Member-only story
How are video games tricking you?
Deceptive design patterns can range from tricking users to spend more time in game… to manipulating children into making in-app purchases.
Video games are one of the most popular forms of entertainment today with 3.24 billion players worldwide. People from all age ranges, backgrounds, and cultures enjoy gaming.
I’m a huge video game fan myself, but I can’t help but notice some deceptive design patterns that are fairly popular in the industry.
What do I mean by that?
A deceptive pattern in gaming can be defined as “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.”
This can be as simple as coercing users to spend more time playing the game to something as serious as manipulating children into making in-app purchases.
Not all of these deceptive patterns I’m going to go over have crazy horrible effects that make the game bad by any means, but they are something we should be aware of.
For example, daily rewards are a common feature in video games — particularly mobile games. With most daily rewards, a player needs to log on to a game every day to…
