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Exploitative Patternsin Games

Dark patterns

Also: deceptive patterns

Interface and system choices that benefit the provider by steering, deceiving, or coercing users against their own interest.

Coined by UX practitioner Harry Brignull in 2010 (a foundational, non-DOI source), ‘dark patterns’ name design choices whose predictable effect transfers value from the user to the provider. The research community and regulators increasingly prefer ‘deceptive design’ / ‘deceptive patterns’ to avoid the connotations of ‘dark’ and to align with legal language. There is no single agreed definition; the field is better understood as a family of normative concerns drawn from psychology, economics, ethics, and law.

See also

References

  1. Gray, C. M.; Kou, Y.; Battles, B.; Hoggatt, J., et al. (2018). The dark (patterns) side of UX design. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174108 · citing patterns
  2. Mathur, A.; Acar, G.; Friedman, M. J.; Lucherini, E., et al. (2019). Dark patterns at scale: Findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW). doi.org/10.1145/3359183 · citing patterns
  3. Narayanan, A.; Mathur, A.; Chetty, M.; Kshirsagar, M. (2020). Dark patterns: Past, present, and future. Queue. doi.org/10.1145/3400899.3400901 · citing patterns
  4. Gray, C. M.; Santos, C. T.; Bielova, N.; Mildner, T. (2024). An ontology of dark patterns knowledge: Foundations, definitions, and a pathway for shared knowledge-building. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642436 · citing patterns
  5. Chang, W. J.; Seaborn, K.; Adams, A. A. (2024). Theorizing deception: A scoping review of theory in research on dark patterns and deceptive design. Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '24). doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3650997 · citing patterns