ArticleAddiction (Abingdon, England)2025
Sludge, dark patterns and dark nudges: A taxonomy of online gambling platforms' deceptive design features.
Article in Addiction (Abingdon, England), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Online prize draws and competitions: Gambling products outside the United Kingdom regulatory framework.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2026Article
- Digital vectors of disease: how alcohol 'smart' labels leapfrog health policy.BMC public health · 2026Article
- Dark patterns in online gambling: A scoping review and classification of deceptive design practices.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2026Article
- Regulatory Whack-a-mole: A Rapid Scoping Review of Gambling Marketing Restrictions and their (in)Effectiveness.Current addiction reports · 2026Review
- Does the Habit Theory of Addictions Extend to Disordered Gambling?Current addiction reports · 2026Review
- Research priorities in deceptive online gambling platform design research: We need to understand behavioral usage patterns in order to inform safer platform design.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
- 'Playing to extinction': the commercial determinants of gambling-related harm, suicidality and suicide.The Lancet regional health. Western Pacific · 2025Review
- Gambling website design as a factor in North American betting expansion.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
- Sludge, dark patterns and dark nudges: A taxonomy of online gambling platforms' deceptive design features.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
- Reducing gambling harm requires a balanced focus on commercial factors, individual differences and their interaction.Addiction (Abingdon, England) · 2025Article
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Abstract
backgroundGambling research has highlighted various aspects of deceptive design. For example, land-based casinos are physically designed to encourage people to gamble there for longer. Similarly, various electronic gambling products, such as electronic gaming machines, exhibit "structural characteristics" that likely encourage people to continue using them. Here I argue that the deceptive design of online gambling platforms is an important yet relatively neglected topic, representing the digital equivalent of land-based gambling venue design. This topic's importance is underscored by online gambling's international growth. ARGUMENT: Online gambling platforms' deceptive design features can be categorized using three terms from the interdisciplinary field of behavioral science. "Sludge" refers to detrimental frictions, which feature for example in online gambling platforms' withdrawal processes. "Dark patterns" refers to deceptive user-interface design more broadly, which includes sludge-based features and other design features such as high suggested deposit/bet sizes. Finally, "dark nudges" refers to all of these as well as other aspects of deceptive design, such as presenting gambling as a fun activity.
conclusionsThe complexity of online gambling platforms poses challenges for researchers, to understand what effects various design features have on behavior, and also for policymakers, to ensure fairer outcomes for people. Increased awareness and collaboration are needed from many stakeholders to better understand deceptive design features' behavioral impacts and to give them the appropriate regulatory attention in comparison to other determinants of harm.
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