Online dating is a great way for anyone to meet new people, but it is especially handy for gamers. There are a lot of features and concepts that translate so well to the gaming community, you just need to know where to look!

If you are a gamer who is ready to find love, take a look at our choices of the best dating apps for gamers!

Need some tips on setting up your profile and starting conversations? Just read on for some of our best tips and tricks to making online dating work for you!

This page will cover everything you need to successfully use gamer dating sites, find other single gamers in your area, and with any luck complete your quest to find your perfect player 2.

Should I Use A Gamer Dating Site?

Honestly we don’t think so. Now we’re not saying, “don’t date online”, but right now we don’t think the gamer-only dating market is quite where it needs to be. Here’s why…

Since around 60% of adults in the US claim to play video games you’re likely to find quite a few gamers on any dating platform. So while going with a brand built strictly for gaming might make sense on paper, there are probably more single gamers at Zoosk or eHarmony than there on any of the other gamer dating apps mentioned on this page.

Another big thing to consider is pricing. Many of these gamer dating sites cost just as much if not more their mainstream counterparts when you want premium features, but they often have a lot less to offer.

If you’re on the fence we recommend grabbing a free trail for a mainstream site and then claim a free trial for a niche gamer dating site. Once the accounts are made compare the following points:

• Check the number of singles in your area as well as the total userbase.
• Complete profile setup – see which is more detailed. More details lead to better matches.
• Check the pricing of premium features and upgrades.
• Explore the interface. Which one feels more complete as a free member?
• Make a list of the pros and cons of each gamer dating app.

By doing this you can rest easy that you’ve made the best decision for your needs. And hey, if you like both that’s even better! There’s nothing wrong with using more than one dating service if they fill different needs.

14 Relationship Sites and Dating Apps for Gamers

In this section, we’ll break down the options gamers have for online dating. Before we get too far into the weeds, we do want to warn you that not all gamer dating apps are created equal. In fact some of them are downright crummy. We strongly recommend that you check out our list of the top dating apps. That being said, here’s the full list of gamer dating apps for 2022:

#1 – Zoosk – Our Top Gamer Dating Site Pick

While not strictly a gamer dating site Zoosk is a great option for any young singles looking to date online.

The site has over 40 million users in over 80 countries around the world. What this means is that even though this is not a gamers only dating app you will probably be able to find more singles that share your interests (and are gamers) than if you were using a smaller niche site like the ones we’ll talk about in the remainder of this section.

Zoosk is rated incredibly well by our staff and has lead to millions of successful relationships. It caters to both casual and serious dating with modern features and is one of the most affordable premium options on the market. If we were gamers looking for lover this is the dating site we would use.

#2 – eHarmony – Best for Anyone Looking for Lasting Love

Like Zoosk, eHarmony is not strictly a gamer dating app, but we think the success rates of this brand should earn it a place on this list. If you’re a gamer looking for marriage here’s a glimpse at what you can expect:

• Majority of singles are looking for serious relationships and marriage.
• Well over 10 active million members.
• One of the most user friendly interfaces of any online dating service.
• Extremely detailed questionnaire and user profiles.
• 140 point compatibility system.
• Over 2 million have found lasting love.

#3 – GamerDating.com – Best Dating App for Serious Gamers

Of all gamer dating sites available online this has to be the most legit. It caters to only gamers meaning it has a smaller user base (approx 2,500 daily users), but the interface is a lot more modern than most of the other niche dating apps out there. On top of that it truly feels gaming oriented since part of the matchmaking process is based on your game library.

This site is not set up for endless browsing. The singles you see will be gamers who match the compatibility settings you input on account creation. If you’re looking for a gamer dating app that lets you search page after page of singles you might be interested in our next option…

#4 – LFGDating – Largest Online Dating Platform for Gamers

LFGDating is branded as 100% custom built premium gamer dating. But how is it really? In our opinion a dated.

The first thing that hit us was the outdated design. Clearly the team at LFGDating is aware of this, but the promise of an update in 2021 lead our team to the conclusion that this gamer dating app is probably a bit out of touch with modern trends and best practices.

That being said, there was a seemingly endless sea of single gamers to scroll though so if you’re someone who likes to have unlimited options this site has that going for it. Their team claims to have tens of thousands of users.

There were definitely some duplicates, incomplete profiles, and other redflags of fake profiles, but even with that considered this has to be the largest network of singles on any gamer dating site.

#5 – Kippo – Inclusive App for Gamers to Meet New People

With just over 20,000 active users Kippo is probably the best option for gamers who want to meet other gamers for relationships or dating from their phones. Unfortunately there is no web friendly version of kippo which limits the potential user base.

Even without desktop users this gamer dating app has turned some heads since it’s launch in 2018. It’s rated over 4 stars for both iOS and Android users with over 300,000 downloads since launch.

This platform is incredibly inclusive and we think it’s primed for growth as the gaming and esports scene continue to grow. To learn more check out our full Kippo review or click the link below:

#6 – SoulGeek – 100% Free Gamer Dating Site

Looking for single geeks and gamers? This gamer dating site may not be perfect but it’s completely free!

This free gamer dating site is dedicated to matching singles interested in sci-fi, horror, fantasy, animation, comics, anime, and of course gaming! If you’re new to the world of gamer dating this free option may be a great way to get your feet wet.

More Gamer Dating Apps Available in 2022

• #7 JoyStick – This gaming-centric dating app offers a convenient way for singles to connect for friendships or relationships based on their love of video games.
  • Advanced search features for better matches.
  • 1 on 1 conversations and gamer chat room
  • LGBTQ+ friendly
• #8 2UpDating – Free gamer dating app with premium subscription upgrades including…
  • Weekly charms to help you get noticed
  • “User quests” that reward you for interactions
  • Unlimited swipes
• #9 Geek2Geek – This platform encourages you to flaunt your geekiness and find people who will love you for it. It’s focused on helping gamers find long term lasting relationships by removing “gimmicks like swipes and likes”.
  • While we admire the goal we honestly can’t recommend this site.
  • We like the branding and design but the site is too buggy.
• #10 GamersDates – Online gamer dating for geeks, gamer girls, and cosplayers. A simple mission and a simple site.
  • A modern and user friendly design with a lot of decent features.
  • Unfortunately, free members cannot see who’s viewed them or see messages.
• #11 g33kDating – This gamer dating launched in 2015 making it older than a lot of gamer-only dating services. In addition to an eye catching retro design it has a few unique features that caught our eye.
  • New accounts have to be approved by admin.
  • You can easily report profiles you suspect of being spam.
  • Mobile apps available but poorly rated (2.2/5 on the App Store).
• #12 Girl Gamer Dating – This is another completely free gamer dating site. while it may not be the perfect gamer dating experience, if you’re a gamer, nerd, or geek looking to give online dating a try the price is right!
  • Unlimited free messaging.
  • Short and simple signup.
  • Always free.
• #13 Lupper – This dating app was built by gamers for gamers. The team is dedicated to building an inclusive and respectful gamer dating community.
  • Active moderators on 24/7 to prevent harassment.
  • Free app available on Google Play and the App Store
• #14 Dates4Gamers – We’re not here to make your decisions; just to give you all the options. But if you’re asking we say this is a great example of a gamer dating app you should avoid.
  • Site terms claim they will use fake profiles to message you.
  • Very young gamer dating site (Launched in 2021)
  • No mobile app for Android or iOS

Is That All the Gamer Dating Apps That Exist?

