Time / attention
Engineered overuse and degraded digital wellbeing; time captured beyond what the player intended to give.
Patterns that target this (17)
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.
Obstructed exit / cancellation (sludge)
Asymmetric friction makes quitting, refunding, or disabling far harder than starting.
Offer-wall / cross-promotion redirection
Dangling an in-game reward for going to another app or game and spending money or time there, confirmed by a third-party tracker.
Predatory / forced advertising
Unskippable or rewarded ads — sometimes disguised as content — are bundled into progression.
Aggressive nagging / interruptive upsell
Frequent pop-ups repeatedly steer the player to the store.
Choice overload / option flooding
The interface floods the player with too many overlapping options, currencies, bundles, settings, or offers to compare meaningfully.
Collection & completionism pressure
A visible, incomplete collection — roster, index, grid — compels players to keep playing or paying to complete the set.
Content treadmill
A relentless cadence of new seasons, stories, and limited updates keeps players returning so they never fall behind an ever-moving target.
Daily login / streaks
Escalating rewards and loss-aversion penalties punish missing a day.
Endowed progress
Giving players an artificial head-start or visible partial progress so the urge to complete it pulls them onward.
Energy / wait timers (appointment mechanics)
Play is gated by real-time cooldowns that can be bypassed for money.
Interruptible-but-sticky loops
Auto-advancing or endless content resists natural stopping points.
Pay-to-skip / engineered grind
Progression is deliberately slowed so the game can sell time-savers that remove the friction it introduced.
Subscription / battle-pass traps
Easy entry and obstructed cancellation, with 'earned' value that expires if you stop paying or playing.
Sunk-cost / entrapment
Designs make prior investment justify further spending or time.
Time fog / playtime opacity
Elapsed time and session length are concealed so players lose track of how long they have played.
Grinding / engineered repetition
Repetitive effort is inflated to extend play or to drive pay-to-skip purchases.