Conceptualizing dark patterns with the ludeme theory: A new path for media education?

As “pattern[s] used intentionally by a game creator to cause negative experiences for players which are against their best interests and likely to happen without their consent” (Zagal et al. 2013), dark patterns are widely discussed in game design. This phenomenon raises concerns for gaming education (De Cock et al. 2018), because numerous dark patterns trick players into real money transactions or gambling.
As Zagal et al. remark, “dark patterns […] may be transparent to players, thus rendering them ordinary patterns or ineffective”. However, measuring this transparency/opacity remains difficult. A major obstacle is the definition of “game patterns” (Björk/Holopaien 2004), basing solely on action-oriented structures.
Yet when gauging a game structure before experimenting it for the first time, or when reacting quickly to numerous in-game stimuli, players strongly rely on visuality and sonority. In our opinion, the semiotic model of the “ludeme” (Hansen 2019) accounts for this behavior through providing the context needed to assess the severity of dark patterns. Departing from the gamers’ perspective, this “basic video game unit” consists of a graphic, an acoustic and a mechanical component. If the combination of an action pattern with graphic-acoustic signs coincides with the video game “grammar”, then the pattern becomes recognizable, disabling the deceptive potential. Contrariwise, coupling well-known ludemic components with a pattern contradicting their traditional signification proves misleading.
After applying the ludemic framework to dark patterns, we will exemplify our approach through analyzing the in-game purchase system in SimCity BuildIt, and discuss the media education implications of our findings.