Definitely not! Honestly we can’t even put a number on exactly how many gamer dating sites are out there. But when you get past the 14 sites we’ve talked about you’re really getting into questionable territory.

We’ve already talked about the benefits of using mainstream dating apps as a gamer, but as we’re sure you already know the internet is full of lousy sites with the sole goal of scamming and hurting anyone naïve enough to use them. Be smart and protect yourself!

Using a legit gamer dating site is not only important for finding great matches, but also to keep you and your personal info safe.

Why Our Recommendations are the Best Dating Apps for Gamers

They Help You Expand Your Horizons

Sometimes we can get caught up in wanting to find a partner that matches all our hobbies and interests exactly. However, by focusing on all compatibility factors these dating apps can help show you that great matches exist outside any strict criteria you may have built up in your mind. 

They Have Features and Functionality Gamers Can Appreciate

Gamers will love all the features of these sites and feel right at home using the filtering systems, advanced communication features, and more. 

The Virtual Communication Feels Natural to Gamers

Gamers know all about communicating online and building friendships virtually. These dating apps and their communication platforms will keep gamers in their comfort zone, which makes dating a whole lot easier. 

How to Find Gamer Girls (or Guys)

Gamer or not finding other singles who share your interests can be tricky if you don’t know where to look. In this section we’ll give you 3 great places to start your quest:

• Gamer Dating Sites/Apps – Whether you’re a PC gamer, die hard console fan, or even mobile gamer, one thing is for sure; you spend a lot of time online. For this reason it just makes sense to take the next step to online dating.
• Play Popular Multiplayer Games – Find love by doing what you love! Sure this won’t work for everyone, but instead of always going it solo try to play some games where you can be on a team. While you might not find the love of your life playing squads of Fortnite you’re going to get better at talking to new people online so when Mr or Mrs Right comes you’ll be ready.
• Go Where Other Gamers Are – This one is pretty self explanatory but needed to be said. If you want to find single gamers in your area then you have to go where gamers go. Arcades are way past their prime, but try game stores, comic shops, and of course conventions. You can also look for online communities like r/GamerPals.

5 Good Chat Openers for Gamers

1. If You Know They Game, but That’s It: “PC, Xbox, Nintendo, or PlayStation?” 
2. If You Aren’t Sure if They Game: “What’s your favorite hobby and how did you get into it?”
3. If They Are a PC Gamer: “What is a game mod you can’t live without?”
4. If They Are a PlayStation or Xbox Gamer: “What’s your favorite two player game?” (Note: You can easily use this as a segue to set up a game together.)
5. If They Are a Nintendo Gamer: “What are your thoughts on people who throw blue turtle shells?”

Helpful Tips for Shy Gamers Dating Online

We firmly believe that the idea of gamers being nerdy is totally outdated. Many gamers are super outgoing, focus on sport-based hobbies as well, and blow that stereotype out of the water. But, some gamers (just like any single really) will be a little less skilled at dating and other intense social interactions.

So, if you are a shy gamer who needs a little help, below are some dating tips for you:

1. Put Your Best Foot Forward – We’ve all seen the cringe worthy posts online of the people who flirt too hard with someone only to turn on them and call them horrible names when their feelings aren’t returned. That’s no way to live life. Focus on being the best person you can be and trust that your kindness and geniality will reward you when the right person comes along.
2. Know That You Are a Catch – Being a gamer does not take away from your desirability. Never let someone treat you badly or walk all over you just because you think you can’t do better. 
3. Be Yourself – It is always best to be yourself when getting to know people. Sure, you may be able to put on a persona and fake your way through interactions, but eventually the shroud will fall and the relationship will be severely damaged. Focus on finding someone who loves you for you. 
4. Don’t Settle Just to Avoid Being Alone – Unfortunately, this happens all too often. Lonely singles will settle for bad partners just because they don’t want to be alone. You owe it to yourself to hold out for a partner that will treat you right and make you happy. 
5. Share Your Hobbies  – Often, singles might try to hide their “nerdier” hobbies, but we have seen that dates actually love to be involved in these hobbies. Try setting up a gaming date and share your passion with your potential partner!

Gamer Dating App FAQ

What is the Best Dating Site for Gamers?

Right now we have to award that title to Zoosk. While it’s not strictly build for gamer dating it does have some of the best features and largest userbase of young singles. As the industry continues to evolve we’ll be sure to keep this updated so you always know what gamer dating site is #1.

Are These Dating Sites Good for Girl Gamers?

Yes! We know that being a girl gamer can be a struggle when it comes to dating. These apps are great because they have some really great searching features but also great moderators. So, the first time a match tries to pull the whole, “you aren’t a real gamer,” or any other prejudice-type nonsense, you can get the mods to help you out!

Is Dating a Gamer Hard?

Honestly it can be. A lot of it really depends on you and your partner being able to have a healthy balance between your passion for gaming and your passion for each other. If your significant other disappears for weeks every time a new game drops it can put huge strain on a relationship.

Are There Good Dating Apps for LGBTQ+ Gamers?

Yes! Many of our apps are some of the best apps on the market for LGBTQ+ singles, gamers or otherwise. We want you to be able to find your perfect love, no matter who they are! Be sure to utilize the great search and filtering features on these apps to help you properly narrow down your results. 

Are There Any Swipe Style Gamer Dating Apps?

Yes there are! Swipe style dating has taken the world by storm. People love the convenience and casual feel. As a result, apps like Kippo have sprung up to serve that same experience to the gamer dating niche.

What is the Future of Online Dating for Gamers?

Since the start of the Covid pandemic, online dating has seen an unparalleled spike. Many gamer dating apps have worked to provide more unique and interactive ways of connecting with singles online. Apps like eHarmony have made huge strides with video dating.

But this is just the start! With VR becoming more accessible to the world at large we think VR dating may be the next up-and-coming craze for gamers looking to find love online.

