Image credit: UX Planet: design ethics vs dark side ux
Dark Patterns:
Dark patterns, design patterns that exist to extract additional value from a player where they otherwise wouldn’t want to, are extremely prevalent in gaming, more so now than ever. This is largely due to the profitability of these kinds of designs, which, if used properly, could double or even triple your game’s sales. While it’s often tempting to incorporate these kinds of designs in our games, it’s important to draw moral and ethical boundaries in these systems so as not to take advantage of our audience.
The purpose of this exercise is to identify and design a dark pattern by reverse engineering similar systems, and then putting a positive spin on it. Making a change to the system that extracts value from players in a healthier way.
The Dark System:
The dark system I’ve chosen to create is a timed crafting mechanic. These are most often seen in mobile games and MMORPGs, creating a reason for players to either come back later or spend precious in-game currencies. Some examples of games that use this system:
Clash of Clans
Warframe
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Hay Day
Fallout Shelter
On its own, this system is not inherently dark or unhealthy. In-fact it pairs particularly well in RTS games or games with a heavy emphasis on time and resource management (though they often have much lower crafting times). What makes this particularly egregious is when games attempt to leverage your impatience by allowing you to pay to skip these timers.
The Mock “Dark System”:
In my made-up MMORPG: “Fables From a Far Far Land” (FFaFFL) players can craft lots of types of gear. Some are permanent/hard to destroy, while other items are consumables or used in crafting. In FFaFFL, players can be attacked at any moment by hordes of monsters or other players. It behooves the player to always be fully stocked and manage their resources carefully.
If a player is caught off guard they could lose precious resources, so due to this the player must always be crafting to keep surviving. If a player runs into a stroke of bad luck and they run out of items, it means they will need to start crafting. But due to long wait times, the player could be underprepared for large periods of time!
Luckily there’s an easy solution! If the player grabs their credit card and purchases a pack of Premium Currency, they’d easily be able to skip the crafting times and gain an edge on everyone else. This is commonly known as a pay-to-win and unfairly gives players who are willing to fork over their hard-earned paychecks an advantage.
Below is a list of some items and how long they would take to craft, as well as their associated price to skip the crafting process. Notice that the longer-timed, singleuse items are priced at a time to currency ratio of 1:2, whereas the cheaper consumable items are priced at a ratio of 1:4. So while those items might seem cheaper, they would likely contribute more to the overall game sales.
Item: | Time to craft: | Premium Currency to Fast Forward |
Chestplate | 24 hours | 40 |
Grieves | 24 hours | 40 |
Weapon Repair Kit (Consumable) | 6 hours | 18 |
Arrows (50) (consumable) | 1 hour | 4 |
Arcane Supercharger (consumable) | 12 hours | 24 |
Predatory behaviours:
Capitalizes on impatience
Puts pressure on players to pay
Exploits impulse buying
The Fix(es):
Now is the hard part. We need to take this existing system and make it healthier towards our audience. There are quite a few ways to go about this, but the main objective here is to extract value from the player in a healthier way.
Create a premium currency player market:
This is a tough one, but something Warframe executes elegantly. By creating a stimulating market where players can trade other items for Premium Currency, we encourage healthy trading between players who are willing to spend money on the game and players who would rather invest more time to earn premium currency.
Community Goals:
By participating in community goals/events the player could earn skip discounts or free skips. As a bonus, this reinforces your game’s community, which for an MMO is almost always a plus.
Special Quests:
Certain quests could provide skip discounts or free skips upon completion. This would encourage players to engage in a different game which would break up the monotony of a typical gameplay loop
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