Dark Patterns

EDIT: From March/April 2013. Not sure why it was never posted until now.

Hey everyone, last week I listened to a presentation on Dark Patterns, and quite frankly it resonated with a lot of negative opinions that I have of games, and the capitalistic society we live in. People's attention spans are naturally thin when it comes to using supposedly "intuitive" interfaces. For an extreme scenario, any random window that pops up, disguising its "pay now" button as an exit button, is considered a dark pattern. Such dark patterns are commonplace in social games - not all, but some. For a lesser dark pattern, look at the subtle pre-clicked "share rewards" option in Ruby Blast, depicted the example image below:

Ruby Blast © Zynga

Naturally players will instantly click the "OK" button to get rid of the window, but not knowing that an option was pre-clicked in the first place. It's literally like walking through a supermarket, and people throw other products into your bin to "help you", without you even realizing it. I recall when I worked at Wooga, I heard people mention how they disapprove of such dark patterns, like what was found in Ruby Blast. Although dark patterns can be helpful for an organization to reach its goal, their ethical nature is debatable. For example, with regards to organ donations in Europe, 12% of Germany's population gave consent to donate their organs upon the possibility of a sudden death, while Austria stands at 99.8%. How is this the case, when Austria and Germany are very similar culturally? It's because Austria made organ donation a default for all citizens, and that they have a choice to opt-out.

Do Defaults Save Lives? © Eric J. Johnson and Daniel Goldstein