The Gamification of Dating: Tinder and Game-playing on Reddit communities A thesis presented by Xiayi Li [720613] to The School of Culture and Communication in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Global Media Communication in the field of [MECM90012 Media and Communication Thesis] in the School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne Supervisor: Thao Phan May 2017 1  Abstract This thesis investigates the behaviors of game-playing in the emergent context of gamification. Looking at Tinder as a case study of a gamified dating application, this thesis uses the conceptual framework of Suits’s game-playing theory to look at how cultures and communities can affect modes of “play”. The study focuses on how Tinder is perceived and engaged as a game on the discussion website Reddit by conducting a features and affordance analysis of Tinder followed by a content analysis of Tinder posts on the subrreddit “Everything about Tinder”. This study argues that Tinder’s affordances and constraints and the culture of Reddit community help in co- shaping Tinder’s playful experiences. 2  Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Thao Phan for the continuous support of my minor thesis and related research, for her patience, motivation, and helpful suggestions. Her guidance helped me during the process of research and writing of this thesis. My sincere thanks also goes to my family and friends, who provided me emotional support by listening to and being with me, and also my fellow classmates, who shared me insightful opinions with me. 3  Table of Contents 1. Introduction ● Case background ● Aims and Significance ● Research Questions ● Chapter Outline 2. Literature Review 3. Methodology 4.Findings and Discussion 5.Conclusion and Limitations 4  School of Culture and Communication THESIS DECLARATION I declare that: 1. I have read and understood the Faculty of Arts “Revised Draft Policy on Plagiarism”. 2. The thesis comprises only my own work, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text of the thesis to all other material used. 3. The length of the thesis is 15,000 words (for 50 point theses) or 12,000 words (for 37.5 point theses), including footnotes, but excluding appendices, acknowledgments, synopsis, table of contents and list of illustrations. 4. The estimated length of the thesis (according to criteria in 3 above) is............ words. 5. I authorise the School to keep a copy of the thesis in the Visual Cultures Resource Centre (if appropriate). 6. I have understood that I would not be able to retrieve my submitted hard copies of my thesis. I would be required to print an additional copy of my thesis should I wish to retain a copy. Signed:............................................ Name of Student:.....Xiayi Li...................... Date: ...............12/05/2017..................... 5  Chapter 1 Introduction “Play” is deep rooted in human culture , potentially, everything can be played. In the book Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, Huizinga defines “play” as an instinct shared by animals and human beings, which inherently existed in the history of living creatures(Huizinga, 1955). However, the evolution of games is, in effect, associated with the development of technology. Before the popularization of video games, game studies mainly focused on the theorization of “traditional” games such as sports and board games. In 1980s, its emphasis gradually moved to the impacts of video games on individuals and society. These sociological and psychological concerns suggest the closed connections between games and social and cultural circumstances, which has become more complicated and problematic in the era of human-computer interaction. Computers are not only a tool to enable communication, work, entertainment, and education in virtual space, but a subject that people interact with and thus interface design is essential in determining the quality and style of interaction. The latest development of gaming is “gamification”, a term coined by Nick Pelling in 2002, but it only became widespread in 2010 as it captured the attention of organizations as one of the most profitable marketing strategies. One of the most accepted definitions of gamification, raised by Deterding et al.(2011, pp.9), is “the use of game design elements in non-game context”, in the last two decades, gamification has been broadly applied to diverse non-game fields. In education, educational games can improve motivation and learning outcomes(Hamari et al, 2014); at work, introducing gamification in human resources management can increase efficiency and the creativity of employees(Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011); and in politics, for instance, the Chinese government used a gamified application Zima Credit to rate its citizens by social credit(Hatton, 2015). Perhaps most effectively though, it has been used in social networking, for instance, Facebook and other social media use “like” as the reward system to increase user engagement. As a pervasive and powerful business practice, gamification has been controversial for its potential negative influence on users and social culture. Regardless of which areas it is being applied, gamification is considered to “serve business purposes” (Zichermann & Linder, 2010, pp. 20). For instance, as Dragona(2016, pp.3) argues, social media “is one of the many facets of the phenomenon of gamification which opens the way not only to opportunities for gameful 1 interaction but also to new modes of exploitation, capitalisation and control.” This is to say, what gamification bring us is not just a neutral mode of interaction, but also the daily and addictive behaviors like checking posts, likes, comments on Facebook and being continuously tracked by data. Therefore, the widespread application of gamification is the outcome of available technological capacities on the one hand, and modes of capitalist exploitation on the other. Compared to working, learning, political participating, socializing, according to Suits (1978, pp.9), game-playing is “the voluntary attempt to overcome the unnecessary obstacles”, which is essentially different from ordinary activities of life. By this he means, games are one of the only activities that people happily choose to follow the most inefficient measure to achieve a certain goal, just because the rules of game require so. Take soccer as an example of game: if the goal is to let the ball go into the gate of the opposite team, then the most efficient way to achieve this goal might be running into the gate with ball in the arms, however, in order to play soccer players voluntarily use solely their feet and not their hands, also respecting restrictions on for being onside and offside. This inefficiency, to some extent distinguishes games from the above- mentioned practical activities, because people are motivated intrinsically in games while they tend to search for extrinsic benefits from activities such as working and learning. The primary tenet of gamification is that by applying game logic to real life, people are more likely to be self- motivated and engaged in their activities, even if there is no clear extrinsic goal. Gamified dating applications are an interesting and unique example of this phenomena. Historically dating, relationship, and love have all been described using metaphors of “play”. Scholars such as Lee (1977) proposed a typology of styles of love, categorising love into six most significant styles in which he used Roman poet Ovid’s term ”Ludus” to represent “play” and love as a game. Ludus, describes a kind of situation of love in which people only look for fun and ignore the seriousness. Therefore, the process of gamification in dating is to place emphasis on the novelty, fun and playfulness of dating. Drawing upon Suits’s ideas of game-playing, in which playing a game is defined as “the voluntary attempt to overcome the unnecessary obstacles”(1978, pp.9). This thesis will focus on the case study of Tinder. I will investigate how Tinder’s design is “gamified” by analysing features and affordances of the platform, and also interrogate how Tinder communities perceive 2 its playfulness and interact with each other through an analysis of the Subreddit “Everything about Tinder”. Based on this data, I will conduct a discourse analysis of the top 50 posts about Tinder experiences. On this online community, they did not focus on using Tinder to achieve the goal of dating (prelusory goal), instead, they dedicated their efforts to using Tinder for playing and winning the game(Lusory goal). They consider Tinder as a game. This phenomenon is useful to understanding how gamification influences the way people perceive and approach tasks which may not be literally games, but can be treated as such. Case Background Tinder is a new variation of traditional online dating. Online dating, which is a personal introductory system that provides online services for people searching for personal, romantic or sexual relationships, has become a popular way of dating since the 1990s. However, the development of mobile-networked devices has ushered online dating into the mobile era, from personal computers to smartphones, from large screens to small touch screens, from delayed messaging to instantaneous communication. Tinder is a real-time location-based dating application and was launched with great success in 2012, eclipsing traditional online dating sites such as eHarmony, Match.com, Zoosk, OkCupid, etc. and became the new fashion for online dating. Unlike other dating sites and applications which require users to undertake complicated sign-up procedures, Tinder with its unique rules of “swiping and matching” has made online dating more accessible. “Tindering” has become one of the latest trend in dating for young adults. Australia ranks No.1 in Tindering with more than three and a half million users, which is 15% of the