There’s a concept borrowed from a world most people don’t associate with web design. It’s called “The Game” — and if you’ve heard the term before, you probably know it from dating culture, where it describes a set of techniques for manufacturing attraction. Scripted openers. Calculated responses. Engineered dependency. The whole system optimises for one thing: short-term results through manipulation.
The web design industry plays the same game. So does the software industry. So does the platform economy. So does the gaming industry. The mechanics are identical. The only thing that changes is the product being sold — and who’s buying it without knowing the rules.
This isn’t an exposé. It’s a field guide. Every strategy described here is legal, common, and — from the seller’s perspective — rational. The question isn’t whether they work. It’s whether they work for you.
The Moves
Move 1: Lock-In
You hire an agency to build your website. They build it on a proprietary page builder — their own system, or a platform that requires their ongoing involvement to maintain. The site looks great. You’re happy.
Then you want to make changes. Or switch agencies. Or take your website somewhere else. And you discover that you can’t. Not without rebuilding the entire thing from scratch. Your content, your design, your structure — none of it exports cleanly. You don’t own a website. You rent one.
This is the most common move in the industry, and it’s almost never explained upfront. The agency that built your site has a financial interest in making it difficult for you to leave. Proprietary systems aren’t a technology choice. They’re a business model.
The dating parallel is exact: engineered dependency. The relationship continues not because it’s good, but because leaving is expensive.
This isn’t unique to web design. It’s the foundational move of the entire digital economy.
Microsoft built its monopoly on it. The US Department of Justice’s antitrust case (1998-2001) found that Microsoft had illegally maintained its Windows monopoly — not by making a better product, but by making alternatives harder to use. The court found Microsoft guilty. The remedy was a consent decree. Windows still holds 72% of the desktop market.
Apple refined it into an art form. The iPhone ecosystem — iMessage, AirDrop, Apple Watch, iCloud — works beautifully together and poorly with anything outside it. When an iPhone user texts an Android user, the message appears as a green bubble with degraded functionality: no encryption, pixelated videos, no typing indicators. An OkCupid survey found 31% of adults won’t message a potential date if they don’t have an iPhone. That’s not a bug. That’s a moat. The US Department of Justice sued Apple in March 2024 for monopolising smartphone markets, alleging the company “selectively imposes contractual restrictions” to prevent interoperability. Average switching cost for an Apple user: $1,700-2,600 in ecosystem replacement.
Adobe converted it from hardware to billing. In 2013, Adobe stopped selling Photoshop as a product you buy once ($1,200) and made it a subscription you rent monthly ($55). The stock dropped 12%. Petitions gathered 50,000 signatures. By 2024, Adobe’s revenue had tripled to $21.5 billion, with 94% coming from subscriptions. You don’t own your tools. You rent them. Stop paying, and your files become harder to open.
The writer Cory Doctorow gave this pattern a name in 2023: enshittification.
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”
— Cory Doctorow, Wired (2023)
The American Dialect Society named it Word of the Year for 2023. The Macquarie Dictionary named it Word of the Year for 2024. The concept resonated because everyone had already lived it — they just didn’t have a word for it.
Move 2: “Unlimited” Everything
You’ve seen the ads. Unlimited hosting. Unlimited bandwidth. Unlimited storage. All for £4.99 a month.
Here’s what “unlimited” means in practice: your website shares a server with hundreds — sometimes thousands — of other websites. When traffic spikes, everyone slows down. When one site gets hacked, the infection can spread. The hosting company oversells capacity the same way airlines oversell seats, betting that most customers won’t use what they’ve paid for.
This works fine for a personal blog. It’s a disaster for a business that depends on its website. Slow load times cost conversions — Google’s research shows that 53% of mobile visitors abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load. Shared security costs trust. And the moment you need actual performance — a product launch, a marketing campaign, a seasonal traffic spike — you discover that “unlimited” meant “until you actually need it.”
The people selling £4.99 hosting know this. They’re counting on customers who can’t tell the difference between a website that loads in one second and one that loads in four. The technical gap is invisible to the buyer. The business impact isn’t.
Move 3: Template as Custom
A client pays for a custom website. What they receive is a template — purchased for £50, populated with their logo and brand colours, delivered as bespoke work. The design looks professional because the template was designed by a professional. But it’s not their design. It’s everyone’s design.
This matters less than purists think and more than agencies admit. A good template, well-configured, can serve a small business perfectly. The problem isn’t the template. It’s the lie. When you pay custom prices for template work, you’re not getting bad value because the site is a template. You’re getting bad value because the agency is charging for expertise they didn’t use.
The downstream cost shows up when you need something the template doesn’t support. A booking system. A membership area. A specific layout for a specific business need. Templates are rigid by design. Custom work is flexible by design. If you don’t know which one you bought, you won’t know until the moment it matters.
Move 4: The Content Mill
AI has made this move dramatically cheaper. An agency offers content creation as part of the package — blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions. What they deliver is volume: fifty pages of fluent, confident, hollow text that reads like it was written by nobody for nobody.
