Has a game ever presented you with a choice in a way that made you think “Hey, wait a minute, what are you trying to pull here?” Or have you ever played a free-to-play game that just seemed to be designed to extract money from you first and give you a good time second or even third? Ever blanched at the news that one of your favorite games was getting a mobile game “port” and by “port” I mean “redesign to be like every other mobile game out there?” If so, you may have encountered what are known as “dark patterns” in game design.

This is a term used broadly in the context of user interface design to describe things that make it inconvenient, hard, or even impossible for users to do what they want to do if the product owner doesn’t want them to do it. This could include tricking or misleading players in the worst cases. The typical example is if you want to cancel your subscription to a streaming service, the app or website will throw all kinds of obstacles in your way, like burying the page needed to cancel and making a “Nevermind, keep my subscription!” button bright and noticeable while making the “Cancel Membership” button small, grey, and hidden in the corner. Case in point, here’s what I see when I go to cancel my Hulu subscription right now:

The actual button to cancel is down at the bottom, doing its best to remain unnoticed.

Video games, too, have dark patterns related to their user interfaces and, perhaps more to the point, their design. Don’t think we haven’t noticed, video games. Back in 2013, Jose Zagal, Staffan Bjork, and Chris Lewis were among the first to think of applying this concept to video games and developing an ontology of dark game design patterns. They developed a decent working definition, but the website www.darkpatern.games, which offers a database of games rated according to their dark pattern design principles, later arrived at the following definition on its front page:

A gaming dark pattern is something that is deliberately added to a game to cause an unwanted negative experience for the player with a positive outcome for the game developer.

Most people can get their heads around what’s being talked about here. It’s things that benefit the game developer/publisher, but which players don’t want or at best tolerate…

Support me on Patreon to read the rest of this article and many others, plus get ad-free versions of the podcast and audio versions of articles.

One thing in the list of frequently asked questions that accompanied this announcement did catch my eye, though. It was about what happens when someone in your family misbehaves:

What happens if my brother gets banned for cheating while playing my game?

If a family member gets banned for cheating while playing your copy of a game, you (the game owner) will also be banned in that game.

Woof, that’s rough. If your idiot younger brother is playing your copy of Helldivers II and tries to load up some cheats so that he gets banned, that’s it. You’re both banned from the game. 

Valve, the owner of Steam, probably has various reasons for doing it, but it also reminds me of what I wrote in my book, Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People Who Play Them, about how cheating is a social disease that spreads among contacts. 

To take a closer look at social networking among cheaters, University of South Florida’s Jeremy Blackburn and his colleagues decided to scrape a ton of data on such villains and their friends from Valve’s Steam platform. The computer program Steam not only acts as a digital storefront, but also has a number of features that facilitate social interaction and buddying up. Chief among these is its Friends list, which lets you keep track of your pals, send them messages, and invite them to play games with you. Valve also runs what it calls the Valve Anti-Cheat System, or “VAC” for short. This is a tool that’s in use by over 60 games to curb cheating and hacking by detecting such antics and placing a big red “CHEATER” flag on the offending user’s Steam account. Those who run multiplayer game servers usually configure them to kick such cheaters square in the crotch and off the server, so getting such a VAC ban has serious consequences. This is especially true considering that all the games you buy with a given Steam account are indelibly attached to that account, so getting around the ban usually requires re-purchasing games under a new identity. On top of that, a big “Bans on record” is displayed in red text on the cheater’s public profile –a mark that Blackburn wittily calls “The Scarlet C” in reference to another scarlet letter made famous by novelist Nathaniel Hawthorn. Valve likes to keep the details of how VAC works a secret for obvious reasons, but the website VACBanned.com estimates that it has resulted in over two million such bans since its release in 2002.

Blackburn and his colleagues pulled Steam profile information for over 12 million members of the Steam community through its website, including 700,000 or so marked with the scarlet C of a VAC ban. After running the data through complex social graphing methods, the researchers found several results that support the idea that people tend to cheat in video games more often when their friends cheat. “Cheating appears to spread through a social mechanism,” the researchers write of their analysis of known cheaters’ Friends lists. “The presence and the number of cheater friends of a [non-cheating] player is correlated with the likelihood of her becoming a cheater in the future.” A full 15% of cheaters have mostly other cheaters on their friends list, and 70% of cheaters have friends lists that are at least 10% cheaters. This is far different than the population of non-cheaters, Blackburn and his co-authors note. While their analysis doesn’t preclude the contribution of other factors to this outcome (e.g., maybe cheaters find and befriend each other through their common interest in such knavery), it does show that having someone on your friend’s list who gets branded with the scarlet C increases the probability that you will join them.

