Abstract
Dark patterns are malicious user interface design strategies that nudge users toward decisions that may be against their best interests. As countermeasures, related work has explored legislation, detecting and modifying web content with such patterns, and educating users about dark patterns. Serious games that teach detecting and classifying dark patterns, however, have received little attention so far. We present a web-based prototype of such a game targeting adults and the results of a comprehensive user study investigating its effectiveness and knowledge retention among participants. Our findings demonstrate that participants became better at detecting dark patterns, indicating that they became more aware of such design manipulations. While our analysis of participants’ classification abilities yields mixed results, our game log data confirms that their detection skills increased.
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Notes
- 1.
While the ACM Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council already considers the term to be problematic, the research community has not agreed on a different name yet. Therefore, we use the term to better connect with the existing literature.
- 2.
https://www.deceptive.design, last accessed July 17, 2024.
- 3.
https://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame, last accessed July 17, 2024.
- 4.
All accepted papers to the workshop are available at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3720/, last accessed July 17, 2024.
- 5.
When conducting the study, the updated version of the ontology presented at CHI’24 [10] was not available yet. Hence, our game still uses Nagging as a high-level pattern.
- 6.
https://react.dev/, last accessed July 21, 2024.
- 7.
https://nextjs.org/, last accessed July 21, 2024.
- 8.
https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/UQ9ZF, last accessed September 20, 2024.
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Fiedler, K., Schäfer, R., Borchers, J., Röpke, R. (2025). “Deception Detected!”—A Serious Game About Detecting Dark Patterns. In: Schönbohm, A., et al. Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15348. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-78269-5_18
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