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Exploitative Patternsin Games

Coercion

Also: coercive design

Removing, withholding, or penalising acceptable alternatives.

Coercion shrinks the choice set rather than the player’s beliefs. Non-transparent choice architecture deployed without consent — and the withholding of resources needed to progress — can itself be coercive, which maps onto engineered grind, energy gating, and obstructed exits. The structural counter-move is genuine consent and opt-out by design.

See also

References

  1. Goltz, S. M. (2020). On power and freedom: Extending the definition of coercion. Perspectives on Behavior Science. doi.org/10.1007/s40614-019-00240-z · citing patterns
  2. Nguyen, J.; Ruberg, B. (2020). Challenges of designing consent: Consent mechanics in video games as models for interactive user agency. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376827 · citing patterns