Real Life and Dating Games
Tinder’s “Swipe Night” and the Gamification of Love
On the first Sunday of October 2019, dating app Tinder launched its interactive, choose your own adventure game called Swipe Night. Every Sunday night for the month, new episodes made use of the iconic right/left swipe motion for users to make choices about what the characters would do in an apocalyptic situation, ranging from which snack to grab to whether or not you’d help save someone’s life. After each episode ended, user’s choices would appear on their profile for fellow swipers to judge. The whole time you’re playing the game and watching the show, a counter in the left corner tells you how many people on the app have played that night.
In her essay “From Game-story to Cyber-drama”, Janet Murray wrote that we are experiencing “the invention of a new genre altogether, which is narrative in shape and that includes elements we associate with games”(Murray 4). This new genre of interactive media, which Murray calls cyberdrama, has now been utilized in all sorts of cultural spheres, from the pure entertainment like Netflix’s Bandersnatch or for commercial ends, like Ford’s set of interactive commercials from the year 2000 (Murray 6). Tinder’s Swipe Night reaches towards a unique goal: increased engagement on the app between users. In Swipe Night’s official synopsis, Tinder writes that “Swipe Night choices will give you more insight on your matches and offer plenty of material for post-apocalyptic banter. You learn a lot about someone by being in the trenches with them” (Boucher). It hopes that playing the game will make users swipe more and be more likely to talk to others on the app. And Tinder was successful with this. TechCrunch reports that Swipe Night led to a 20%-25% increase in “likes” and a 30% increase in matches, and that elevated conversation levels continued for days after each episode (Perez). Eva Lia Wyss theorizes that increasingly intimate communications will occur over new media platforms in “Communication of Love: Mediatized Intimacy From Love Letters to SMS” (Wyss 85). She suggests that new communication forms, like the digital, are now thoroughly intertwined with face-to-face communication, and “together they form the basis of our social relations” (Wyss 85). Thus, the gravity of online interactions, like the ones on Tinder, should not be underestimated.
While Swipe Night is in many ways the first of its kind, it is not altogether groundbreaking in form or function, following in the footsteps of other interactive activations to an entertaining and commercial end. Bandersnatch, for example, uses almost the exact same decision-making process, in that users are offered two choices from which their decision will immediately tilt the outcome of the story. It also, like Swipe Night, limits the time players have to make choices and does not allow players to reset or reverse a choice. Presented on the streaming platform, Netflix, Bandersnatch offers an interactive element which activates the normally passive activity of watching TV by allowing viewers a sense of agency and the joy of play while watching.
What is unique with Swipe Night is that the game activates a dating app, where users on the other side of interactions are just as real as the player. People don’t play as characters, but as themselves, theoretically looking for a romantic connection. In regular use of the app, users can’t simply reset if they accidentally swipe the wrong way or fudge a conversation with a match. They can’t respawn if a date in real life goes poorly. In Swipe Night, the first person format doesn’t create a character for the player, like protagonist Stefan in Bandersnatch, and users are expected to make choices that they would make if they found themselves in this situation. While players don’t play directly against each other in Swipe Night, the player counter in the right-left corner reminds users while they’re playing of the thousands of other people on the app who they now share this experience with, and afterwards game-play choices matter as potential matches can use them to judge a real person’s character. The integration of the Swipe Night game creates a “play” atmosphere around the app, a feeling which Hito Steyerl describes in “On Games: Or Can Art Workers Think?” as a relative removing of consequences in the real life of the player (Steyerl 101) despite all interactions outside of 5 minute Swipe Night episodes being, for all intents and purposes, real.
A confusing grey area between game and reality is built here. Murray writes “stories and games are like one another in the insularity from the real world, the world of verifiable events and survival consequences” (Murray 1). But with Swipe Night, it takes its narrative and game qualities past the end of the episode and into reality, albeit a digital one. Steyerl investigates the boundary between games and reality, which Murray agrees has become increasingly blurred in a postmodern world, saying that “[a] desirable game[…], is one that is restricted to a dedicated space and time; […] A correlation game is the opposite of this. It is not limited, and you have no idea where, when, how, and through whom you were captured for participation” (Steyerl 110). While Swipe Night begins in this desirable category, following fictional events which a player can manipulate only for as long as the episode lasts, its effects continue far past the end of the game. Not only do likes, matches, and conversations that spawn from the game stay on a user’s profile for as long as their account is open, but also increased activity provides data for Tinder’s algorithm to better predict who would like who, according to Vox’s insights on how the algorithm works (Tiffany).
“They,” Steyerl continues on games, “are not only playgrounds for free choice, but also training grounds for habits” (Steyerl 106). Swipe Night’s game character, it can be argued, gamifies a user’s experience with the app, adding a play behavior while some users may earnestly be looking for connection. According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2016 a majority of Americans consider dating apps a good way to meet someone (Smith and Anderson). The process of gamification shares similarities with persuasive technologies that are designed to influence a user’s behavior outside of game-play, according to Alaa AlMarshedi in “Gamification and Behaviour (AlMarshedi). This all begs the question, do play values, like the perceived absence of tangible consequences, permeate into the real-life relationships grown from a gamified experience like Swipe Night? So, when users begin to think of dating apps as a win-able game, do they forget the just-as-real-as-themselves people on the other side of the screen? Is this where playing grows into acting, and dating-app users begin thinking of their matches, conversations, and dates as just a game?
I think, in some ways, this may be true, and a potentially damaging playing field begins when daters and dating-app users lose sight of the humanity of those they’re trying to woo. But I also think that dating has always been a game-like experience; trying to achieve an objective, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, under the understanding that there are, as they say, plenty of fish in the sea. Maybe, a gamified experience of dating is a natural format for the way romantic connections are grown, and all Swipe Night and Tinder have done is capitalize on this understanding for the digital age.
Works Cited:
AlMarshedi A., Wanick V., Wills G.B., Ranchhod A. (2017) Gamification and Behaviour. In: Stieglitz S., Lattemann C., Robra-Bissantz S., Zarnekow R., Brockmann T. (eds) Gamification. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham.
“Bandersnatch”. Netflix, 2018.
Boucher, Geoff. “Tinder’s ‘Swipe Night’: How Moviemaking And Matchmaking Got In Bed Together.” Deadline, 25 Oct. 2019.
Murray, Janet. “From Game-Story to Cyberdrama”, Electronic Book Review, May 1, 2004, .
Perez, Sarah. “Tinder’s Interactive Video Series ‘Swipe Night’ Is Going International next Year.” TechCrunch, TechCrunch, 6 Nov. 2019.
Steyerl, Hito. “On Games: Or, Can Art Workers Think?”, New Left Review. Jan/Feb 2017.
Smith, Aaron, and Monica Anderson. “5 Facts about Online Dating.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 29 Feb. 2016.
Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “How the Tinder Algorithm Actually Works.” Vox, Vox, 18 Mar. 2019.
Wyss, Eva Lia. Communication of Love : Mediatized Intimacy From Love Letters to SMS. Interdisciplinary and Historical Studies. transcript Verlag, 2014. EBSCOhost.
