Dark patterns in mobile games: how to spot them

Colin Gray and colleagues assembled a corpus of examples that UX practitioners themselves had flagged as dark patterns and analysed what ethical concerns they raised. They describe dark patterns as cases where user value is supplanted in favour of shareholder value, and sort the strategies into five families: nagging (repeatedly interrupting to push a choice), obstruction (making something harder than it needs to be), sneaking (hiding or delaying information), interface interference (manipulating the screen so one option stands out) and forced action (requiring something unrelated to get what you want).

These are not rare. Arunesh Mathur and colleagues built automated tools to scan about 53,000 product pages across some 11,000 shopping websites and found 1,818 instances of dark patterns, of 15 types, along with third-party companies selling them as ready-made features. If ordinary shops use them at that scale, it would be surprising if games, which have far more screens and far more moments of emotion, did not.

Sources1Source 1Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14.2Source 2Mathur, A., Acar, G., Friedman, M. J., Lucherini, E., Mayer, J., Chetty, M., & Narayanan, A. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1–32.

Elena Petrovskaya and David Zendle asked 1,104 players to describe a time they had met a game transaction that felt misleading, aggressive or unfair. From the answers they identified 35 separate techniques in eight domains: game dynamics designed to drive spending, products not meeting expectations, charging for basic quality of life, predatory advertising, in-game currencies, pay to win, the general presence of microtransactions, and other. Several of the practices players reported did not seem to align with UK consumer protection rules.

Notice how many of those domains have nothing to do with a shop screen. Charging for quality of life means making the free version deliberately tedious, so that paying feels like relief rather than a purchase. In-game currencies put a layer of conversion between you and the real price, and bundles of odd sizes make the arithmetic harder still. Some come from the game’s design as much as its shop. Daniel King and colleagues examined 13 patents for in-game purchasing systems and found designs that use behavioural tracking and price manipulation to personalise offers and encourage continued spending, often with limited protections such as refunds. The patents do not prove any particular game uses these systems, but they show what the industry has thought about building.

Sources3Source 3Petrovskaya, E., & Zendle, D. (2022). Predatory monetisation? A categorisation of unfair, misleading and aggressive monetisation techniques in digital games from the player perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 181(4), 1065–1081.4Source 4King, D. L., Delfabbro, P. H., Gainsbury, S. M., Dreier, M., Greer, N., & Billieux, J. (2019). Unfair play? Video games as exploitative monetized services: An examination of game patents from a consumer protection perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 101, 131–143.

Children and teenagers play many free-to-play games and may be more susceptible to manipulation. Dan Fitton and Janet Read combined practitioner insight, existing research and a study with 39 girls aged 12 and 13 to build a framework for what they call App Dark Design. The result is a set of problematic design aspects, many of them tied to advertising and in-app purchasing, that the authors say young people around the world meet in their apps every day.

For parents, that argues for talking about these patterns directly. A child who can name “that’s a fake close button” or “they want me to buy now because I just lost” is harder to steer. Settings help too: on Apple devices, Family Sharing’s Ask to Buy lets a parent approve a child’s purchases before they go through.

Sources5Source 5Fitton, D., & Read, J. C. (2019). Creating a framework to support the critical consideration of dark design aspects in free-to-play apps. Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 407–418.

Jacob Aagaard and colleagues ran interviews and workshops with mobile game players, designers, developers and business developers. Their account shows that dark patterns rarely come from a single villain; they emerge from commercial pressure, metrics and habit, and professionals themselves feel the tension. That is why a checklist helps. One rule of thumb covers most of it. If a game makes refusing hard, hides a cost or picks your worst moment to sell, it is working on you, not for you. Here are the specific patterns worth learning to spot, drawn from the studies above:

• Offers that appear right after you fail, when you are most frustrated.
• Currencies that make it hard to know what anything costs in real money.
• Timers and energy meters that stop play unless you pay or wait.
• Streaks and daily rewards that punish a missed day.
• Adverts that play without your asking, or close buttons that are tiny or delayed.
• Pop-ups that return every session until you give in.
• Features that used to be free being moved behind a purchase.

Sources6Source 6Aagaard, J., Knudsen, M. E. C., Bækgaard, P., & Doherty, K. (2022). A game of dark patterns: Designing healthy, highly-engaging mobile games. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, 1–8.3Source 3Petrovskaya, E., & Zendle, D. (2022). Predatory monetisation? A categorisation of unfair, misleading and aggressive monetisation techniques in digital games from the player perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 181(4), 1065–1081.1Source 1Gray, C. M., Kou, Y., Battles, B., Hoggatt, J., & Toombs, A. L. (2018). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–14.

The cover of this article shows OutBrick’s own shop, with special offers and the Brick Pass, because we think the same questions should apply to us. Here is what we can say plainly. Advertising is rewarded video only: nothing plays unless you press a button asking for something, there are no banners or interstitials, and each of the eight placements has its own daily cap, with 39 views a day at most. Declining costs nothing, and nothing has to be bought or watched to play the core boards. Lives exist: you hold five, one returns every thirty minutes, and a life goes only when an attempt ends without a clear. All of this is set out on the home page under what lives, undos and adverts cost.

You will have to judge the rest yourself, and you should. The related question of randomised rewards is covered in loot boxes, variable rewards and ethical monetisation, and streak pressure in the case for daily rituals that do not demand you. If a game, ours included, leaves you feeling handled rather than entertained, our guide on when to play and when to put the phone down is a good place to start.