The word “gaming” is a linguistic oddity. It can mean curling up on the couch with your favourite comfort game, or it can refer to gambling – one word for two distinct experiences. While videogames entertain us, or inflame our imaginations, gambling is mostly take and very little give. But what happens when the design features used to keep us seated in front of slot machines are combined with the enriching experience of playing videogames?
“Dark pattern” design features aim to manipulate us to engage in addictive behaviour – often to the detriment of the user and to the benefit of the software developer or publisher. Even if you’ve never heard of dark pattern design before, chances are you’ve fallen victim to it countless times. Dark patterns are embedded in much of the software we use every day. They’re the blueprint for the infinite scroll feature which has become the design standard for social media apps. Who among us hasn’t felt the horror of realising how much time we’ve spent scrolling through Instagram reels? This is what dark patterns in design aim to do: extract something from the user, whether that be time, money or enjoyment. And though we might dread a less-than-flattering weekly screentime report, many of us continue to sink our time into these apps. Dark patterns can appear anywhere from social media to videogames, to your inbox: a brand can make unsubscribing from their emails difficult enough that you might eventually give up and stay subscribed.
Rotted Luck is the “anti-slot machine”
An antidote to dark pattern design is videogames that prioritise fun.
With Rotted Luck, Vidya Rajan and Ian MacLarty have created a game that does just that. This special commission for Melbourne International Games Week draws inspiration from Vegas casinos and flips the tricks of the pokies.
A fungus has taken over a slot machine. The cartoonish fruits that once glistened in its slots now sit rotten. You, the player, are the mycelium, weaving your roots into the machine. Rotted Luck has a simple setup with unpredictable outcomes. What Rajan and MacLarty describe as an “anti-slot machine” is displayed on a large screen that’s equipped with a webcam and space to move around in front of it. Rajan describes the game as silly, dark, organic and spectral. “At one point, millions of years ago all of Vegas was covered in networks of giant fungi. How would the collectivist brain of this fungus understand something like a slot machine if it took over the world again and got inside? These were some of the thoughts that helped inspire the mechanics of Rotted Luck. It’s fun but hopefully beautiful too,” she says.
“We started talking of how the patterns of [slot] machines are the opposite of what we love in games and that it could be cool to make something without those addictive win conditions that still felt rewarding,” MacLarty says.
Time zappers
Temporal patterns are dark patterns that compel us to spend more time playing a game than we ordinarily would. This includes features like unskippable ads, daily rewards, incentivising play at certain times of day and “grinding”, where players complete tedious tasks to receive a reward. Conversely, Rotted Luck invites play by reacting whenever it detects movement. Rather than a traditional narrative, the game has two phases. During the first phase, players lock in slots featuring fruits, coins and bells. In the second phase, the player becomes the fungus inside the slot machine, influencing its output. Aside from these phases, the game starts and ends whenever the player wants it to. “I think it’s a very friendly way to interact with the game,” MacLarty says. “A controller can be quite intimidating, and it requires you to walk up to it and actually be confident enough to pick it up and start playing with it.”
Social and psychological dark patterns
Social dark patterns reward players for inviting friends onto a platform, sending promotional spam to a player’s social media accounts or provoking a sense of obligation to an in-game team. Rotted Luck can be enjoyed single-player or co-op. Players can stand in front of each “slot”, experimenting with how their movements influence what’s happening on screen.
The key is that players aren’t meant to know exactly how they’re impacting the outcome of the game. “It’s not necessarily a direct mapping from your movements to what the game’s doing, but it’s obvious that it’s responding to your movements in some way,” MacLarty says. This is one way that Rotted Luck subverts psychological dark patterns. This category spans a wide range of design features, from appealing to the “sunk cost fallacy” where the user feels that because they’ve invested so much time and effort into a game, it would be a waste to stop playing, to games that create an “illusion of control” by making a player feel more skilled in a game than they truly are. For example, a developer might covertly place an easier level after a challenging level so that the player will feel like their skill level has improved, igniting the brain’s reward system and incentivising play.
“The other way [Rotted Luck] is like an anti-slot machine is that it’s very hard to actually match three fruits, but even if you do, there’s nothing really different that happens,” MacLarty says. “It doesn’t matter what you match, something interesting will happen. So, you get a reward of sorts either way. It’s more about just going through that experience and experiencing the visuals instead of getting that dopamine of actually winning something or not.”
Hidden costs
Monetary dark patterns – rife in mobile games – prompt users to spend more money on a game than they intend to. Think “pay to skip” ads, limited time offers which create artificial scarcity, and in-game tokens, gems or coins; the conversion rates of in-game currencies often obscure how much players are actually spending.
Despite Rotted Luck’s slot-machine-influenced façade, this game’s only currency is movement. “The game is accessible to different ages and people,” Rajan says. “It’s really about how you want to move – just a hand, your whole body – it’s whatever comes to you.” Without a distinct reward or goal to work towards, Rotted Luck invites players into a moment of experimentation and play. This absence of the clear cause and effect we’ve come to expect from videogames is MacLarty’s favourite aspect of the game. “I think the ambiguity of the way the game interprets movement causes people to experiment a bit, and go, ‘What are my movements doing? What does this do? What does that do?’” By poking fun at the hidden costs of dark pattern game design, Rotted Luck swaps addiction and compulsion for imagination and play.
– Sabrina Caires is an Assistant Editor (RMIT internship) at ACMI. She also writes about arts and culture for Broadsheet.