Encourages anti-social behaviour
Designs that reward or normalise toxic, aggressive, or anti-social behaviour in order to drive engagement.
- Code
- S7
- Category
- Social & parasocial
- Severity
- Medium
- Evidence
- EmergingCommunity-catalogued (DarkPattern.games); social-harm evidence in games is still developing.
- Purpose served
- Serves businessPrimarily serves the provider's revenue, retention, or data — the most suspect.
- Mechanism family
- Social / parasocial
- Platforms
- Live-service · UGC platforms · PC / console
- Player costs
- Social / relationalEmotional / psychological
- Modes
- Exploitative
- Tags
- toxicityharassmentanti socialsocialserves businesstransparent but exploitativesocial pressureemotional pressureugc platformsvulnerability exploitation
- Also known as
- toxicity by design
How it works
Competitive incentives, unmoderated interaction, and reward structures that favour dominance can make harassment, griefing, or exclusion a route to status or progress.
Why it can be harmful
It externalises harm onto other players — especially vulnerable and younger ones — degrading wellbeing and community health, and can become a vector for broader social harms.
Examples in the wild
- Reward systems that incentivise griefing
- Unmoderated in-game voice and chat tied to competitive pressure
- In-game status earned by humiliating other players
Illustrative genre examples to aid recognition — not allegations about specific titles.
References
- Zhang, Z. (2025). More than just microtransactions: Predatory monetization in user-generated games. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI PLAY). doi.org/10.1145/3748626 · citing patterns
- van Rooij, A. J.; Birk, M. V.; van der Hof, S.; Oostenbach, K., et al. (2025). Game-check: Development, application and visualization of a classification system for behavioral design in games. Trimbos Institute, Eindhoven University of Technology & Leiden University (for the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations). osf.io/5qzda/ · citing patterns
Community catalogue
The community site DarkPattern.games catalogues a related pattern, “Encourages Anti-Social Behavior”, with 10+ example game mentions captured in our source crawl, including Pixel Starships™ Space MMORPG, Evony: The King's Return, Star Stable Online, Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
Community-contributed and votes-based; the listed game titles are page-level examples from that catalogue, not a full game-profile crawl or our assessment. View on DarkPattern.games →
Related patterns
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.
Social obligation / guilt
The design leverages teammates' dependence to compel continued play or spending.
Monetised social status
Visible status is sold to exploit peer comparison and the desire to belong.
Reciprocity
Giving the player or their friends a free gift to create a felt obligation to give back — by spending, playing, or recruiting.
Creator tipping & crowdfunded content
Routing real money to creators or crowdfunding unreleased content, where prosocial “support” framing lowers price scrutiny.
Impersonation / disguised system-as-friend
System messages are styled to look like communication from a peer.