About & methodology

Exploitative Patterns in Games is a research primer: a clear, source-anchored orientation to the design patterns that extract money, time, data, and attention from players. It is meant to sit alongside the dense general dark-patterns literature and point newcomers — students, journalists, developers, parents, and policymakers — to the evidence, rather than to replace the scholarship.

What makes this different

• Exploitation over deception. While "deceptive design" is the common legal and regulatory term for dark patterns, deception strictly requires inducing or exploiting a false belief about a material fact. Many of the most severe game harms (such as loot boxes, currency obfuscation, or whale-targeting) operate transparently. They do not deceive, but they take unfair advantage of a vulnerability (such as cognitive biases, age, or impulsivity). This primer uses "Exploitative Patterns" because exploitation captures these harms even when there is no false belief.
• Deception ≠ harm. Games legitimately deceive for entertainment — bluffs, fog of war, narrative plot twists. Every entry is classified by the conditions under which a pattern becomes harmful, not merely by its deceptive label.
• Evidence on the surface. Each pattern shows an evidence level and resolvable sources — more transparent than a votes-only directory.
• Taxonomy crosswalk. The catalogue maps game-facing patterns against Gray, Santos, Bielova & Mildner's 2024 ontology and uses Chang, Seaborn & Adams' 2024 scoping review to keep theoretical labels explicit.

Sourcing rule: DOI-first, source-resolvable

The bibliography prioritises peer-reviewed and formally published sources with resolvable DOIs. Selected institutional reports and official web sources are included when they document a current platform mechanism, practitioner taxonomy, or primary source that cannot be represented by a DOI. Where a foundational idea sits outside that bibliography, it is credited here:

• Zagal, Björk & Lewis (2013), “Dark Patterns in the Design of Games” — the conference paper that founded this subfield.
• Harry Brignull (2010), who coined “dark patterns,” and the practitioner catalogue at deceptive.design (formerly darkpatterns.org).
• Björk & Holopainen, whose game-design-patterns program underpins the “pattern” framing.
• Gray, Santos, Bielova & Mildner (2024) andChang, Seaborn & Adams (2024), which provide the current ontology and theory-review anchors for this site's general deceptive-design framing.

AI-assistance disclosure

Literature discovery used AI-assisted academic search tools, and the catalogue's structure and prose were drafted with AI support during a 2026 Dagstuhl Seminar working session. Every DOI or canonical URL was checked against its source, and the synthesis, severity judgements, and taxonomy design are the editors'. Treat severity and evidence labels as considered editorial calls grounded in the cited literature as of 2026 — not settled fact.

How severity and evidence are graded

Severity (Low → Severe) reflects the strength of the harm case under the rubric combined with the empirical record. Evidence level is graded Strong (replicated or meta-analytic, though often correlational), Moderate (consistent qualitative or observational), or Emerging (newer areas where the base is still forming). Much games-specific harm evidence is correlational; causal and behavioural work remains the priority gap.

Contributing

The library is built to be extended by several hands:

• Patterns live as one MDX file each in src/content/patterns/. Add or edit an entry, fill the frontmatter (title, code, category, family, severity, platforms, evidence level, harm vectors, modes, tags, examples, references), and open a pull request.
• References are the source of truth in src/content/references.csl.json (CSL JSON). Add a source with a DOI or canonical URL and reference its id from any pattern or glossary entry. A shared Zotero library can export straight into this format, so a group can curate references together and sync to the repo.
• Glossary, families, costs, modes, and the rubric are editable the same way. Related-pattern links are generated automatically from shared tags, family, and player costs.

Acknowledgements

This primer grew out of a working-group discussion at the 2026 Dagstuhl Seminar on Harms. With thanks to the group members (alphabetical by surname): Scott Bateman, Alena Denisova, Sara Grimes, Celia Hodent, Lennart Nacke, Vero Vanden Abeele, Jennifer R. Whitson, and Bieke Zaman.

Licensing

Written content is licensed CC BY 4.0; the site code is MIT. Screenshots, where added, remain the property of their respective rights-holders and are included only where licensing or fair use permits — the library ships with none by default and never scrapes copyrighted game UI.

Disclaimer

This site is an educational resource, not legal advice. Naming a pattern is not an accusation against any specific title; the examples are illustrative of genres and mechanics.