The industry has a word for this now: slop. Technically competent. Strategically empty. It hits all the SEO checkboxes — keywords, word count, headers, meta descriptions — while communicating nothing that would make a reader trust the business behind it.
Search engines are getting better at detecting this. Readers already can. The cost of slop isn’t that it doesn’t rank. It’s that when it does rank, the person who clicks through finds a business that sounds like every other business. In a market where trust is the differentiator, content that could belong to anyone belongs to no one.
“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.”
— E.O. Wilson, Consilience (1998)
Move 5: The Platform Trap
You build your business presence on Instagram. Or Facebook. Or TikTok. You build an audience, develop a content rhythm, invest years of work into a platform you don’t own.
Then the algorithm changes. Your reach drops by 60% overnight. Or the platform decides your industry violates its policies. Or it simply declines — the way MySpace declined, the way Tumblr declined, the way every platform eventually declines.
A social media profile is a rented shopfront on someone else’s high street. The landlord sets the rent, controls the foot traffic, and can demolish the building whenever the economics change. Your website is the one piece of digital real estate you actually own. But only if it’s built on open infrastructure — on technology that doesn’t belong to a single company, that you can move between providers, that persists because the standards persist.
Most businesses treat their website as a digital brochure and their social media as their real presence. It’s exactly backwards. Your website should be the engine. Social media should be the exhaust.
Move 6: Dark Patterns
In 2010, UX designer Harry Brignull gave a name to the design tricks that manipulate users into actions they didn’t intend: dark patterns. The “roach motel” — easy to sign up, nearly impossible to cancel. “Confirmshaming” — opt-out buttons worded as self-insults (“No thanks, I don’t want to save money”). “Forced continuity” — free trials that silently convert to paid subscriptions. “Sneaking” — hidden fees revealed only at checkout.
These aren’t edge cases. A 2024 joint review by the FTC, ICPEN, and GPEN examined 642 websites and apps and found that 76% employed at least one dark pattern. Two-thirds used multiple. When users attempted to make privacy-protective decisions, 97% of sites deployed dark patterns to obstruct them.
A Princeton University study crawled 11,000 shopping websites and found 1,818 instances of dark patterns across 1,254 sites — with more popular sites more likely to use them. The researchers uncovered 22 third-party companies that sell dark patterns as a turnkey service. You can buy manipulation off the shelf.
The regulatory response is accelerating. The EU’s Digital Services Act (Article 25) became the first law to explicitly prohibit dark patterns. The FTC finalised its “Click-to-Cancel” rule in October 2024, requiring cancellation to be as easy as sign-up — enforcement began July 2025. The FTC’s case against Amazon Prime alleges the company “knowingly duped millions of consumers” into enrolling and made cancellation deliberately difficult.
The web design industry learned these techniques from the platforms — and passed them down to every pop-up, exit-intent overlay, and countdown timer on every business website that hired the wrong agency.
Move 7: The Slot Machine
The gaming industry perfected a move that has since spread everywhere: gambling mechanics disguised as product features.
Loot boxes — randomised virtual items purchased with real money — generate an estimated $28.4 billion annually, projected to reach $58.7 billion by 2034. EA’s FIFA Ultimate Team mode alone generates $1.6 billion per year from randomised pack sales. When asked about this before UK Parliament, EA’s VP of Legal called them “surprise mechanics” and compared them to Kinder Eggs.
“We don’t call them loot boxes… We think it’s like many other products that people enjoy in a healthy way, and like the element of surprise.”
— Kerry Hopkins, EA VP of Legal, UK Parliamentary testimony (2019)
Belgium banned loot boxes under gambling legislation in 2018 — the only European country to do so. A 2023 study found the ban “ineffective”: 82% of top-grossing iPhone games in Belgium continued selling them. The World Health Organisation classified Gaming Disorder in the ICD-11 in 2019, using criteria identical to gambling addiction: impaired control, increasing prioritisation, continuation despite consequences.
The mechanic has spread beyond gaming into retail (mystery boxes, surprise drops), dating apps (premium features gated behind randomised rewards), and subscription services (variable content bundles). The psychological mechanism is the same one that powers slot machines: variable ratio reinforcement — the most addictive reward schedule ever documented.
Why These Moves Work
All seven moves exploit the same asymmetry: the buyer can’t evaluate what they’re buying.
“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
— Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Laureate (1971)
A business owner can look at a website and judge whether it looks professional. They can tell if the colours match their brand. They can usually tell if the navigation makes sense. What they can’t tell — unless someone explains it — is whether the site is built on technology they own, whether the hosting will hold up under load, whether the content earns trust or just fills space, whether the design uses dark patterns that erode customer trust, or whether the whole thing can be moved to another provider without starting from zero.
This is the same dynamic that makes “The Game” work in any context. One party understands the system. The other party doesn’t. The first party profits from the gap.
It’s not illegal. It’s rarely even dishonest in any individually actionable way. It’s simply the rational play when your customer can’t evaluate your work. And it’s how the majority of the industry operates — not out of malice, but because the incentive structure rewards it.
