Interruptible-but-sticky loops
Auto-advancing or endless content resists natural stopping points.
- Code
- T5
- Category
- Temporal & attention
- Severity
- Medium
- Evidence
- EmergingAttention-capture mechanics; evidence base still developing.
- Purpose served
- Gameplay & businessServes play and the provider at once — the contested middle where context decides whether it's deceptive.
- Mechanism family
- Temporal
- Platforms
- Mobile / F2P · Live-service
- Player costs
- Time / attention
- Modes
- Manipulative
- Target Audience
- developers
- Also known as
- endless loops, auto-advance, infinite content
How it works
The next round, reward, or item loads automatically, removing the friction that would prompt a player to stop.
Why it can be harmful
By engineering away stopping cues it captures attention beyond the player’s intention, a temporal harm to digital wellbeing.
Examples in the wild
- Auto-queue into the next match
- Continuous reward feeds with no end screen
Illustrative genre examples to aid recognition — not allegations about specific titles.
References
- Monge Roffarello, A.; De Russis, L. (2022). Towards understanding the dark patterns that steal our attention. Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519829 · citing patterns
- 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
Community catalogue
The community site DarkPattern.games catalogues a related pattern, “Infinite Treadmill”, with 10+ example game mentions captured in our source crawl, including Redecor - Home Design Game, Hatch Dragons, Pondlife — Relaxing Fish Game, Match Collector.
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
Daily login / streaks
Escalating rewards and loss-aversion penalties punish missing a day.
Time fog / playtime opacity
Elapsed time and session length are concealed so players lose track of how long they have played.
Aesthetic / sensory manipulation
Celebratory audio-visual feedback reinforces spending and reward moments.
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.
Content treadmill
A relentless cadence of new seasons, stories, and limited updates keeps players returning so they never fall behind an ever-moving target.
Choice overload / option flooding
The interface floods the player with too many overlapping options, currencies, bundles, settings, or offers to compare meaningfully.