So Valve’s sharing cheating bans across members of a family makes a certain amount of sense, especially if they want to prioritize getting rid of cheaters. For sure, another part of the reasoning for this rule is that it eases the administrative burden of making judgment calls and adjudicating the “It was my kid brother!” defense. But knowing that cheaters tend to flock together probably made deciding on this rule easier, as well.

And while these arguments make sense and are sometimes paired with anecdotal evidence, research in a controlled study are hard to come by for a variety of reasons. In this episode of the podcast, I’ll talk with a researcher who has set out to create and empirically test a program for using D&D to help people lower social anxiety and loneliness while improving their self-image.

Are you one of my suave and sophisticated Patreon supporters? If so, you get an ad-free version of this and all other podcasts. Check your secret Patreon feed!

Guest Expert Links:

• Dr. Billieux’s university page
• His Researchgate.net page
• Information about the study we discussed

Audio Credits:

• “Robot Motivation” by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0\
• “Babylon” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In-Game Currency

To get the best stuff, you have to buy the premium pass with the in-game currency “lattice.” Using these kinds of currencies often gets us to lose track of spending, but MR does us the favor of having an easy conversation rate of 1 lattice = 1 cent.

Link: The Perils of In-Game Currency

Waste Aversion

But the BP price is weird: 980 lattice. Since you can only buy lattice in set amounts (e.g, 1,000) and you earn a bit through the season, you’ll have leftover lattice. This can feel wasteful thanks to “waste aversion” and encourage us to spend it down.

Link: The Psychology of Waste Aversion

Envy

Of course, one reason we equip all those BP rewards is to maybe trigger a bit of envy in other players.

Link: Envy and Microtransactions

Cosmetics Instead of Pay-To-Win

But again to the game’s credit, all BP and shop purchases are cosmetic only, which avoids perceptions of “pay to win.” Which otherwise might backfire on them.

Link: When Pay-To-Win Backfires

Endowed Progress

You unlock stuff with a different currency (chrono tokens) earned by completing missions that you get underway just by playing. Which triggers the endowed progress effect –wanting to complete something because you feel you’ve started it.

Link: Endowed Progress in Game Quests

The game also does this with hero progression, offering rewards like titles and other UI customization options.

The Overjustification Effect

But once you complete the battle pass and stop getting rewards, you may become less motivated to play than you’d have been without any rewards thanks to the overjustification effect.

Link: The Overjustification Effect

Loss Aversion

Purchased battle passes never expire (you can go back and keep earning unlocks forever) but free ones do. This leverages loss aversion, our desire to avoid losses more than we want equivalent gains. Buy the paid BP to avoid losing your opportunity to unlock.

Podcast: Loss Aversion and Game Design

Price Anchoring

Store in Rivals uses many pricing tricks. One is using “price anchoring” by putting a price next to an item, crossing it out, and showing you a sale price. Bigger non-sale price anchors you on a higher value and makes the discount look better.

Link: Why We Buy Those Crazy Steam Bundles

Conceptual Consumption

Many super cool costumes and other items are only available for real-money purchase in the store. Why buy them and show them off, besides the aforementioned envy? A concept called “conspicuous consumption” suggests it’s to show off via expensive purchases.

Link: Conceptual Consumption

I could probably come up with more, but what about you? Anything I didn’t touch on that this or other games do that you want explored?

Let’s say you were grinding out some faction rep in an open world game. You’re doing a series of quests with multiple steps that yield “faction points” with a group called, I dunno, “Sons of Buttered Toast.” Each step in the quest chain rewards you with a specific number of faction points and you can bounce between the two quest chains. Of course, completing the last step in a questline closes it out.

Say you go to the quest vendor for the SoBT and they present this list of your current options:

Questline A step 3 of 6: Procure salted butter. Reward: 100 faction points

Questilne B step 3 of 6: Polish the butter knife. Reward: 130 faction points

Assume both tasks are equally difficult and would take the same amount of time. Which do you think you would choose next? Probably the second one, which gets you a bigger reward, right?