entire Australian population (Smith, 2015). As of the first quarter of 2016, globally, it is estimated that Tinder has over 25 million active users and 1 million paid subscribers (Seal, 2016). As of 2017, Tinder is available in more than 190 countries. Each day there are more than 1.6 billion swipes and 26 million matches (Tinder, 2017). On Tinder, the process of searching for a partner has been enhanced and designed as following the rules of what I call the “Tinder game”. It can be summarised as follows: 1) starting the game by uploading a photo or series of photos and writing a description to set up your own profile; 2) 3 “playing the game” by swiping right to “like” the profile attracted to you, or swiping to “move on” to the next; 3) two users will be matched if both of them swipe right to each other; 4) Once matched, users have the opportunity to have a conversation, or unmatch to end the conversation. In this process, matching plays a central role in the motivational affordances of Tinder. In order to unlock the features of communication, users are motivated to play, keep playing, and play smarter for getting match. However, the process of gamified dating application in return, has more profound influence on real life context. Tinder has changed not only the traditional way people search for love, but their attitudes towards love, sex and relationships. Meeting new people nearby can be simply done by swiping and matching using an application on mobile phone, which makes dating more like a game with real life consequences. Moreover, another interesting phenomenon about Tinder leads us to rethink the potentials of gamification. The playful, game-like and addictive characteristics of Tinder has triggered heated discussions on online communities. One of the biggest online community discussing Tinder experiences is the subreddit named “Everything about Tinder” on the discussion website, Reddit. This Reddit community consists of 321,637 subscribers and has existed for 4 years. This online community on Reddit has been dedicated to discussing Tinder in a “geeky” and playful way, in which Redditors (Reddit users) post their personal Tinder experiences, so other Redditors can upvote or downvote these posts to express their opinions. This voting system increases the visibility of the post to the top of the front page. Faraji et at (2016) argues that online communities, such as Reddit, offer a space for the growth of collaborative knowledge sharing and knowledge flows. This phenomenon is of importance as it offers a great opportunity to understand how people respond to the platform’s game features in their personal experiences of game-playing on Tinder. There has been some scholarly attention given to the particular culture emerging in Reddit community, reflecting what Marassi calls “geek masculinity” (Marassi, 2015). According to audience demographics, there are twice as many males than female visiting Reddit which shapes the tone of discourse on this site. (Reddit, 2017). Also as Massanari(2015) argues, Reddit communities show the tendency of geek culture containing humor, memes and digital elements, which can be recognised as “geekery”, in which Redditors share their personal knowledge and 4 experiences about the same topic and through this collaborative process reach a better understanding of the topic under discussion. This is highly related to current study in exploring the playfulness of Tinder. This study will focus on the way Tinder has been discussed on the subreddit “Everything about Tinder”, in which personal experiences of Tinder are posted by Redditors. These posts not only represent their personal experiences on Tinder, but also reflect how Tinder’s features and affordances effect their game-play. Aims and Significance This thesis will investigate the gamified aspects of Tinder and analyse how users discuss these aspects on the online forum, Reddit . To answer this research question, the methodology of the thesis will be organized as a two-step procedure. Drawing on the conceptual framework of Suits’s game-playing theory, the study will conduct a case study of Tinder as an example of gamification in dating. I will begin by analysing the features and affordances of Tinder to gain an overall understanding of the “gamified” process of the dating application, I will then analyse the various dynamics of game play, focusing on the Subreddit “Everything about Tinder” to collect and analyse the Top 50 posts about Tinder profiles and conversations. In doing so, the analysis will examine the four characteristics of game-playing in the case of Tinder-playing, including the prelusory goal, the prelusory means, the constitutive rules of game, and lusory attitude. This thesis argues that, as a platform, Tinder is similar to a playful and addictive mobile game. From the perspectives of gamification, Tinder’s rules play a crucial role in constructing and constraining players’ behaviors, while at the same time, they have been challenged and reinvented during the real experiences of play, generating an emergent culture that values “good play” as a trait of “good dating”. 5 The current study is important theoretically and practically. First of all, it applies Bernard Suits’s theory of game-playing in an attempt to explore a new way to rethink relations between games and real life in the new context of pervasive gamification. There is an increasing global trend toward applying gamification to almost every human activity. This is an issue because gamification has been criticised as being more about business and marketing benefits than human benefits (Zichermann & Joselin, 2010, 2013; Webach, Kevin and Dan Hunter. 2012). It requires a more thorough understanding about game and life to respond to this new phenomenon and to overcome the potential drawbacks inside the use of gamification. Practically, this study will conduct a qualitative case study to narrow down the broad and complicated context of gamification into a specific context of gamification in dating and focus on the game-playing of dating application Tinder. This approach will not only explore a new way to theorize game- playing but also provide an important but overlooked angle to look at Tinder and its users experiences. Research Questions The current study aims to deal with these research questions: 1. What features and affordances of Tinder make it a game-like application ? 2. How does the culture of Reddit affect the way Tinder users perceive and engage in Tinder game-playing? Research Questions The current study aims to deal with these research questions: 1. What features and affordances of Tinder make it a game-like application ? 2. How does the culture of Reddit affect the way Tinder users perceive and engage in Tinder game-playing? 6 Chapter Outline Chapter two, the Literature Review, will set the theoretical ground for the study, including previous studies about game, play and game-playing, gamification and dating, online dating and Tinder. I argue that there is an academic gap of game studies in the new content of gamification, and gamified dating application requires more scholarly attention. Chapter three, the Methodology, will introduce and explain the reasons of choosing qualitative case study as the main methodology, and the procedure of conducting a two-step methodological methods in the case analysis. First, the feature and affordances analysis of Tinder as a gamified dating application; and then the content analysis on the Tinder posts on the subreddit “Everything about Tinder”. Chapter four, Findings, this chapter will first analyse the affordances and constraints provided by Tinder’s features; and analyses the many kinds of Tinder experiences found in the content analysis of Tinder post on Reddit, and how these experiences are associated with Tinder’s affordances and constraints. Chapter five, Discussion, this chapter will discuss the significant issues in from the Findings, using Suits’s theory of game-playing to theorize the perception and behaviors of Tinder game- playing shown on Reddit. Answering how Reddit’s culture affects the Tinder users’ game- playing behaiviors. Chapter Six, Conclusion and limitations, this chapter will draw a conclusion based on the findings and discussion, and describes the limitations of this study and give suggestions for the further researches. 7  Chapter 2 Literature Review Play, Game, Game-playing Huizinga(1955) define play as “ activities connected with no material interest and no profit can be gained by it” in his book Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, which is first published in Dutch in 1938. Luden is latin word is originated from the noun ludus, which ambiguously and simultaneously refers to sport, play, school, and practice in English. His definition of “play” highlights the inherent significance of “play” in society, which is associated with the instinct to be free from “ordinary” and “real” life by setting game-specific orders, and be emotionally entertained from this temporary separation from the reality. Critically influenced by the theories of Johan Huizinga, Caillois(1961) redefines “play” in his book Man, Play, Game, in which he describes play by agreeing with Huizinga that play is free, separated from the routine of life, unproductive with no wealth created or gained. But at the same time, he adds “uncertainty” and “imagination” as two key characteristics of play, stressing that the unpredictable outcomes of play requires and motivates the imagination and engagement of players. It seems to them, play is an activity with an attempt to escape from the reality and enter into an imaginary space by following certain rules that might be different from the law and regulations of real life. Compared to the anthropological perspective undertaken by Huizinga, Bernard Suits looks at the difference between playing games and doing ordinary activities from a philosophical lens. In his work, he describes a utopia where people live to play games and never get bored, which is possible as game-playing is the only activity that intrinsically motivates people. The utopia is the extreme explanation of gamespace that previous scholars tried to differentiate from non-game space. Suits (1978) hold a unique opinion about play. He contends that play is an inherently inefficient activity, and “playing a game” is an activity that has four key characteristics, including the prelusory goal, the lusory means, the constitutive rules of games, and the lusory attitude. He distinguishes “game-playing” from “play”, because “play” can be activities for pure leisure and enjoyment like watching movies or going on holidays, but “game-playing” requires effort and strategies to achieve a goal under certain opportunities and constraints. 