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Uncovering deceptive patterns in video games
Common gaming elements, like guilds and battle passes, can manipulate players into spending more time and money in-game than intended.
The gaming industry has something to offer for almost everyone — you can build your own worlds, defeat monsters, solve challenging puzzles, battle your friends, or even… just ride a lawn mower for a few hours.
As the gaming industry continues to push the boundaries of creativity and technology, something else has emerged — deceptive video game patterns designed to ensnare and manipulate players into spending more time and money than intended.
Not all of the patterns that I’m going to go over are inherently bad by any means. Many of the things I go over below are common practice in the industry and don’t necessarily make a game manipulative or deceitful in any way.
This is simply a list of features that can lead to a negative user experience and bad habits in a player base.
Scheduled play
There are a few different methods that developers can employ to get you to hop on and play their game, even when you don’t really want to. Let’s go over a few: timed events and time-specific challenges.
Competitive leaderboards and ranked events are a prominent feature in a lot of modern games. During these, users will need to perform certain tasks or defeat other players in order to earn points. The more points a player has, the higher their rank.
These competitive events are usually open for a certain time window (a day, a weekend, a month, etc.). At the end of the time window, rewards are given to the players based on what ranking they have.
This means that even if someone had been playing for weeks straight, they need to keep on playing right up until that time window ends in order to ensure that they keep their spot on the leaderboard.
This can also hold true for non-competitive timed events. For example, the game Deep Rock Galactic has seasonal events where players can try to get points they can use to unlock certain items and cosmetics. Once the event is over, there is no way to get the items anymore…
