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Comment by ingonealan3 | Hacker News Reader

As a technical demonstration, this little project is really interesting. There's only one aspect I'd like to poke at a bit:

"Mobile gaming is more interesting than PC/web clients to me. If nothing it means developers can use push notifications and make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game on their computers."

This is one of the dark patterns that are actively eating away at our attention spans, and should be avoided. Develop ethically, please.

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Mobile gaming has the lowest retention on the market - 90% of users leave on day 7.

Mobile gaming is catered towards more casual audience succeeds better with micro-transactions (i.e. $0.99 - $2 like in-app purchases)

Most of the notifications get turned off if spamming most of the time and do not really help that much if the gamer is not intrinsically into that game. So its like fake marketing when you push but loose out anyways.

The dark pattern is really gacha style and gambling related casino games where slots are not real but you need to pay to spin. Users who get hooked spend thousands of dollars on it.

I think we're really abusing the terms 'dark pattern' and 'ethics' at the point where merely popping a notification about ingame events is covered.

When Tetris was first released back in 1986, its uniquely addictive nature led some to theorize that it was intrinsically harmful, or more conspiratorially, that it was a weapon made by Russians to harm US productivity. Had Tetris first been released in the modern era, I think both of these (patently insane) complaints would have been taken more seriously.

There's also a difference between "merely popping a notification" and actively hoping to make your games a mindless part of players' days, as in your parent's quote.

I see a fundamental problem in the following general attitude: "make games a much more mindless/regular part of players' day vs. depending on users to actively seek out their game". Why do this? Why not just put the game out there, and if it's any good, players will start raving about it. Sure, in this case it's pretty harmless. But when most executives and/or developers start thinking this way, it turns into a sort of arms race for users' attention. User attention is basically the new "market share" that they seek to maximize. I think that as long as this is the general view on things, the companies' incentives (or individual developers, to a somewhat lesser extent) is misaligned with the public good.

And specifically on notifications, we have evidence that they don't have a positive impact on our attention spans: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2858036.2858359 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26121498/

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