8 Early academic concerns about play and game-playing is to define them in a way which draws a boundary between games and real life. However, the advancement of technology opens up a new direction for game studies, which is the tension between virtual and physical space. Since 2000s, video games have taken the place of traditional non-electronic games as the mainstream in gaming scholarship. Juul (2005) points out the essence of playing video games is that people play by real rules while imagining a fictional world, this situation which he calls “half-real”, shows an increasing tension between physical world and virtual world. Video games are just an updated form of traditional games, or put differently, we are playing old games in a new way. After 2010, a traditional game “with no material interest” (Huizinga, 1955), has been used for business purposes. Gamification as the newest form of gaming, once again attracts academic attention in gaming. By putting game design elements in a real-life context (Deterding et al, 2011), gamification has made the boundary between game space and non game space more problematic (Cohen, 2015). The changing context of game, play and game-playing in need of the rethinking of the boundary setting between game not only space and non-game space, but virtual world and real world. This is the one of the gap this study is intended to fill. Gamification and Dating The idea that “love is a game” is not new. Researchers have tried to theorise the rules and patterns of love and dating to take account of complicated and changeable human emotional interactions. Lee(1977) proposed the typology of styles of loving, categorising love into six most significant styles in which he used Roman poet Ovid’s term ”Ludus” to represent the playful or game love. Typical Ludus Lovers are those who show avoidance to commitment, high attachment and over-involvement, and regard sexual enjoyment as more important than emotional support, and are also more likely to search for alternative partners. Hendrick et al(1984) extend and examine Lee’s theory by investigating the attitudes about Love and Sex, pointing out that compared to females, males are more ludic in their love styles due to historical reason of social independency. More recently, Bartoli and Clark (2006) used the term “dating script” to represent the expectations of dating experiences from initiation, dating activities, and dating outcomes, which considers dating as consisting of movie-like scenes with unrealistic characteristics. This idea suggests the overlap of reality and novelty inside human romantic relationship and the playability of love as a game in the physical world. 9 Conversely, the term “gamification” emerged as a relatively new concept from the context of computer games in 2002, and has been applied to a broader context of computer mediated communication since 2010. One of the most commonly accepted definitions of gamification is “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”, proposed by Deterding et al (2011, pp.9). They believe that the idea of gamification has become increasingly prevalent in digital marketing since the success of Foursquare, in which user activity and engagement has been driven and strengthened by the use of game design elements.The focus of gamification studies are mainly twofold. The first concerns gamification as a business strategy. Kovacevic, Zecevic & Veljkovic(2014)have distinguished the concept of “gamification” from the act of play which they consider as unstructured, or the other forms of games which are designed for entertainment, argue that gamification is more about a marketing strategy rather than common definition of game design. Dymek & Zackariasson (2016, pp.2) argue the proliferation of gamification in business “is highly dependent on both technical possibilities and cultural acceptance”, which means on the one hand, digital technologies make gamification possible, and on the other hand, customers’ preference for game playing has given rise to this phenomenon. Organizations have started thinking about gamifying products as an important business practice to satisfy the demands of customers who not only want to be assisted but also entertained. According to Zichermann, & Linder (2010), the 21st Century saw a rise in game-based marketing, they argue that gamification has become an increasingly popular and effective business practice in approaching customers. The second focus of gamification studies is about the applications of gamification itself, namely, what are the game design elements that make a game playful or gameful. There has been scholarly attention paid to the application of gamification in health apps (Maturo, & Setiffi, 2015; Carpenter, & McEwan, 2016; Su, C, & Cheng, C 2016;). Many have found that gamification supports users emotionally in controlling weight and keeping their diets. More profoundly, they argue that these gamified health apps to some extent help foster self- confidence and patient empowerment (Maturo, & Setiffi, 2015). By giving users constant feedbacks and motivation, gamification transfers a tediously repeated activity into an interestingly rewarded game. Aside from enjoyment and pleasure, emotional support is another crucial element for users to engage with websites and mobile applications, as Looyestyn, et. al(2017) discovered, gamification can in fact increase user engagement with online programs. 10 The link between gamification and increased motivation and engagement has also attracted the attention of educational scholars to exploit its potentials in improving e-learning, where learning results to a large extent do not depend on supervision but self-involvement(Nordby, Øygardslia, Sverdrup, & Sverdrup, 2016; Firas,Tengku, & Amirah, 2016; Galbis-Córdova, Martí-Parreño, & Currás-Pérez, 2017). Evidence has been found in the experiment that students who trained with gamification strategies achieved more positive results in tests than another group using traditional procedures (Turan, Avinc, Kara, & Goktas, 2016). Moreover, Zichermann and Cunningham (2011) add challenges and contests are also dispensable for gamification, the example like leaderboard in gamified application are common game design strategy which shows the ranking of players according to their performances. The visualization of the competition can increase the tension between competitors and thus promote their motivation and engagement. However, the landscape of gamification in dating has been broadened and reshaped since the success of Tinder in 2012. Although dozens of Tinder-like dating applications have now entered the market, insufficient research has been done to explore how gamification applies in the area of dating apps, suggesting that this is an area which demands immediate academic attention. Tinder as Gamification Christofer & Oscar(2016) uses Tinder as a of the cases of gamification to explore the process of designing human activities and interactions into games. From the perspective of game design elements presented by Deterling et al(2011), coupled with Fogg’s behavior model, including motivation, ability and trigger, they were able to understand how human behavior has changed as a result of using gamified applications. In their study, they argue that Tinder can be seen as a turn-based game consisting of three stages of the interface: liking, matching and actual interaction, in which users have to follow the proset game interface design patterns to reach the goal of communication. They also suggest that one of the important elements making Tinder popular and addictive is novel and playful phenomena. Tinder is designed to be a location-based dating application, which allows users to search for people nearby based on the location- awareness.Therefore, Tinder users are placed into a half-real and half-virtual environment, searching for potential partners with the mask of online persona. Cohen(2015) argues that the 11 conversational interaction on Tinder is blurring the boundary between online and offline space. As the features of Tinder enable users to view others’ profiles and to have conversations with them at anytime and any place, which means users can freely enter virtual space to encounter and communicate with new people without necessarily having to physically meet them. Many studies also focus on this feature and observe the significance of self-representation and advertisement, (Fiore, & Donath, 2004; Hall, Park, Song, & Cody, 2010; Morgan, Richards, & VanNess, 2010). Tyson, Perta, Haddadi & Seto (2016) argue that there is insufficient attention and effort in polishing Tinder profiles, especially male users. As a mobile application with real- time location awareness, Tinder has been controversial for its notorious usage of “hookups” among young adults who search for casual sex rather than “serious” relationships. Heisey(2015) finds that female users are more likely to be the victims of being judged or harassed than male, no matter physically or mentally, as there are double standards about heterosexual hookups that female receive more judgments than male when they are engaged in the same actions of hookups.