This page aims to educate gamers about harmful design practices in mobile games, promoting awareness and critical thinking as part of media education.
Helping You Find Healthy Mobile Games
A game review website devoted to helping you find games that don't use psychological tricks to manipulate you into becoming an addicted gamer. Learn about the dark patterns that game designers use to waste your precious time and money.
Definition: 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.
Temporal Dark Patterns
A temporal dark pattern is designed to get you to spend more time playing the game than you would have otherwise.
More Temporal Dark Patterns...
Social Dark Patterns
Social dark patterns use your relationships with friends and family to benefit the game.
Monetary Dark Patterns
A monetary dark pattern is one which tricks you into spending more money than you want to spend on a game.
More Monetary Dark Patterns...
Psychological Dark Patterns
These dark patterns are psychological tricks that are used to get you to make bad decisions.
More Psychological Dark Patterns...
DarkPattern.Games is a brand new website. We are starting with iOS and Android games because this is where most dark patterns appear, but we will be adding other platforms soon.
Because we are new, we have a lot of games that don't have any reviews yet. This will improve over time and we are working hard to get games reviewed. Please help us by finding a familiar game and submitting a review.