I built a Skinner box, then made it confess

A card-pack game where the cards themselves name the dark patterns behind loot boxes. Not a critique you read about later. The deck is the confession, mid-pull. Building the engine that runs it felt appropriately uncomfortable.

A loot box that tells you exactly what it's doing to your brain, while doing it.

https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/blog/a-skinner-box-that-confesses

The Pull is a card-pack game with no real money in it. The twist: the cards openly name the psychological dark patterns that make loot boxes work. Variable ratio reinforcement. Artificial scarcity. The near-miss. Then I built an engine to actually run it. Designing the Skinner box and labelling all its levers at the same time is a strange thing to do to yourself.

The Pull is a card-pack game where the cards don't just exist, they confess. Each one names the dark pattern behind it: variable ratio reinforcement, artificial scarcity, the near-miss effect. The deck is a working loot box and a dissection of loot boxes simultaneously. Building the engine for it meant implementing the exact mechanics I was critiquing. That part felt predictably uncomfortable. https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/blog/a-skinner-box-that-confesses

A loot box that labels its own manipulation while you pull from it. The cards name the dark patterns. The engine runs them anyway.

https://www.jakelawrence.xyz/blog/a-skinner-box-that-confesses

A card-pack game where each card names the psychological trick behind its own existence. Variable ratio reinforcement. The near-miss. Then I built the engine that actually runs it.