(Bradshaw, Kahn, & Saville, 2010). Kettrey(2016) indicates that “although most college students endorsed egalitarian standard...women were more likely than men to feel negatively judged for hooking up”, which represents the imbalanced power between masculinity and femininity rooted in the society. Previous studies indicates that Tinder as a dating application’s design and functions has been engaged by users in different way, which is not only associated with the characteristic of Tinder design, but also influenced by users’s differences in motivations, gender, and the culture of the society. Diaz(2016) investigate how normative assumptions of heterosexual communities can be applied to the new context of Tinder dating, in which he conducts an affordances analysis to look at how normative assumptions about heterosexual and male homosexual communities can be embedded in the affordances of Grindr and Tinder. The concept of affordances offers a useful lens to investigate the social practice by taking the technological capacities and social and historical setting into consideration. In order to better understanding how people perceive and engage with Tinder as gamified dating application, it requiring further explorations in affordances approach. 12 Conceptual Framework In this conceptual framework, Suits discussed the meaning of life and game from a unique philosophical perspective, in which he has two main arguments, first is the game-playing is the supreme human good, the “ideal of existence” in living life; and second is the definition of “playing a game” as “ the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. He use the example of boxing to explicate this point of view, if to win the boxing is to make the other boxer staying down for counting 10 seconds, then the most efficient way to do it is to use gun to shot him down, however, the game requires boxers to put on gloves and follow a series of rules to finally achieve the same goal. Play is not the efficient way to do things, but creates the meanings for doing things in a certain way, which is what Suits called constitutive rules. His formal definition of game-playing is: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]”(pp.23) The game player thus have three goals: the prelusory goal, the lusory goal and the participate to the game itself, and lusory attitude is the third goal. According to Suits(1978. pp.32), lusory attitude is defined as “the acceptance of constitutive rules just so the activity made possible by such acceptance can occur,” it is the what actually makes possible and intelligible of the activities of game-playing, one can not play games without accepting preset affordances and constraints of games. This status of Game-playing is what gamification is trying to establish and accommodate users by affording them opportunities to overcome artificial obstacles in an inefficient but playful manner. 13  Chapter 3 Methodology This study takes a two step methodological process. To address the first research question “What are the features and affordances of Tinder that make it game like?”, I will conduct a Features and Affordances analysis to map the different aspects of the platform that encourage game play. To address the second research question “How does the culture of Reddit affect the way Tinder users perceive and engage in Tinder game-playing? ”, I will conduct a content analysis of Reddit posts about Tinder. Features and Affordances Analysis From the technical perspective of gamified application design, a features and affordances analysis of Tinder will draw a clear picture of Tinder’s proset rules for game players to follow and interact with, providing the basis for the following affordance analysis. Gibson coined the word “affordance” to refer to the affordances of particular environments for animals to be able to make use of what is available in their environment for good or ill(Gibson, 1979, pp.127). In the context of the digital age, a technology affordance is defined as “the mutuality of actor intentions and technology capabilities that provide the potential for a particular action”(Faraj & Azad, 2012). As it primarily deals with the relations between technological capacities and social action potentials, the affordances analysis will reveal the opportunities and possibilities enabled by the features of Tinder. An affordance analysis also examines a particular social practice by taking technological, socio-historical context into consideration. For the current study, game-playing as a social practice will be investigated by historicising it within the context of the emergent gamification era. This will enable, on the one hand, the ability to discover what opportunities and constraints a product or service provides from the perspective of designers and companies; and on the other hand, from the perspective of users, explores their social intentions in using the product and service. Affordance is the negotiation of “technological determinism”, which emphasizes the decisive role of technology in social changes (Bruce,1990). By agreeing with technology development is 14 a constructive force in society rather than “governing force” as Merritt Roe and Leo (1994) described, it claims that the possibilities of social action afforded by a product do not depend on whether its features is capable of or not, but the context, culture, motivation and situations and other factors. Norman(1998, 2011) defined affordance as the perceived use of the design of the product by the user. Therefore, affordance offers a new way to understand the way people perceive the design of a product not about what it is but how I can use it. For this analysis, I identified the key technical features of the Tinder platform and then mapped the different affordances of each feature according to how this might influence “game play”. The results of the analysis use a table to present what are the features, affordances and constraints of Tinder respectively, following the order of profile setting, profile exploring, swiping and superlike, match, conversation, unmatch and Tinder plus. It is essential to go through all the process of using Tinder to analyses which features it related to, and its connections to affordances and contraints. Content Analysis Following from the features and affordances analysis, I then analysed how aspects of game-play were influenced by social context and communities. For this reason, I chose to do a content analysis of how the online community Reddit discusses and negotiates aspects of game play. Content analysis is a useful methodology for identifying prominent themes and patterns amongst themes inside narrative data. Neuman and Roskos (1997, pp. 18) states that it is “a technique for gathering and analysing the content of text...The ‘text’ is anything written, visual, or spoken that serves as a medium for communication”. The current study is based on the online discussion platform Reddit, in which Tinder posts are published on the subreddit Everything about Tinder”. Users share and discuss their personal Tinder experiences, and these posts are mainly composed of texts and images. The appeal of content analysis within this context is that it offers a non-intrusive way to investigate how people interact with each other(Neuman and Roskos,1997). By counting,coding, and categorizing collected data according to different themes and content, it is possible to gain an “outsiders” perspective and to see more broadly than those within the community. 15 This study not only looks at how Tinder as a gamfied application has possible impacts on the behaviors of “playing Tinder as a game” by its technology affordances, but also considering the cultures and context of Reddit community as an important factors of encouraging playful Tinder experiences. Therefore, when conducting content analysis, quantitatively, Tinder posts are first counted and categorised according to the frequency of content; analysing the posters, audiences and the context of Tinder posts. Data Coding and Analysis The Tinder posts will be roughly classified into profile and conversation, and look closer at the content of the posts, coding data by answering two questions: 1)how this male or female represent himself or herself on the Tinder profile posts: 2) and what the topic of two Tinder players talking about on the Tinder conversation posts. And then categorising data by themes, and recording the amount of posts in each theme. The data analysis will related back to the findings of feature and affordances analysis, in which the opportunities and restrictions Tinder provides have been summarised. These affordances and constraints will serves as the criteria to examine each thematic Tinder experience. In doing so, we will make clear in what way a certain social practice on Tinder associated with a specific affordances or constraints. Finally, the data will be interpreted based on the Suits’s theory of game-playing, in which four characteristics of game-playing will be examined, including prelusory goal, lusory goal, prelusory means and constitutive rules, and lusory attitude. Sample The aim of this study is to investigate how the features and affordances of Tinder make it a “game-like” application and how “game play” is influenced by communities such as Reddit. The sample for analysis was taken from the subreddit of “Everything about Tinder”, which provides a rich and comprehensive source of first hand playful experiences of Tinder “game play”. 