PixelProf

@PixelProf@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are we all suffering from "future shock" in 2025?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting points, maybe a book I’ll have to give a read to. I’ve long thought that information overload on its own leads to a kind of subjective compression and that we’re seeing the consequences of this, plus late stage capitalism.

  Basically, if we only know about 100 people and 10 events and 20 things, we have much more capacity to form nuanced opinions, like a vector with lots of values. We don’t just have an opinion about the person, our opinion toward them is the sum of opinions about what we know about them and how those relate to us.

  Without enough information, you think in very concrete ways. You don’t build up much nuance, and you have clear, at least self-evident logic for your opinions that you can point at.

  Hit a sweet spot, and you can form nuanced opinions based on varied experiences.

  Hit too much, and now you have to compress the nuances to make room for more coarse comparisons. Now you aren’t looking at the many nuances and merits, you’re abstracting things. Necessary simulacrum.

  I’ve wondered if this is where we’ve seen so much social regression, or at least being public about it. There are so many things to care about, to know, to attend to, that the only way to approach it is to apply a compression, and everyone’s worldview is their compression algorithm. What features does a person classify on?

  I feel like we just aren’t equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.

  Do we need to see enough of the world to learn the nuances, then transition to tighter community focus? Do we need strong family ties early with lower outside influence, then melting pot? Are there times in our development when social bubbling is more ideal or more harmful than otherwise? I’m really curious.

  Anecdotally, I feel like I benefitted a lot from tight-knit, largely anonymous online communities growing up. Learning from groups of people from all over the world of different ages and beliefs, engaging in shared hobbies and learning about different ways of life, but eventually the neurons aren’t as flexible for breadth and depth becomes the drive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about Darkpatterns.games, a website that rates mobile games on their "Dark patterns"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, that’s definitely the way to see it, and as that I think it’s great. I think it might overload the term dark patterns a bit too much, and would have liked to have seen a different name used (as a game design academic), but I absolutely agree with and appreciate the approach otherwise.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about Darkpatterns.games, a website that rates mobile games on their "Dark patterns"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  All I’m commenting on, as a game design researched and professor, is that it’s an established term in a discipline which means something else to those actually within the discipline. These are still patterns, and they can absolutely be harmful patterns, but the terminology is being overloaded and there is some interesting nuance within it.

  Also, just to comment on the last quip there, and yes - to those I’ve spoken to, they are okay with those because they (being actively involved in the industry) know more than most people to educate and supervise and ensure that playing games with these patterns doesn’t turn into harmful behaviours. They also call them out for what they are - often, very bad design.

  I guess that’s really the line they drew - these patterns are more gray than the examples they presented. Most are good sometimes and terrible other times depending on how it is used. The term “dark patterns” as used professionally refers to always bad, always deceptive, always harmful. I do like having that line, even if it means the dark side is a much smaller subset of the greater space, then you can easily say, “If this uses a single dark pattern, it’s out. If it uses a lot of ‘grey’ patterns, be cautious. If it’s nothing but grey patterns, it’s purely abusive trash.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK about Darkpatterns.games, a website that rates mobile games on their "Dark patterns"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting. I was chatting with a lot of big name AAA designers and indie designers discussing dark patterns, and they’ve got a very different opinion on what constitutes a dark pattern. To them, largely, it needs to be more technical deception - like having a fake “X” button, or immediately popping up an ad over where a button was to trick you into clicking it, or bait-and-switching pricing before the user notices.

  I tried to raise these kinds of patterns as problematic, and it was a mixed bag. The general vibe from them was that they’d only call it a dark pattern if it deceives the player to get more money than they were prepared to spend (or similar for ads). If the player knows what they’re getting into, and they are presented with a choice to stop or continue, it’s on them.

  And I’ll admit, while I don’t go that far (and there were designers in both camps), I can at least understand how all game design is manipulation, in the same way that teaching and storytelling is manipulation, and drawing the lines can be very hard. Your job is to convince the player that they are having fun and want to keep playing. Resources in a game have no real value, only valued by the scarcity and utility of them, which the designer intentionally assigns to convince the player it’s more or less valuable.

  Curiously, the examples listed in the OP were exactly the patterns I see designers discuss, but don’t seem to be the patterns on the website (like “illusion of control”, artificial scarcity, which is like, game designs while thing).

  Either way, nice to have this as a resource because honestly a lot of these elements are what I’d put in the “bad / abusive design” category rather than purely dark patterns, but still great to highlight, but I can agree that we should probably be careful blanket calling these dark patterns; examples: It mentions illusion of control being separating you into shards of leader boards so that you can be in the top 500 of a shard rather than top 200,000 world ranking or whatever, or claw machines choosing whether you successfully grab an item rather than relying on skill. How does this compare to Uncharted not letting enemies successfully shoot you in the first few seconds of an action sequence to give you time to ground yourself, or Resident Evil spawning different loot and enemies based on how good/bad you play?

  I’d say, is it to extract money from you in the short term, but it’s more grey than a non-designer might read into from lists like these.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Terrible⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love that friend group A is a gradient.