Show HN: Terms and Conditions Apply: A mini-game about annoying pop-ups

I made this mini-game where you battle devious pop-ups, based on real dark patterns

It feels like the web is becoming increasingly user hostile. Every website now greats you with a plethora of pop-ups; Cookie permission, GDPR consent, newsletters, notifications. We’re all becoming unwilling experts at quickly clicking the right clicks (and crossing our fingers we didn’t give away anything too important).

I thought it would be fun to try and make a game out of it.

It’s called ‘Terms And Conditions Apply’.

In it you battle ‘Evil Corp’ as they use every trick in the book (and a few more made up for fun) to grab your personal data. Puzzles are inspired by (or outright stolen) from real dark patterns that companies are using right now.

I worked with puzzle writer Alex Bellos to help create the pop-up-puzzles. Three of the challenges are featured today in his Guardian column. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/may/17/can-you-solv...

Thanks darkpatterns.org, reddit.com/r/darkpatterns, webtransparency.cs.princeton.edu/dark-patterns/ and of course HN for all the inspiration!

Also a shout out to plausible.io which I used for web analytics since we couldn’t really have a cookie consent banner on our own site.