Integrating Dark Patterns into the 4Cs of Online Risk in the Context of Young People and Mobile Gaming Apps

Abstract

Mobile technologies potentially expose children and adolescents to increasing online risk. These risks take many forms and are widely categorized using the 4Cs: Content, Conduct, Contact, and Commerce. Commerce is the least developed category and, while it has significant overlap with what is known as Dark Design within the field of UX, amalgamation of Dark Design and the 4Cs has not yet been considered. Within this paper we integrate Dark Design into the 4Cs to provide a set of questions we call RIGA (Risk In Games Assessment) and use RIGA to identify potential risks to children and adolescents in free-to-play mobile gaming apps. The key contribution of this paper is the integration of contemporary understandings of Dark Design into the 4Cs framework, through the RIGA question set, which can support research and practitioner communities in identifying potential risk to young people present in mobile gaming apps.