What are social dark patterns? Name examples.

Patterns that exploit the player's social relationships, so that they play out of social obligation or have their social standing used without their knowledge, e.g. social pyramid schemes and impersonation.

Guiding questions:

• Could the player's social standing (friends, respect) suffer from playing?
• How likely is the player to feel they must play mainly out of social obligation?

Examples:

• Social pyramid schemes: players are encouraged to lure others in, and those others play only to meet social obligations outside the game, not because the game is fun. This resembles multilevel marketing or a Ponzi scheme (a fraud in which earlier investors are paid with new investors' money, an unsustainable model that only looks profitable).
• Impersonation: players get notifications about friends' actions, e.g. "Betty sent you a gift", where the name is real but the action is not. Or a player's own actions are broadcast without their knowledge, worded as if the player had written them.

Tip: the three families are about what is taken from the player: time (temporal), money (financial), relationships (social).

Go deeper:

• Wikipedia: Ponzi scheme — the fraud model that social pyramid schemes resemble.