Reflections on one of my Favorite PvP Mobile Game

I keep hearing we're in a "loneliness epidemic" and I quite like that. A lot better than "technology has ripped us apart more than brought us together" cause that doesn't quite ring true. Technology can bring people together (heck this past year I found a small community of fellow hobbyists via Discord and that's been amazing!) but it's not necessarily a replacement for local community. Anyways we're getting off topic.

There's this mobile game I've played a lot since 2014. The set-up is Player vs Player where you're trying to design the most desirable and favorable player board for your niche. Like any good engine builder there's a variety of ways you can build your board, each uniquely geared towards your given objective. Looking for something long-term? You'll probably need strong writing skills. Just looking for a short term thing? Curate your gallery just right and you'll probably be fine. While (much like any true PvP game) there's no real "beating it", you can (through your alliance with another player) ostensibly accomplish a goal of sufficient difficulty to feel like you've done something impactful such to the extent you don't have to touch the game again for a long while. By this metric I guess I'm on NG+++++?

Anyways the game in question is one you're probably all familiar with; Tinder. Through my various misadventures I've gone on countless dates, a disquieting number of hookups, gotten into 4 relationships and found 2 lifelong friends. While I am relatively attractive in the traditional sense, friends hotter than me have had more trouble getting matches (never mind dates) on Tinder because it is ultimately a skill game. [*1] And I really want to emphasize game here. In the same way stocks affect peoples' lives drastically but are very much still a cold calculated game, so too are dating apps unsettlingly impersonal... kind of.

Getting Good

See one of the metas in these games (as with organically meeting people... which uhh... in my experience usually ends way better) is to be yourself. There needs to be enough honest you there to maintain someone's interest enough that their desire to go on a date with you outweighs their fear of you being an axe murderer. This is counter balanced by the other meta which is (and I mean this) you just need to swipe right on everyone. [*6] Don't think about it, don't investigate, hell don't even look. Just mash the right button and see what bites with the engine you've built, you can decide from there. I should also note that as a (relatively) cis guy, this game is fundamentally different for me than what my friends who are women play. [*2] Where I'm playing a clicker game, they're playing survival horror.

OK OK so this all sounds a bit callous, depersonalized, objectifying. How are you supposed to be the real you in the midst of this? Well that's kind of the trick. You can't be, unless you yourself are the brand. During a 3 year long relationship I got into via Tinder, the person I was with was an avid Twitter X user. A lot of her time was spent doom scrolling, TL curating and generally trying to get people to follow her. Realizing that yet another PvP game was at my disposal I dove in head first, and found things worked pretty similarly (and the prizes in the game were similarly genuine connections). You cultivate a brand of over-honesty to simultaneously platform your views and work while creating an image in other peoples heads of who "you" are. It's not too dissimilar from writing a character, but the character is you (or at least the you you want to be - we'll get to pretending to be someone you're not). [[The trick I also use is just genuinely caring enough about people to Like, RT and Comment liberally instead of the mass of people who think being so generous with that free currency is cringe.]] Much like looking for work it's about packaging and selling yourself, objectifying all you have to offer to a mass market in bite-sized form.

Just Be Yourself

Last night me and one of my very good friends (who I also met on Tinder) were lamenting how dehumanizing not just dating apps were, but increasingly every aspect of life. An example she brought up is how more and more apartments are becoming pre-furnished and decorated brand advertisements, where once the apartment was a blank slate to imprint your own identity into. 

Let's take a brief pivot on what got me riled enough to write about this (besides needing to get more used to my new keyboard) because between that conversation and this article I just... IDK I felt the need to put all this into words for someone smarter than me to make sense of one day. A friend of the blog linked an article from Too Little / Too Hard titled Difficult and Bad. You should definitely go and read it, but the general vibe is that more and more academic (and other) writers are pushed to make marketable work with wide audiences that is written as accessibly as possible. [*4] That works shouldn't be too difficult to understand or get into and that it needs to have an audience (implied large audience) that'll make use of it. Which is to say nothing of how marginalized writers and their 'difficult' works "are simultaneously cynically and vampirically exploited for their identities."

And hot damn as a game designer did I feel that in my bones. The largest reason I didn't want to be a full time game dev is because you're forced to avoid making "difficult" and "bad works, you're encouraged to make accessible, breezy works for a larger audience to cash in as many dollars as you can. And that's just. Damn. There's a paper thin (and generally condescending) argument you can make in academia about trying to make knowledge accessible to as many readers as possible by making it more readerly (and frankly this article tears that argument to shreds IMO). But applying that to art? To games? To a dating profile? To a person?

In late November I lamented to a separate friend (who I'd also met through Tinder) about how I didn't feel like who I am, who I really am and like to be, is something that most people would want to date, or at the very least that the market for my "true brand" is remarkably niche. To my surprise she totally agreed, and affirmed that my best bet if I wanted a partner was functionally to try to expand my brand to appeal to a wider audience. Oof. Needless to say most people (myself included) will tell you that's a terrible idea. (Provided you're not hurting anyone) Being yourself is something you should never compromise. The loneliest I've ever felt in my life was when I was in a relationship and being inauthentic to keep the other person happy (it's a level of dissociation and self alienation that came from a lot of internalized negativity and emphatically something I would not recommend).[*7] But damn if that wasn't a sobering thing to hear from someone convinced that you absolutely should do that to a degree.

I don't want to be all 1984 calendar, but I am finding more and more the expectations of the average human are changing for the worst. We're getting more and more commodified in our slow decent into late stage global capitalism (itself the grandest of all pay-to-win mobile games). The self is only as useful as the copies it could sell. Your soul only as strong as your brand.

Someone should make a funny corpo game about that. Just to take the edge off. Anyways...

