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It's dark but just a game: towards an ethical and healthy game design practice

Published: 19 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The digital games market has been one of the fastest-growing sectors in the world. In this competitive scenario, the game industry has been betting on developing standards quite unethical, which bears some degree of risk for players. Known as 'Dark Patterns', these patterns lead the user to a kind of negative experience, such as addiction and lack of will. In this paper, we discuss the conceptualization of an alternative to the Dark Patterns, which we called 'Radiant Game Design Patterns'. They seek, initially, to oppose the Dark Pattern, offering game designers an alternative to lead the players to a state of well-being, satisfying one or more basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness). We expect our research to contribute to the discussion on ethical practices in game design and motivate future work towards the development of policies to protect players.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)They Say That the World Was Built for Two But Deceptive Patterns Say Otherwise: A Critical Game for Player EmpowermentProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702076(1-15)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Challenges in Evaluating Players’ Interaction with Digital GamesGrand Research Challenges in Games and Entertainment Computing in Brazil - GranDGamesBR 2020–203010.1007/978-3-031-27639-2_1(1-24)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2023

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  1. It's dark but just a game: towards an ethical and healthy game design practice

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    IHC '22: Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    October 2022
    482 pages
    ISBN:9781450395069
    DOI:10.1145/3554364
    © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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    Published: 19 October 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. dark patterns
    2. game design
    3. self determination theory

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    View all
    • (2024)They Say That the World Was Built for Two But Deceptive Patterns Say Otherwise: A Critical Game for Player EmpowermentProceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702076(1-15)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
    • (2023)Challenges in Evaluating Players’ Interaction with Digital GamesGrand Research Challenges in Games and Entertainment Computing in Brazil - GranDGamesBR 2020–203010.1007/978-3-031-27639-2_1(1-24)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2023

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