Now imagine that the options were like this:

Questline A step 6 of 6: Procure salted butter. Reward: 100 faction points

Questilne B step 3 of 6: Polish the butter knife. Reward: 130 faction points

The only difference is that the step in Questline A is now the final step in the chain. I bolded that bit for emphasis. You don’t get any bonus for completing a whole questline, just the 100 points advertised for the last step. NOW which questline would you pursue next?

Support me on Patreon to read the rest of this article and many others, plus get ad-free versions of the podcast and audio versions of articles.

Mastering Dungeons is one of my favorite D&D podcasts so it was great fun to be on the episode with Shawn and Teos. Plus I got to talk about psychology stuff!

• Subscribe to the audio version of Mastering Dungeons
• Visit and subscribe to the Mastering Dungeons YouTube channel

Not to start a discussion with “back in my day…” but back in my day Dungeons & Dragons players took a bit more of a risk to their social status when playing the game. D&D players were often seen as funky smelling nerds and weirdos who lacked the social graces to participate in more mainstream activities. Like playing sports or watching sports or talking about sports. Stereotypical D&D players were described as shy basement dwellers who struggled to speak up around other people and would always feel out of place in group activities that weren’t mediated by dice rolls. It’s an image that permeated popular culture for some time. It didn’t matter whether or not the stereotype was accurate; it was what was assumed.

Want to know lots more about the psychology of Dungeons & Dragons? I have a whole book about it available in print, ebook, or audiobook! See the table of contents and listen to excerpts from the audiobook version here: The Psychology of Dungeons & Dragons: How How to Be a Better, More Engaged, and Happier Player or Game Master wherever you buy books. Then buy it wherever you buy your books!

Over the years, that concept changed little by little until today D&D is seen as much more mainstream and celebrated. The game itself has evolved over its editions to emphasize more social and improvisational elements such as role-play, character building, and storytelling. Sure, many people still play it more like a war game than an improv show, but the game and its play base have changed enough to call into question the question of whether its players, taken as a group, have no charisma. (If I were a hip teen, I might have said “have no riz” but I’m not so I didn’t. You can’t prove otherwise.)

I recently came across an article in Frontiers in Psychology that attempts to empirically test the idea that the opposite of this old stereotypes are true. (Lorenz, Hagitte, and Brandt, 2022). What if D&D players are actually more charismatic and more open to a broad range of experiences than the general public? To do this, the researchers gathered a sample of over 800 people –half were D&D players and the other half were not– and measured several of their personality traits.

They were particularly interested in three traits from the “Big 5” model of personality:

• Extraversion / Introversion – How outgoing you are and how much you get energized by interacting with other people
• Openness to Experience – How open you are to experiencing new things and how inventive you tend to be
• Neuroticism (often called Emotional Stability) – How well you emotionally deal with stress and how mentally resilient you are

In addition to administering a personality assessment to subjects, the researchers also asked the half that were gamers about how charismatic their D&D characters are, on average, and what type of characters they liked to play.

The results were interesting and argued against the idea that today’s average D&D player is a socially awkward dork. Specifically, the researchers found that relative to non-players, D&D players were both more extraverted and more open to new experiences. On average, they enjoyed social interactions and novelty more than their non-gamer peers. Additionally, D&D players were no more or less neurotic than non-players, further evidence that they did not suffer a deficit of emotional stability.

Another interesting finding was that based on what D&D players reported about their typical player character, there was a significant correlation between a player’s score on the extraversion scale of the personality test and how many points they typically put into their characters’ charisma scores. Charisma, you’ll remember, is a game statistic meant to represent how effectively the character can interact with other people.

This was an interesting study to me because it puts the lie to old misconceptions about D&D players as being shut-ins who would rather slay an imaginary dragon than go to a party. Some thoughtful readers are likely to point out that “correlation doesn’t mean causation,” and while that’s generally a great mantra, it actually misses the point in this case. I don’t think the authors are trying to make the argument that playing D&D necessarily makes you more extraverted.The point IS that people are likely self-selecting into D&D as a hobby because they are more outgoing, creative, and open to new experiences.  It’s just that the game has evolved into an experience that can encourage and reward those kinds of tendencies.