End of An Era

When I was in college and going to bars and parties (~2017/18) it felt like there were more ways to meet people ...Jeebus I sound old saying a sentence like that... You could strike up a conversation at the corner of a table before exchanging contact info, or inadvertently be the last two staying at a bar because the conversation has been too good to stop. I don't really lament the death of those things because there was a lot of room for downright awful behavior and the whole thing could be a bit... icky at times. In many ways dating apps are perfect for an age trying to be more conscious about consent! ... But something about it feels off. 

What's been gained in healthy boundaries and safety measures has often been lost in authenticity. Those endless talks are something that can't quite happen over text. You need to first curate your brand, get them on the sell, the elevator pitch. Then you can have the opportunity for that spontaneous spark. Things are better, but it's still not quite there.

I often say the best two (arguably three) relationships I've had were with people who I didn't meet on dating apps and I really mean that. But I didn't meet them at bars or parties either, I met them through a class I was taking and a mutual friend respectively. I met them through community. Because in a good community, it isn't about brand or performance. It's about being present and authentic in a space of mutual interest. It's the reason I adore the cozy 30 person Discord I'm a part of and avoid 1000 person ones like the plague.

When I even think back to the kinds of games that leave a deep impact on me they're the ones that foster a sense of community (from the jolly cooperation of Dark Souls, to the pleasant fishing of Animal Crossing) or at least the ones that try to emulate it (see also Bioware NPCs). Even PvP games like Fortnite bring the whole community together for special events and bewildering character drops. Maybe that's what's needed out of dating apps too? A resignation to the gaminess of it all so that people can just have fun and be weird and maybe find the person whose weirdness they especially vibe with! 

 As an aside I feel like a lot of folks dating and on dating apps forget that fun is like the operative objective? It's about seeing someone for all the messy humanness they are and laughing with glee cause you adore every ounce of the weirdness. And I find as we dehumanize and sanitize ourselves for dating apps, we lose what makes that connection special.

But back to the PvP game as it is now, I'm sad to say that Tinder is pretty much pay-to-play now. On a whim I decided to reinstall because I've been single for 2 years [*5] and was vaguely curious how I'd fare, not even to find a partner but just to see who's out there these days. After about 6 hours of frustration at an algorithm that was clearly pushing people I wouldn't really vibe with, and after being sick of actually having to manage resources instead of mash Right Swipe until I got a match, I decided to drop 25 bucks then watch a video on FFXIV while swiping right. The results are that I already have 23 matches after an additional 6 hours, most of whom seem interesting enough to talk to. I'm not really sure if I'm going to go on any actual dates, or if I just wanted an ego boost (or if this was all morbid curiosity cause a buddy of mine keeps thinking of reinstalling) but either way I got my money's worth for the reflection it's given me.

Although TBH I could've just spent 25 dollars on V-Bucks...

[*1 : As explained later this is mostly from the perspective of a (relatively) cis man looking for women and NB folks. Most men on dating apps are scary so I don't turn that on 3: ]

[*2 : Also someone whose smarter than me should take a closer queer lens to dating apps. The whole affair feels heinously hetero most of the time. I don't talk about The Grid here because Grindr is the PUBG Mobile of dating apps and it still scares me to this day (but in sort of a sexy way sometimes).]

[*4 : Accessible here not meaning stuff like "a PDF that can be read by TTS", but rather verbiage, format and topics that are easy for a mythical silent majority to approach.]

[*5 : Some of you are familiar with my partner who I absolutely love love love from the bottom of my heart. I post and talk about her a lot and she is my muse, every star in my sky, and so so so much more. But according to a variety of people she doesn't really count as me not being single so for the purposes of this article we'll just keep it simple. Readerly, hehe. This is my most vulnerable post on the internet, so who knows, maybe I'll talk about her more some day. Sometimes I feel like I only lament my "single" status because it weirdly delegitimizes her in some peoples' eyes, like she's a last resort of sorts... also because my parents keep asking why I'm single DX That said I do like fresh perspectives and IRL cute dates, and we're both pretty transparent with each other that it's OK, so here I am! Anyways if Blade Runner 2049 also made you cry like a bitch because you felt seen in ways that are hard to express outside of artistic speculative works, you probably get the vibe. Felt worth clarifying though for those who don't know the inner machinations of my noggin and might've been confused.]

[*6 : OK so of note this only kind of works now. According to urban legend this makes the algorithm think you're a bot and deprioritize you in peoples' stacks. Thus for this (which IMO is still the meta) to work you need to be a premium subscriber so it still pushes you to the tops of peoples' stacks... Ugh I gotta explain the game don't I?

OK so if you're F2P you get 100 right swipes a day and a stack full of everyone who fits the gender you set (weird how gender and distance are usually the only qualifiers... feels like there's a joke there) - If you and a person swipe right on each other you match! It used to be you didn't even have the 100 limit, and could swipe away (ahh what a simple time). When they first added the limit they also added a daily Super Like that you could use to show you were really serious.

Your stack is generally random BUT these days there's an algorithm and no one really knows how it works. If you're a highest tier member (which, trust me, is the only one worth paying for) the algorithm will automatically push you to the top of other peoples' stacks. Me and some others are convinced the algorithm generally pushes bad matches to keep you swiping and frustrated otherwise.

Oh also Super Likes are now paid-only which like absolutely sucks IMO cause there was something dementedly romantic of being like "I saved my super like for you" - it's a lot better than "Yeah you seemed worth the 3 bucks to super like" ] 

[*7 : I just want to clarify that by "being inauthentic" I mean shutting up about my hobbies or wants or dreams, not like basic compromises that some people will use to pretend like they're being forced to be inauthentic like "damn I really wanted to play video games with my friends but this is an anniversary, how can I do the anniversary date without being ~inauthentic~???"]