It was a global problem

one of my friends is a mobile game designer who's worked for big companies before.

One of the things she's told me she's proud of before, was a time when one of the (older) users of the game she was designing discussed her strategy of drinking extra water to wake up early enough to claim her dailies, and how proud she was that she made a game people liked that much.

Even looking her in the eye and asking "getting 60 year olds to disrupt their sleep schedule by pissing themselves makes you proud?" did not get her to hear herself talk.

I think a lot of people don't comprehend the evil of dark patterns. They handwave it all away by "it's personal decisions people make", even while they see the patterns of behaviour they create on the populace. They read falling into those patterns as focus and grindset, if anything. And for a good number of people, pay-to-win is a *positive* thing.

I think if I were tasked with coming up with a way to make a populace depressed, unhealthy, and insomniac, even without getting them to pay me, I'd be heading towards video games stuffed with dark patterns. And such a video game would also produce profit for me, as it happens.

I studied game design and nothing disillusioned me like this one time I did an internship at a mobile game company because it was so obvious that the team only cared about how to screw as many people out of their money as possible. The only feedback I ever got for my system designs was "okay but how can we make it more addictive?" or "how can we get them to spend?" and shit like that. Nobody there cared about the game being fun. In their minds, a "good" game was a profitable and addictive one. I haven't been able to see these games the same way ever since. It was one of the big reasons I quit being a game designer. Dark pattern design doesn't happen by accident. They know what they're doing. They want to fuck you over.