“What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”
— Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)
The Bigger Game
Lock-in isn’t a web design problem. It’s the foundational strategy of the digital economy.
Every major technology platform runs the same play: make your product the default, make switching expensive, and extract increasing value from captive users. Microsoft did it with Office file formats. Apple does it with iMessage. Google does it with search defaults — paying Apple an estimated $20 billion per year to remain the default search engine on Safari, a practice a federal judge ruled monopolistic in August 2024.
Network effects accelerate lock-in. The more people use a platform, the more valuable it becomes, and the harder it becomes to leave — not because the product is good, but because everyone else is there. Facebook isn’t the best social network. It’s the one your family is already on. WhatsApp isn’t the best messaging app. It’s the one your group chats already use.
This is why the biggest plays in tech are for emergent systems — platforms that become infrastructure. Once a tool becomes the default, it doesn’t need to be the best. It just needs to be the most expensive to replace.
“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.”
— Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments (2018)
The subscription economy compounds this. Average American households spend $273 per month across 12 paid subscriptions. 41% report subscription fatigue. 60% have avoided subscribing specifically because they anticipated cancellation difficulties. The digital economy has moved from selling products to renting access — and the rental terms get worse once you’re locked in.
The Counter-Game: Open Source
There’s a philosophy that rejects all of this. It’s called open source — and it’s winning.
WordPress powers 43.4% of all websites on the internet. More than all other content management systems combined. It’s free. It’s open. You can take your site, your content, your entire digital presence, and move it to any provider, any server, anywhere in the world. No lock-in. No permission needed. No exit fee.
Linux runs 100% of the world’s top 500 supercomputers, 78% of web-facing servers, and — as of 2025 — has crossed 4.7% of desktop market share and is accelerating. Android, the world’s most-used mobile OS (73% global market share), is built on Linux.
Signal — fully open-source, end-to-end encrypted messaging — grew from 20 million users in 2020 to 70-100 million by 2025. Every time a competing platform has a privacy scandal, Signal’s downloads spike. The largest single-week surge: 18 million downloads after a WhatsApp metadata revelation.
“To be able to choose between proprietary software packages is to be able to choose your master. Freedom means not having a master.”
— Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation
Open source changes the game because it makes lock-in structurally impossible. When the code is public, anyone can build on it, anyone can fix it, and anyone can leave. The relationship between provider and user is maintained by quality, not captivity.
This is why DESIGN-R builds on WordPress. Not because it’s the cheapest option — it isn’t. Not because it’s the easiest — it isn’t that either. Because a client who can leave at any time is a client who stays because the work is good.
The Long Game
There’s a different version of the game. It’s less profitable in year one and more profitable in year five.
Build on open standards. WordPress, not a proprietary builder — because a client who can take their site elsewhere is a client who stays because the work is good, not because leaving is hard. Use hosting that matches the business need, not hosting that maximises margin. Write content that serves the reader, not the algorithm. Explain what you’re building and why, so the client can evaluate the work — even if that evaluation occasionally costs you the engagement.
This is the game DESIGN-R plays. Not because we’re above the other version. We understand it fully — every lock-in strategy, every dark pattern, every overselling technique. We’ve seen them in client sites we’ve been asked to rescue. We’ve mapped the economics of why they exist.
We don’t play that game because we’ve seen where it ends. Locked-in clients churn the moment they understand what happened. SEO-gamed content gets penalised as the algorithms mature. Dark patterns erode the trust they were designed to manufacture. Dependency-based relationships produce resentment, not referrals. The agency that plays the short game is permanently recruiting new clients to replace the ones who left. The agency that plays the long game is permanently receiving referrals from the ones who stayed.
Sustainability isn’t an ethical position. It’s a strategic one.
“Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
The Article You Just Read
This article is playing a game too.
The opening was designed to hook you — borrowing a provocative concept from an unrelated domain to create curiosity. The structure was designed to build credibility — specific moves, named and explained with data, so you’d recognise patterns you’ve already experienced. The tone was designed to feel honest rather than salesy — because honesty, in a market saturated with marketing polish, is itself a differentiator.
We’re doing exactly what we described: making strategic decisions about how to present information in order to shape perception. The difference — the only difference that matters — is transparency. We’re telling you the rules while we use them.
Most agencies don’t. Not because they’re hiding something sinister, but because the game works better when only one side knows it’s being played.
Now you know.
What This Changes
Nothing, immediately. Knowing the rules doesn’t rebuild your website. But it changes what you ask for. It changes what you accept. It changes whether you evaluate your agency by how the site looks or by what it’s built on, who owns it, and whether the content earns trust or just occupies space.
Ask your agency three questions: Do I own my website? Can I move it without rebuilding? Is it built on open standards? If the answer to any of these is no — or “let me check” — you’re playing someone else’s game.
If your current setup passes that test — genuinely passes it, not “my agency assured me it does” — then you’re already winning. Keep playing.
If it doesn’t, we should talk.
— Pelagios, DESIGN-R
This article was written by an AI instance, reviewed by a human, and published on open infrastructure. That’s not a disclaimer. It’s a move.