Dark Pattern Games

It’s always shocking to see one of my sites pop up on HN.

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 The game listings are years out of date.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.

Thanks for doing this! Years of grinding in Diablo 2 and reading about the psychology of intermittent rewards has made me able to see through any game with a grinding mechanic and not play it. So naming and explaining the dark pattern can help.

You mean the new diablo 2 right? I doubt the original Diablo 2 grinding was money-earning focused. I mean the old games (as they appeared to me) were focused on "do it, sell it, make people fall in love with it while we prepare the new game". The new games are more like "make people hooked on it, while we prepare another DLC" - I've never played the new Diablo 2 so I am asking. However I used to grind Diablo 1 (and still do it sometimes with devilutionx) and while I am grinding they do not earn anything, so I feel that it's only to my guilty pleasure...

I didn't know there was a new diablo 2? I mean the original one from two decades ago. I agree its not bad compared to modern games since the grinding just wasted your time rather than money (there was a secondary market for items that was worth some money but you didn't need to participate). I feel like it was one of the prototypical games of this kind of grind.