User Inyterface Game: Dark Patterns in Action
This game was purposely frustrating – I literally felt my life wasting away before my eyes as I clicked endless pictures trying to “verify I wasn’t a human being.” The seconds bled away when help boxes were slow to disappear and misleading buttons did unexpected things. When I clicked “help,” instead of getting assistance, it just told me “Please wait, there are 409 people in line” – making me realize how many futile, unnecessary tasks the game forces on users.
The cookie acceptance was particularly revealing. When presented with “Not really, no” as an option, I felt the nonchalance in that phrasing was irksome. I actually care about cookies and website access to my browsing history, but the design made me feel I was selling a piece of myself just to progress quickly – a need for speed created by the interface itself.
Form fields were nightmarish. Having to delete placeholders before typing was annoying enough, but then the placeholder text still appeared as I typed over it! This second-guessing of my sanity showed how these dark patterns deliberately disorient users. Email entry forced an unnecessary horizontal movement to a drop-down menu instead of just letting me type the domain.
The terms and conditions used clever double negatives: having to untick “I do not accept” meant I had to not-not-accept, which actually meant accepting. This manipulation of syntax shows how interfaces exploit language confusion.
I did not even notice all these password stipulations the first time I played the game:
- “Your password is not unsafe”
- “Your password requires at least 10 characters”
- “Your password should have at least 1 Capital letter”
- “Your password must have at least 1 Numeral”
- “Your password needs at least 1 letter of your email”
- “Your password can have at least 1 cyrillic character”
I did a hack where I asked for a random password generator which allowed me to blow through this part (I didn’t have to look up what a cyrillic character was). I did this intuitively because I suspected there would be some absurd requirements – I didn’t even see all the requirements until my second playthrough because of how difficult the font was to notice.
The age slider increment by twos was frustrating – I wanted to put 124 (to match my August 1, 1900 birth date) but could only toggle between 123 and 125. The months appeared out of order in the dropdown menu for date of birth, which was “cool” (by which I mean incredibly frustrating).
Perhaps most devious was placing tick boxes ABOVE the pictures for the human verification. Since boxes are intuitively expected below images, I clicked what I thought were boxes for the pictures above, but they were for those below – forcing me to start over. This was especially confusing because I had to scroll up to reveal the top row, initially assuming standard layout.
What struck me most was realizing I simply wanted to complete the game – exactly the behavior these dark patterns promote. Websites often use similar techniques to make users “sign away their lives” just to accomplish simple tasks. This game effectively simulates that manipulative dynamic.