It's dark but just a game: towards an ethical and healthy game design practice

It's dark but just a game: towards an ethical and healthy game design practice

It's dark but just a game: towards an ethical and healthy game design practice

By David Motta Miranda, Rebeca Maia Pontes, and Ticianne de Gois Ribeiro Darin

Abstract

"The digital games market has been one of the fastest-growing sectors in the world. In this competitive scenario, the game industry has been betting on developing standards quite unethical, which bears some degree of risk for players. Known as 'Dark Patterns', these patterns lead the user to a kind of negative experience, such as addiction and lack of will. In this paper, we discuss the conceptualization of an alternative to the Dark Patterns, which we called 'Radiant Game Design Patterns'. They seek, initially, to oppose the Dark Pattern, offering game designers an alternative to lead the players to a state of well-being, satisfying one or more basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness). We expect our research to contribute to the discussion on ethical practices in game design and motivate future work towards the development of policies to protect players."

Reference

Miranda, D. M., Pontes, R. M., & de Gois Ribeiro Darin, T. (2022, October). It's dark but just a game: towards an ethical and healthy game design practice. In Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3554364.3559144

Keywords

dark patterns, gamification, ethics