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.

Edit to include, I guess why I have that hesitation with an example - I couldn’t link this in a class I’m teaching without loads of caveats because suddenly 80% of the curriculum gets seen as abusive when it’s really just experience design and explain the grey (which we do, so this is quite helpful for that particular purpose), and I would need to caveat that when they see the term out in the wild it will be used differently.

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.”

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.

C could just be a blank and you have to bit blit the arrow on yourself.

I don’t know why, but I still can’t open a core file without going I’m in. I don’t do QA, though, and so tinkering with final breath of my program frozen in time maintains some novelty.

My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.

Soap. 100%.

It depends what “From Scratch” means to you, as I don’t know your level of programming or interests, because you could be talking about making a game from beginning to end, and you could be talking about…

• Using a general purpose game engine (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and pre-made assets (e.g., Unity Asset Store, Epic Marketplace)?
• Using a general purpose game engine almost purely as a rendering+input engine with a nice user interface and building your own engine overtop of that
• Using frameworks for user input and rendering images, but not necessarily ones built for games, so they’re more general purpose and you’ll need to write a lot of game code to put it all together into your own engine before you even starting “Making the game”, but offer extreme control over every piece so that you can make something very strange and experimental, but lots of technical overhead before you get started
• Writing your own frameworks for handling user input and rendering images… that same as previous, but you’ll spend 99% of your time trying to rewrite the wheel and get it to go as fast as any off the shelf replacement

If you’re new to programming and just want to make a game, consider Godot with GDScript - here’s a guide created in Godot to learn GDScript interactively with no programming experience. GDScript is like Python, a very widely used language outside of games, but it is exclusive to Godot so you’ll need to transfer it. You can also use C# in Godot, but it’s a bigger learning curve, though it is very general and used in a lot of games.

I’m a big Godot fan, but Unity and Unreal Engine are solid. Unreal might have a steeper learning curve, Godot is a free and open-source project with a nice community but it doesn’t have the extensive userbase and forum repository of Unity and Unreal, Unity is so widely used there’s lots of info out there.

If you did want to go really from scratch, you can try using something like Pygame in Python or Processing in Java, which are entirely code-created (no user interface) but offer lots of helpful functionality for making games purely from code. Very flexible. That said, they’ll often run slow, they’ll take more time to get started on a project, and you’ll very quickly hit a ceiling for how much you can realistically do in them before anything practical.

If you want to go a bit lower, C++ with SDL2, learning OpenGL, and learning about how games are rendered and all that is great - it will be fast, and you’ll learn the skills to modify Godot, Unreal, etc. to do anything you’d like, but similar caveats to previous; there’s likely a low ceiling for the quality you’ll be able to put out and high overhead to get started on a project.

Not the OP, but in Canada at least, I think you would legally be expected to because common law is (as far as I’m aware) very nearly marriage and is entirely implied by time living together in a conjugal relationship. It might be provincial to determine the actual property laws, though.

I don’t have a firm opinion here, but I think the key difference in your case is that a conjugal relationship has some expectation of… Oh I don’t know, mutuality? A landlord tenant relationship is a lease agreement. If your roommate didn’t sign any kind of lease agreement, they might have a legal case to just not pay you and suffer no consequences (I don’t know), but they’re not in a conjugal relationship, so there’s also no implication of shared ownership.

Without signing lease agreement and being in a conjugal relationship, I think there is a pretty fair case that expecting shared ownership is a fair assumption.

That all said, it’s also really up to the individuals to figure that out early, and the deception in the meme suggests that the agency to have that discussion wasn’t available, and that’s really the part I find problematic here.

That and expropriation/eminent domain, etc. Even if you pay your taxes, if the government needs it, they have processes to take it.

I’m not saying it’s an inherently bad thing, but it’s another one of those important things to realize is already present if anyone wants to argue for/against certain government reforms.

“Where did you learn this skill?” “The olde rules prevent me from discussing this further.”

Foul Bachelorette Frog caused some real uncomfortable and eye opening ruckus for a lot of folks.

My bones are tingling.

In Canada, we play this game where we complain that all employees (aside from “contract workers” in gig work) make minimum wage and don’t live off of tips like our American counterparts, then someone complains that minimum wage still isn’t livable so tips are still important, then someone retorts that this only means everyone in minimum wage needs tipping or nobody needs tipping, which usually ends up in a lot of poop being slinged around until you get guilted into tipping before receiving any service.

I’m at least happy to see some decent, really cheap (<$100 CAD) smart phones popping up that are competent enough to work with, but it’s still such a single point of failure for so many aspects of life right now. Not even not having a phone, but a dead battery (and inability to swap it out with a backup like you used to), spontaneously breaking, losing cell service at an inopportune time to access your virtual tickets and things.

I don’t mind smart phones, but the single point of failure for so much is really not good.

Interesting - I’ve been thinking about trying to decentralize lately, and been having fun collecting my data from sites to analyze my own behaviours in data and build unique recommendation engines for myself and was recently thinking about trying to build a crawler and DIY search engine for myself. Any tips/pitfalls on getting started with that?