He’s not working and still living with his parents at 40.

Thank you for sharing this - awareness of these patterns needs to be spread.

Not sure about this one. The “defeat 20 enemies” task could be a pointless checkbox, but it could also be an excuse for a fun quest. I could see this pattern not being “dark”, when applied in a user friendly way.

Then again, this is from an article about app badges and I never saw a game use those in a user friendly at all.

A better approach might be to highlight the fraction of mobile games that deserve more recognition for avoiding dark patterns, like this site does:

https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/

Alternately, focus on AAA games.

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.

hmm people say it's pay to progress not win

You can learn more about Danger World at https://danger.world

Grind or collecting items is suggested as a dark pattern. Dead cells is an amazing game and it has both of these. Most rogue lites use these both patterns heavily.

I don't see grinding as a hard no. I don't mind repeating if game makes feel I am making progress and getting something in return which dead cells do amazingly well. Grind needs some better definition on the website probably. Same for collecting items (what about coins in Mario).

Description: "You work for a dystopian surveillance state and spy on your neighbors."

Saw one where powercreep is considered unhealthy ...if you played a competitive card game without power creep you'd quit because the first meta would be the only meta. Controlled power creep is healthy for game longevity.