Gonna leave this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkq7WZTzkLQ

You’d fit right in on our discord server!

Not only do most of our blind community members love making jokes like that, or often times much more concerning one, you’ll sit there very unsure on how to respond! The off topic channel is good fun all around!

You’re not wrong! Alas I am an admin, not the host. Also we wanted it to be very obvious that it’s a game jam about blind accessibility. Could he have picked a different name? Probably, but at this point we’re kinda committed!

If you end up working in the medical/insurance field in the USA, you don’t even need basic math! The numbers the programs output are just all made up!

I had the audacity the other day to ask in what order we apply deductibles. (YOU want a deductible applied to something covered at 10%, not 100%. The insurance wants it applied to something covered at a100%) I was told it just picks some at random and hopes for the best, so we use the word “best effort” when it comes to estimating what insurance will pay, since they’ll make that up anyway.

So yeah, just another throwing in that it super matters where you work. At my job we plug in what is industry standard for medical accounting, and say it’s just an estimate on everything else.

So would you say my description is accurate? Due to lack of documentation I’m mostly hoping to make sure I’m not completely misunderstanding

An article with actual examples instead of an endless string of jargon! Thank you!

Only 300? XD

That game is nothing but grind after like 20 hours.

That makes sense! The list of dark games probably is most helpful to be like “here’s a list of games made to be addictive, what features that we spoke about are present in the games on this list?”

100%, it’s why I’m more pulled towards RTS games these days.

Like to “catch up” and compete in say a card game… you have to spend money. They are not designed for you to catch up on time.

An rts though? I can catch up to most of the folks if I want to.

I mean, games without memory didn’t. Because once you turned off the game, it was all gone. This is more referring to if you have spent $200 on a game, and have like special event stuff in it, you’ll struggle to give it up.

But again, this is all part of bigger pictures. If it has this + grinding + time lock things + micro transactions it’s a problem. Games with just a couple of the features still have a high score of like 3+ and will be good games. Some of the things it asks about are only problems paired with other mechanics, while some categories are by themselves enough to be a problem.

Haha good call out, but yeah I play this way on purpose and jump from freemium game to freemium game. I’ve gotten pretty good at jumping as soon as it feels like money is the only way to make progress, but to be clear I used to not be good at it and have wasted a few hundred dollars on stupid p2w games. I really want to try to stick to these nicer games now that I have a cool website to help me find them.

Oof yeah I sometimes get drawn into idle games. It’s weird to be pulled into those, because just the constant feeling of accomplishing something short circuits my brain, combined with “Oh I should check in on my game once a day, or I’m not accomplishing things”. Usually once I stop playing for a few days I go “oh, why did I care?” But it feels real bad in the mean time.

Someone shared it with me the other day and I fell in love so had to share!

I’m sure it worked for some people, but for me my brain just picked up the super obvious patterns before picking up much spanish.

It really is, and it kills me when there are legit good games under there.

For a few months I played a cool monster catching game where it was like 5v5 style. The amount of cool combos you could do, the emergent game play with that many, each monster having own unique abilities and moves, etc. was so cool! PVP was really good because once you were proper placed, the games were close and often times came down to either a choice in game or realizing a mistake in team building “Why did I only bring one party member that can counter X?? As soon as they got focused down I got rolled by a team built around it!”

But the pve battles would get harder and harder, but the monsters you could catch weren’t getting stronger. So to continue in the main story you had to do events to get new ones, or… that lovely gacha shop. Eventually in the story the ability to catch new monsters was just removed. You could go back to the early parts to catch the old monsters, but there was maybe one in the main story that was any use once you were to where catching was disabled. Oh and evolving the monsters required you to do events which took… energy! Oh also chapter 1 of the story didn’t require energy to play, and had ability to catch monsters… but later on it did require energy.

So it opened with this really cool game where you could catch monsters, the fights were fair based on what you could catch, and overall was a fun time. Then slowly but surely every team member would need to be replaced by Gacha monsters (that could only be leveled up by gathering materials from events), and all the infinite play game modes would run out of content, leaving only the game modes that require energy.

UGH.

Yeah I did the Spanish for months and it was like “You’re so high level!” but I realized as soon as I stepped back that I mostly had just gotten good at playing their games because they were formatted where the answers were generally obvious, to where I felt like just memorizing key words then trying to read children’s books would have been more helpful.

So yeah they for sure use a dozen dark patterns. Making you feel like your account is valuable, making you feel bad for skipping, giving you bonuses for playing on their schedule, and making you feel better at the language than you are.

Oh no! That’s so annoying, maybe can help her quit by finding a better version of the game.

Like stupid match 3/candy crush trash has a million free clones.

They said they’ll expand to steam eventually, but sounds like they wanted to focus on mobile to start because it has biggest player base and most of the dark patterns are industry norms for mobile.

Very much so :( I’ve played some genuinely really fun games in the top list, but the instant you start playing you can feel what they are about.

Like I’ve been playing Warhammer 40k Tacticus. It’s really cool!.. I’ll probably play it for another week or two at most. Every action I take brings up a suggestion for me to buy something. Everything requires energy. There are about 50 different currency types. I get alerts that I’ve completed quests… that I can’t turn in because they are quests only available if you buy the premium Battle pass. Or the ULTIMATE battle pass. Like you unlock a new character and instantly it pops up like “Congrats on your new character, would you like to spend $20 to level them up so they’re not useless?”

It’s fun because I’m still unlocking more story content at a decent clip, but as soon as it’s a day between 20 second lore drops I’ll have to uninstall. Which sucks, because the game play is fun and interesting since it’s modeled after the mechanics of 40k with the customization of a video game.

So yeah, very sad.

I mean I think this site goes with “overly broad so you can pick what you want” approach.

Also the way I’m viewing it, is each individual item is a thread of a dark pattern. Weaved into normal game play it’s completely fine. It’s just when all the threads of a category come together is it a pattern designed to trigger addiction and over spending.

Like competition is listed under a category, but if that’s the only item in the category, it still has a stellar score and rightfully so and isn’t listed as a dark pattern.