Research

Mobile gaming apps are woven into children’s daily lives, including those of children too young to recognize commercial intent. When apps embed manipulative interfaces or heavy advertising, they place young users in environments that conflict with their right to play and to protection from exploitation, contributing to prolonged screen time, disrupted self-regulation, and accidental in-app purchases. We examined 20 popular, free-to-download children’s mobile games in German-speaking regions using persona-based cognitive walkthroughs to assess the prevalence of deceptive design patterns and advertising. Despite platform policies and EU frameworks such as the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act, every game contained deceptive design patterns that can nudge, confuse, or pressure children, with a median of 5.5 distinct patterns per app. Advertising was nearly ubiquitous (90%), predominantly non-skippable, and deeply intertwined with deceptive patterns throughout gameplay. We discuss what these findings imply for HCI research on ethical game design, platform responsibility, and regulatory enforcement in the EU.

Discord is one of the most popular communication platforms among gamers. While prior research has highlighted its role in community building, relatively little attention has been paid to its original gaming context-how it shapes gameplay and social experiences. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 teenage Discord users. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we show how players leverage Discord to create more collaborative and socially enriched experiences that extend beyond the game itself. However, gaming together on Discord also resulted in social and security risks. We conceptualize gaming together on Discord as a cross-platform practice that extends gameplay beyond a game and supports players’ social needs. Additionally, cross-platform practice also introduces the ‘platform gap,’ where fragmented governance between platforms exposed players to risks. To address this tension, we propose design implications aimed at bridging the platform gap, strengthening communication channels, and supporting safer gaming experiences.

This systematic mapping review examines 54 gamified interventions aimed at combating misinformation. We analyze the theoretical frameworks, game design, and media contexts of academic and non-academic games. The results indicate a field dominated by web-based simulations and trivia formats. While psychological inoculation is a prominent theoretical framework in the field, most interventions prioritize content-discernment tasks over proactive prebunking strategies. We identify systematic gaps in the identified games. Current interventions remain largely text-centric, focusing on news articles and text-based content, despite the growing use of audiovisual content (e.g., short videos) in the digital landscape. We conclude our study by discussing implications for addressing the evolving, multimodal nature of potentially misleading content using gamified interventions.

Deceptive design patterns, which attempt to deliberately influence user behaviour, are widespread in free-to-play games, and their problematic nature has prompted growing regulatory interest across the world. We report a mixed-methods study with over 100 UK adult players exploring whether loot-box use (LBU) and deceptive design pattern awareness (DPA) predict Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD), and how players recognise manipulative design. Qualitatively, reflexive thematic analysis uncovered a “Dark Pattern Paradox”: players clearly identify deliberate tactics (overt monetisation, temporal tricks, affective manipulation, and sensory/UI misdirection) that sustain engagement, obscure monetary value, and raise ethical concerns (notably for children), yet loot boxes often remain enjoyable. Quantitatively, LBU significantly predicted higher IGD in a model including LBU and DPA; however, DPA did not reduce addiction risk. Contributions include empirical evidence linking LBU to IGD, a player-centred taxonomy of game deceptive design patterns, and actionable design and policy interventions (e.g., monetary transparency, value-clarity in UI) to reduce harm and guide ethical game design. More broadly, our findings suggest that awareness and transparency alone may be insufficient consumer protections when monetisation systems are structurally designed to sustain engagement.

In digital roleplaying games character editors are commonly present. Here, not only visual but often also gameplay-related decisions are made. In this paper, we focus on the fantasy roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate 3 . Through an online questionnaire ( N = 171), we investigated how the character editor is perceived, which customization categories players find important and how they assess the number of options offered within categories. We derived design suggestions and our results show that the editor is perceived well overall, but can improve, mainly by offering more categories and more selection options in the existing categories, even in those, that already offer many options. In contrast, categories that already had many options (100+) did not overwhelm participants, indicating that it is not a general problem to offer many options. Complementary to this, we found relationships between individual differences (age, gender, personality and engagement with the game) and the category importance perception, opening up questions around tailoring character editors.

Video games are deeply embedded in teenagers’ lives, shaping their social lives while exposing them to prolonged engagement and gambling-like mechanisms. Although prior work has identified harmful game design practices, teenagers’ own understandings of these experiences remain underexplored. Through semi-structured interviews with teenagers aged 13-17 ( n = 7), we examine how harmful experiences are understood and interpreted. Our findings show that despite being aware of manipulative aspects of game design, including engagement-driven reward systems that encourage prolonged engagement, teenagers frame these experiences as expected trade-offs of gaming. Through processes of acceptance, justification, and social reinforcement, harmful gaming experiences are normalized as everyday play. As a result, teenagers viewed self-control and personal responsibility as the primary ways to stay safe while gaming, shifting responsibility for online safety away from platforms and towards teenagers and parents. We argue that the central harm in contemporary gaming lies not only in manipulative mechanics themselves, but in how prolonged participation becomes normalized through routine engagement. We provide an empirical account of how teenagers come to accept, justify, and normalize harmful gaming experiences. We also show how socio-technical environments normalize harmful engagement and shift responsibility for online safety toward teenagers through expectations of self-regulation.