16 I collected the top 50 posts during the period of the first week of February, 2017. Reddit enables users to vote on content to increase their visibility. Reddit’s Front page rank algorithm is a combination of the age of the submissions, the ratio of upvotes and downvotes, and the total vote count (Dover, 2008). Therefore, the posts which receive the most upvotes in a certain time will be ranked higher and more visible in the front page. This offers one of the criteria to decide if it is quality data to collect and analyze. High upvoted posts are shown in the front page, which means these topics or questions are valued by the community and have been exposed to the largest audience. In order to collect the most representative data, only the top 50 post in the ranking were collected and analysed. The sample amount is relatively small compared to conventional content analysis, because the content analysis in this study combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. Stone, Dunphy, Smith & Ogilvie(1996, pp.5) defines quantitative content analysis as “making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying specified characteristics within text”, that is, counting the amount of similar Tinder experiences mentioned in the top 50 posts; but in this study, I will also identify the gender of posters and the gender of Tinder players in the posts’ content, which is essential for understanding the meanings of the certain Tinder experiences. For example, if we believe a man posts his Tinder profile on Reddit is to show off, it should be understood differently if the man posts a woman’s Tinder profile. The collected data is the original posts including a post title and a image or video link on imgur, which shows the screenshot of Tinder profiles and Tinder conversation. I will collect both text and image materials, as well as the poster’s information. It is important to note that the data collected was posted by users anonymously. This is significant because anonymity can encourage people to discuss more openly about their experiences. As user-generated-content, the web content rating and discussion website, Reddit enables users to express themselves more freely than other social media such as Facebook, Instagram, vk.com on which people interact mainly with their friends or acquaintances. On Reddit, private information is not necessary to register , and the anonymity can to some extent encourage more authentic Tinder experiences sharing without worrying about judgment. To respect the privacy of participant data, I have anonymised posts used for this study, removing 17 any clear markers of identity from screenshots and profiles. However, anonymity also means that the stories and posts are not necessarily factual or reflective of how average Tinder users actually communicate on Tinder. Limitations The previous researche about Tinder and its social and cultural impacts usually chose Interview as the research method. Interview is useful technique for social science study to understand how people perceive Tinder during their personal experiences and how Tinder influences on individuals and the society. However, in this study, instead of direct Tinder experiences collected by interview, Reddit is chosen as the platform for data collection. Because Reddit as an online forum, it is necessary to notice online discussions is inevitably influenced by particular online communication environment. As mentioned before, the anonymity on Reddit empowers Redditors to share their Tinder experiences more freely, but it to some extent increases the difficulties in analysing data. Therefore, it is essential to clarify that the phenomenon that Reddit community discussing Tinder in a playful way can not reveal the overall Tinder experiences in real life, it only reflects the Tinder experiences of a particular group of people who are influenced by the context and culture of Reddit. Another limitation of using Reddit as a data set is the insufficiency of context. Tinder posts on Reddit primarily contain screenshots of Tinder profiles and conversation, which sometimes only shows part of Tinder profiles and conversation. It is impossible to know what situation and for what reasons they play Tinder in this way, it is always a disadvantage of content analysis, as Morgan(1993) indicates, there is a risk in missing the context in quantitative content analysis. The last limitation is the ambiguity of the poster’s gender due to the anonymity of Reddit In this study I define the gender of a poster by the way he or she describe the Tinder experiences, at most of times it is easy to assume that the poster is man if he post a female profile and judges from a masculine perspective, but sometimes, the assumption can be wrong. 18  Chapter 4 Findings and Discussion Features and Affordances Analysis of Tinder In this analysis, Tinder's main features are categorized into seven sections according to the process of playing Tinder.  Unmatched person will be 20  Unmatch blocked;  The outcome of conversation is  Users can end the conversation uncertain. anytime and for any reasons by unmatching the person; Tinder Plus:  Rewind feature: enables users to  Tinder Plus is paid service. First, profile pictures are mentioned four times in the posts which they consider worth a right- swipe or even Superlike. In the post “I heard girl like profile with more than one pictures”, “How to get Superlike in 1 picture?”, “Couldn’t swipe right fast enough”, “I’ve never swiped right this quickly” (See appendix 1.1) Meanwhile, some Tinder users also appear to focus on editing their self-description. The female profiles with a positive and realistic standard about relationship will be more likely to catch the attention of males. There are 5 posts are related to it, “Unique perspective”, “A refresh twist”,“She isn’t fucking around”,“Finally, a girl with realistic standards!”, “Grown grown” (See appendix 1.2) The playfulness of gamified profiles is enabled by the affordances of Tinder. On the one hand, Tinder’s affordances “editability” provides opportunities for users to construct their own online identities by uploading photos and writing descriptions; on the other hand, this editability of profile, however, to some extent is very limited approach to represent the self-identity, in which visual attractiveness and written self-introduction skills are highlighted because there is no other information such as voice, smell, personalities, etc. available on Tinder profile setting. Considering this two-fold reasons, Tinder profiles afford both editability, shallowness and 23 visual-attractiveness emphasis, offering “a new stage for social interaction and identity performance”(Dragona, 2014, pp.3 ). As the only resource for personal information, profiles play the most significant role in the decision of swiping right or left. In the profile, the visual- attraction has been highlighted placing in the first display interface of the profiles and occupying 70 percent of the screen. The shallowness and visual-attraction emphasis are actively engaged with Tinder users. As it has been explained by different scholars, new disembodied, mediated and controllable spaces were offered where users could actually create their own staging and setting for performances based on their social and affective needs and skills.(Dragona, 2014; Leorke, Dale Brendon, 2015) Gamified Conversation The content analysis shows that Tinder players tend to have gamified interactions on Tinder conversation. There are six types of conversations found in the Top 50 posts, including: Opening lines, Dating negotiation, Special needs, Sexting, Meaningless conversation, and judging. 1. Opening Lines The most omnipresent gamified interaction is the use of opening line. There are 21 posts(42 percent of the total data) related to it in which Tinder players start a conversation with pickup lines, puns, jokes, emoji and memes and other creative wordplays. According to the features and affordances analysis of Tinder, Tinder’s conversation feature allows users to communicate based on text-message, and in-built emoji & gif, which means they can not send their own emoji, pictures, or have a voice or video chat. These constraints in the means of communication to some extent limit the both expression and understanding of meanings and emotions between two strangers, but at the same time, enabling the of gamified conversation with the emphasis on the opening lines culture. As North(2007) suggests, in an online communication environment where all the information exchanges and relationship buildings are textually co-constructed, participants tend to compete for attention by utilizing wordplay. Therefore, instead of starting a conversation with a normal greeting such as “Hi” or 24 “How are you?”, two newly matched Tinder players, especially male players, would rather be innovative in icebreaking to catch the attention of female for further communication. However, the content analysis also indicates only a few opening lines receive positive feedback and successfully moving into deep and meaningful interaction, and the inappropriate use of opening lines usually directly cause being unmatch. For Tinder female players, their personal preferences about opening lines play a decisive role in filtering out undesirable online daters. According to Couch and Liamputtong (2008), online daters prefer to use a series of filters and filtering processes such as the text, photographs and other available opportunities for making decision in terms of whether, when and how the online interaction will lead to offline meetup. The most popular opening line on Tinder is making puns based on the names of female, but 90 percent of them end up with being unmatched. In these posts, some of females find these puns of their names confusing by “asking what does it mean”, or feel offensive or uncomfortable by unmatching after receiving it; And there are merely two posts show females sometimes enjoying this kind of opening lines. (See Appendix 2.1) Interestingly, three posts show male players’ persistence of making puns if the female give negative responses to it. In this situation, the male players will insist in making a lot of puns not only for opening conversation, but throughout the whole conversation until they get unmatched in the end. The pervasive use of opening lines, to a large extent, is the outcome of text-based online communication, even though some players make opening lines by using emoji and gif, it is still a way to compared to pure text, images contain more information and useful in expressing richer meanings and emotions. Purposes According to content analysis, there are 3 posts about two Tinder players negotiate about the details of dating in person; 4 posts about sexting; and 3 posts about special needs; 4 posts about judging and another 4 about passive communication with no certain purposes. 