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).
"Upgrade Treadmill" is a very nice way to put it. I'm using this term from now on.
All your points are pretty much how'd I put it. If the core gameplay loop is all about leading me to the microtransactions window, it's an instant No for me.
This goes for almost all free games such as Apex, Fortnite, Destiny, etc... where skins are the primary source of revenue.
That's without mentioning "games" which I consider gambling like Genshin impact, Fifa ultimate team, and all kinds of shameless gacha out there
"It's free" is not an excuse for preying on people's psychological weaknesses.
I think "Red Queen Race" is the term from philosophy I'd use - the faster you run (from the Red Queen in Alice) the more you stay in the same place
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
I think the reason people are bringing this up in this thread is because even though it seems obvious to you, this website doesn't seem to make the distinction.
It just treats every instance of what it's decided are "dark patterns" as bad, regardless of whether they're being used maliciously or not.
I dont know if they added it very recently, but they have a definition right at the top:
> 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.
I don't think this solves all of it since it makes some weird assumptions. Does the developer really say "Hmmm, I want to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player" before adding lootboxes? I am pretty sure they don't, so this definition is not a very good one. OTOH, maybe just changing "to cause" to "that causes" would clean this up quite a bit by removing the assumption I disagree with, so maybe it's just in the way I read it.
Note: In my opinion, it's perfectly fine to say "this is tough to define but I can try to say 'yes' or 'no' to specific examples". It's also acceptable to me to admin (as you have to for some words) that a word doesn't have a real definition but is rather the product of confusion or convenience.
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.
Do you think it's been good for you to use Duolingo consistently? I think a lot of people are unhappy with the design patterns used in it because they feel it gives a greater sense of learning than it does actual learning.
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.
It's both actually. I play mcc on PC.
Controller players get that very obvious cross hair aim you mention, and keyboard/mouse players don't. That's why all the pro players use controller, a 150ms latency human can't compete with the aimbot.
But there's also subtle bullet magnetism, for both controller and kb/mouse players.
There are YouTube videos demonstrating this if you're interested.
I prefer keyboard/mouse which puts me at a disadvantage but I'm not a pro player so I don't mind.
Its probably both, but even without the auto tracking you describe, it's still quite possible for the space within a single pixel to be mostly misses. If someone positions their cursor in this single pixel, the game gives them the benefit of the doubt and counts it as a hit.
> Not really true. They do to be better among their peers, doesn't matter if there are PC players out there, irrelevant.
If you really wanted to be a player without autoaim / bullet magnetism / all the stuff Halo "aimbots" into your controller, you'd be playing Counterstrike.
But no, people play Halo. Because people like (subtle) aimbots making their headshots more consistent. Games like Halo (and other FPS games that came after Halo, such as Battlefront or Call of Duty) all take this auto-aim concept to varying degrees.
Its now a staple of modern FPS games.
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But yes, I recall the "mouse practice" people would do to get better aim on Counterstrike. Those headshots don't happen by themselves: there's a lot of "move the mouse" practice in Microsoft-paint (practice moving one pixel at a time or whatever), and learning the positions of your wrist.
Most people don't care about that level of dedication or practice. I think it suffices to say that typical FPS gamers today prefer the subtle aimbot to handle that level of muscle memory.
I'm being a bit hyperbolic. Obviously the "Counterstrike" players and community cares about this stuff. That's why they still play Counterstrike. But I also am ready to admit that their community is a small minority of players in the greater FPS genre.
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"360 No Scope" happens to take advantage of this bullet magnetism / autoaim as well. Moving the reticle quickly IIRC engages the auto-aim bot a bit more.
> 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.
The game's "auto-aim" system effectively fires two bullets for each frame. If your target is "between" the two bullets, then it counts as a hit.
Sweep-shooting is moving the crosshairs really fast, so that these two "bullets" are spaced as far apart as possible. So you've grown the auto-aim area.
> But no, people play Halo. Because people like (subtle) aimbots making their headshots more consistent.
Valorant, a counter-strike like game, is actually more popular than the current Halo game.
And let's not forget PUBG, originally a PC-only game, that was wildly popular. No aimbot in there either and not only was there no auto-aim, bullets don't even go where you click because they obeyed physics!
PUBG was destroyed by Fortnite, which reintroduced autoaim to the battle-royale genre.
Emperically speaking, whenever a new game comes out with a more "hardcore" mode with less auto-aim... a newer game comes out and just brings back auto-aim, and suddenly the community switches over to it.
People really like autoaim. Whether they consciously know it or not... kind of doesn't matter. People seem to have more fun and that's all a game designer wants.
Yea honestly it probably has more to do with the game in vogue. Auto aim tends to only happen on consoles anyways, otherwise the skill ceiling on aiming gets too high.
Plus there was call of duty, then overwatch, then pubg, then fortnight, then valorant. The PC ones tended to not have auto aim. Of course consoles tend to have auto aim but console gamers are also more casual and mass market… but the auto aim just makes up for the inaccuracy and speed of joystick control.
Also fortnite didn’t destroy pubg. People just got tired of the game. Most pubg players I know just stopped playing, and there were a lot of adults that played it. Fortnite had a totally different crowd (basically preteens and kids) because the game was free to play whereas pubg cost a whopping $30 and required a beefy computer.
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).
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?