Emotional / psychological
Anxiety, regret, frustration, and addiction-adjacent harm produced or amplified by the design.
Patterns that target this (19)
Loot boxes / gacha
Paid, randomised reward containers whose contents — and often whose odds — are unknown before purchase.
Personalised spend-optimisation
Silently using a player's behavioural data to tune offers, prices, odds, difficulty, or matchmaking to maximise that individual's spending.
Can't pause or save
Designs that prevent safely stopping — no pause or save, or progress lost (or attacked) when you leave — so players can't quit on their own terms.
Parasocial-character pressure
Beloved characters urge purchases or continued play, exploiting parasocial attachment.
Variable-ratio reward / near-miss
Slot-machine-like reinforcement and 'almost won' framing drive repeated attempts.
Aesthetic / sensory manipulation
Celebratory audio-visual feedback reinforces spending and reward moments.
Bait-and-switch / product not as expected
The advertised content or experience differs materially from what is actually delivered.
Collection & completionism pressure
A visible, incomplete collection — roster, index, grid — compels players to keep playing or paying to complete the set.
Daily login / streaks
Escalating rewards and loss-aversion penalties punish missing a day.
Encourages anti-social behaviour
Designs that reward or normalise toxic, aggressive, or anti-social behaviour in order to drive engagement.
Endowed progress
Giving players an artificial head-start or visible partial progress so the urge to complete it pulls them onward.
Feedforward ambiguity / unclear consequences
The interface fails to make clear what a button, prompt, or action will actually do before the player commits.
Impersonation / disguised system-as-friend
System messages are styled to look like communication from a peer.
Involuntary social ranking / identity labels
The system assigns relationship labels, closeness ranks, or social-cluster positions to people from behavioural data they did not choose to make socially meaningful.
Licensed-IP collaboration FOMO
Time-limited cosmetics tied to a popular external brand or franchise drive purchases through fandom and scarcity rather than gameplay value.
Optimism & frequency bias
Framing that inflates perceived chances of winning — emphasising wins and near-misses, downplaying losses — to exploit optimism and frequency illusions.
Romantic / intimate mechanics
A romantic or affectionate bond — with a character or another player — is engineered, then its progression is routed through spending or compulsion loops.
Social obligation / guilt
The design leverages teammates' dependence to compel continued play or spending.
Confirmshaming
Opt-out wording is laden with guilt to discourage the protective choice.