Sex, Apps, and Gamification
Posted on December 12, 2013 | posted by:As a gay man living in New York City, I’ve struggled with online dating, especially hook-up apps and websites. I’m not alone in this. I’ve seen friends debate their merits, give them up and join them again, bemoan the loss of community in bars and clubs, lose partners to infidelity through them, and feed our own infidelity. Yet despite all these negatives, not only do the apps still exist, there seem to be new ones all the time. And even as we’ve struggled with them, we can’t quite seem to quit them once and for all.
So what’s going here? “A lot of twisted psychological stuff,” as Josh Harkinson writes at MotherJones.com. Apps of all kinds use gamification principles, some more explicitly than others. They tease us with a series of rewards. They taunt “on the edge of granting treats” to which Jaron Lanier points out our minds are particularly susceptible.1
Games themselves are not new to culture, obviously. Entire industries around sports and gambling gamify the desires of players and audience alike. The potential of gamification has spread throughout the consumer model however with the rise of better data modeling and collection. Just the kind of feedback loop that Lanier and Harkinson worry about. As the Atlantic observes, “Consumers respond very well to gamification in other sectors; businesses report increases in “engagement” by hundreds of percentage points when they gamily.” Apps, of all kinds, take the gaming up a notch. Online and in app user experiences are extremely well engineered. They are tested and modeled. They are advanced designed objects, maximized to produce the exact right combination of rewards to keep us logged in and “playing.” And they are right at your finger tips all day.
Gamification is now a regular part of the discussion for anyone working in digital design. It’s increasingly part of undergrad design curriculums where newly minted game design electives are popular. The proliferation of game consoles in the last 30 years created a generation of students for whom gaming is a significant part of their lives. There’s not only a built in audience of students interested in gaming but a professional class of experts to teach it. Increased awareness and prevalence has led to an inevitable questioning about the significance of games and gamification.
Attention has also turned to the implications of gamification in dating app. A singled at article at Nerve led me to the Atlantic not once, but twice. These articles seem particularly interested in the more heterosexual dominated apps and online dating platforms, especially match.com and the more recent (and more gamified) Tinder app. The “goal” of these apps, as Hinge CEO Justin McLeod says about his app is tilted toward “more first dates.” McLeod’s comments could be so much PR messaging, but the reality is the messaging works because sex without dating as openly discussed in heterosexual dating.
But what of the Grindr, and Scruff, and Jack’d apps of the world? These apps are targeted to gay men and seem to promote sexual gratification over dating. What happens when you combine the neurobiological feedback of sex with the engineered big data model? Does a hook-up, or sex app in gay slang, change when the expectation of sexual reward comes in? I believe the answer is yes and the dangers could be far worse.
Let’s be clear, the notion that love is a game isn’t anything new. From peers to songs to shows like the “Dating Game” to the “Bachelor” and “Bacherlorette,” love and dating have long been mined for their intrinsic game qualities. The neurological rewards in pleasure from game playing are well understood as they are in sex The combination of the two — an engineered game with a goal of sexual release — compounds the dangers in this combination. As with gambling, where real money comes into play and real addiction, the gay hook-up app seems especially ripe for feeding, and perhaps even creating, sex addictions.
And what of design and designers? When we think of negative consequences of design our minds turn to things like instruments of war or, slightly more innocuously, ill-planned highways that destroy neighborhoods or products that generate excessive waste. Experience designers, armed with sets of user data, service maps, and wireframes might seem immune to ethical questions. The questions are the same however: to what end are the tools of the trade being used? Shouldn’t the teams designing web and apps consider the implications of their work?
As Lanier argues: “The intrinsic challenge of computation-and of economics in the information age-is finding a way to not be overly drawn into dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste. The naive experience of simulation is the opposite of delayed gratification. Competence depends on delayed gratification.”
From this understanding, designers must consider a frightening possibility: designing games to manipulate sexual gratification might be breeding more than just sex addicts; designers might be making us incompetent at love.
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1 Lanier, Jaron. “What Is to Be Remembered?” Who Owns the Future? New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 361-67. Print.