REFERENCES

Lorenz, T., Hagitte, L., & Brandt, M. (2022). Do not make me roll initiative: Assessing the Big Five characteristics of Dungeons & Dragons players in comparison to non-players. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1010800. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1010800

Are you one of my suave and sophisticated Patreon supporters? If so, you get an ad-free version of this and all other podcasts. Check your secret Patreon feed!

Guest Expert Links:

• LinkedIN
• Google Scholar

Audio Credits:

• “Robot Motivation” by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Most players probably prefer to make their own attack rolls, saving throws, skill checks, and other throws of the dice in tabletop role-playing games. Why, though? We know rationally that the results of a die rolled by the DM in the open is just as random as one rolled by us. There are even times where it makes sense for the DM to roll for the player behind a screen, as in the case of rolling to detect traps. Rolling a 2 and hearing “You find no traps” has very different implications than rolling a 19 and hearing the same. In the former case, a player might suspect that they just missed the traps because of a bad roll, but in the latter she can be confident of the situation because of the high roll. So it makes sense for the DM to roll privately and just inform the player of the results. Yet players have balked at this suggestion at every table I’ve been at where it was proposed. We want to roll our own dice.

This has a lot to do with what psychologists call sense of agency, which relates to our desire to feel like we can exert control over the world, even in the case of random events like slot machine spins or die rolls. Or how we think we can shape events driven by long chains of causality too complex to understand. We tend to overestimate our ability to influence those events and will make up the wildest reasons why and resist anything that makes those reasons less convincing. In my book, The Psychology of Dungeons & Dragons, I have a whole chapter on the psychology of luck as it pertains to die rolls. Part of that deals with this desire for a sense of agency:

If you think like this, you’re not alone. In one study, researchers increased people’s illusion of control by having them remember a time when they were in charge of a situation or by telling them that they were going to be role-playing a manager dealing with a subordinate.(Fast, et al., 2009). Others were told to remember a time when they had someone lording control over them or told they were going to be role-playing a subordinate dealing with their manager. Everyone was then told that they would win a cash prize if they predicted the result of a 1d6 roll. Furthermore, they were given the option of either rolling the die themselves or letting the experimenter roll it. The researchers found that those primed or instructed to think of themselves as in control tended to want to roll the dice themselves so that they could exert that control and win their reward. Whenever we grab the dice for ourselves, say a little mantra meant for luck, or pick the “good” die to roll something important, we’re wrapping ourselves up in the illusion of control.

–From The Psychology of Dungeons & Dragons

This desire for agency can also compel us to do and believe some pretty irrational things. We may have “good” dice that we save for all-important death saves. We may put our dice in a little box with “DICE JAIL” scribbled across it if they roll too many critical failures. Blowing on dice for luck is an old tradition, and some research even shows that people tend to throw dice harder when they need a high number and more softly when they need a low number (Henslin, 1967).

But none of those things affect the dice. You know they don’t. I know they don’t. But I still put my dice in jail for failing me. Because what we do here is part of a psychological immune system that lets us maintain hope, positivity, and a positive outlook. Because the universe is complex and uncaring. It doesn’t care if we miss that dex saving throw and we have to take 28 fire damage. So it feels good to think that we somehow influenced the outcome when it turns out good and we tend to not remember the times we failed (c.f., the confirmation bias).

And, perhaps most importantly, feeling a sense of agency when we grab the dice for ourselves can lead us to feel more engagement with the game instead of feeling like we are passively accepting outcomes doled out by someone else. Which is not a bad reason to do it.

REFERENCES

Fast, N. J., Gruenfeld, D. H., Sivanathan, N., & Galinsky, A. D. (2009). Illusory control. Psychological Science, 20(4), 502–508. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02311.x

Henslin, J. (1967). Craps and magic. American Journal of Sociology, 73(3), 316–330. https://doi.org/10.1086/224479

Are you one of my suave and sophisticated Patreon supporters? If so, you get an ad-free version of this and all other podcasts. Check your secret Patreon feed!

Guest Expert Links:

• Google Scholar
• Staff page at University of Portsmouth
• Twitter
• Whatwetakewith.us

Audio Credits:

• “Robot Motivation” by The Polish Ambassador, licensed under Creative Commons
• “Chill Wave” by Kevin Macleod