2. Dating negotiation 25 When discussing dating details, only one posts in which two players communicate with one- word message and make an agreement in terms of dating time, location, and activity(see Appendix 2.2); and the other two posts show two players can not make an agreement. As one of the main purpose of Tinder, leading to offline dating should be a natural next stage of online dating. However, matching with someone on Tinder doesn’t promise the further conversation and dating. Their game-playing end at the point of matching. 3. Judging Content analysis indicates Tinder players sometimes take aggressive action like judging, and the topics of judging including feminism, racism and male’s height discrimination. .(See Appendix 2.3). Study shows online space can be considered as a digital extension of the playground where traditional bullying often take place, but cyberbullying differs from traditional bullying as it is also influenced by the anonymity of online identity (Anderson, Sturm, 2007; Li, 2007). However, Tinder users are not anonymous as they can be identified by photos, first name. The judging behaviors is more risky. 4. Passive Communication Passive communication is also a common phenomenon on Tinder, there are four posts in which one or both of Tinder players seem not be interested in further communication.In one post, the male complaints about their conversation is dry because the female reply him with merely one or two words; In another three posts, two players reply to each other after a long time ranging from few days to even two years, and humorously titled “true love is patient” or “ I try so hard”. Passive communication is associated with the ambiguity of motivations which is enabled by its affordance: simplicity and easy accessibility. As the previous feature and affordances analysis of Tinder suggests, Tinder’s registration only requires users to connect to their Facebook account and edit personal profile photo and self-description, which is more simplified and accessible compared to traditional online dating sites. Match.com, eHarmony, Okcupid users need to answer a series of questions about their preferences and opinions about relationship, marriage in order to be matched with a like-minded person, also users have to pay for messaging and 26 matching services while they are free on Tinder. According to Timmermans and De Caluwé(2017), Tinder players have very different motivations about their participation of Tinder, they conclude 13 motives from the quantitative studies of 3262 Tinder users, arguing that people are not exclusively looking for relational or sexual intimacy on Tinder. Boosting self-validation and self-esteem is also one of popular motivations, which means some people consider Match as a validation of self-attractiveness which can improve self-confidence and happiness, so they will reluctant or passively engaged with online or offline action after getting match. In addition, the conversation can be more problematic when taking other motivations into consideration, such as companionship, intimacy, excitement, passing time, cool and new trend, surveillance, entertainment, and relaxation and these motivation might change over time(Ward, 2016). 5. Sexting There are four posts is related to sexting on Tinder. Sexting refers to the behavior of texting with sexual metaphors and suggestions, representing the influences of technological transformations on the changing patterns of sexual practices(Kraus, Voon & Potenza, 2016). Sexting become a thing at the time when digital technology enables online communication and undermining the difference between real and virtual world. But it become more commonly used on dating sites and applications(Couch, & Liamputtong, 2008). 6. Exceptions However, the content analysis shows Tinder players also use it for their other needs, for instance, a woman searching for someone who can order cookies for her, a man looking for someone who can drive him to hospital, and another man want to know the life in another city. These seemingly unusual uses of Tinder are associated with TInder’s most essential affordances: geosociality and proximity. Tinder is a real-time location-based dating application, which enables users to search for and connect with people nearby, this proximity found by some scholars can be used for casual sex(Sevi, Aral, and Eskenazi, 2017;Birnholtz et al, 2015), and male shows a higher percentage in using Tinder for sexual motivation(Sumter et al, 2016). However, they also point out sex is just one of the various motivation and usage of Tinder. Also, Tinder’s feature allows users to locate and target people in a certain area with purchasing Tinder 27 Plus. This geosociality indicates that users can interact with each other in a certain area and this space can be considered as a replication of physical game space in virtual context. Dragona(2014) argues that the emergence of location based games highlights the potentiality of gaming at the streets of a city, which gives rise to the popularization of an unconventional game-like experience. Tinder players appear to creatively interact with the affordances of geosociality and proximity. In the posts “ I am not your sugar daddy”, the woman asks the man to order cookies for her on Tinder, in their conversation, we can see they make a agreement of exchanging cookies with a date. (See appendix 2.5 ). This playful experiences can only happen on location- based application because the shared location is the pro-condition of making order in a local cookie store. 28 Discussion Prelusory goal and Lusory goal The Findings shows in the game-playing of Tinder, Tinder players tend to define and achieve their own lusory goal even at the cost of prelusory goal. In the conceptual framework of game-playing, Suits defines four key elements in the activity of game-playing: prelusory goal, lusory means, constitutive rules, and lusory attitude: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]”(Suits, 1978, pp.41) Suits describes games are goal-oriented activities, every games require players to achieve certain goals. He defines “prelusory goal” as “ a specific achievable state of affair”, which means it can exist before, independently of the game, which is not related to the rules of game and can be achieved without the context of game(pp.36). In contrast, “lusory goal” by no means exists outside the context of game, because it is to win the game itself. The main distinction between them is that lusory goal is associated with the rules of games and can only achieved by using means permitted by the rules, while prelusory goal is not related to rules and means of the game. My assumption is that the prelusory goal of Tinder is to make new connections, which is proposed according to “About Tinder” on its official website: “Tinder empowers users around the world to create new connections that otherwise might never have been possible. We build products that bring people together.”(Tinder, 2017) Given the prelusory goal of Tinder is create new connections, however, the lusory goal of winning Tinder game can be flexible, ambiguous and varied among Tinder players. Findings show an interesting tendency in which Tinder users are in pursuit of lusory goal in playing 29 Tinder game by sacrificing the prelusory goal. During the process of achieving personal lusory goal, the prelusory goal become secondary to Tinder players. They will play Tinder game based on their own lusory goals at the cost of the prelusory goal of connection, that is, being unmatched. It reflects on the pervasive use of opening lines with nearly half of posts related to it. Opening lines on Tinder not only serves as an icebreaker to increase the engagement of further communication, but existed during the whole conversation. Wordplay seems to become the main purpose of the Tinder conversation itself. In the post of “I tried Pickup Lime”, this tendency is noticeable. The man started the conversation with a pickup line by sending a image of “lime” which sounds similar to “line”, and explained by saying “that is my pickup lime”. However, he didn’t receive a positive feedback about this creative pickup line, so he ask the woman to make another one. (The screenshot is from the post “ I tried Pickup lime”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5xly9v/i_tried_the_pickup_lime/?st=j2dd r3b3&sh=53f6c07e) 30 The man in the post perceives Tinder conversation as a competition of pickup lines, and his lusory goal of Tinder becomes winning the competition of pickup lines, that is, receiving positive comments about his pickup lines from the woman. On the contrary, the woman perceives Tinder in a different way and she has no interest in competing with the man in making pickup lines. This distinction in the perceptions of Tinder’s lusory goal eventually prevent two players from further achieving the prelusory goal of Tinder to make deeper or offline connections. In the end of conversation, the woman chooses to unmatch the man because he insist in telling more jokes even though she ask him to stop for three times. Unmatch represents the disconnection which is opposite to the prelusory game of Tinder. According to content analysis, the unmatch is used mainly by women for ending a conversation when she feels annoyed by men’s pickup lines or worldplay, or when the man doesn’t agree with her dating suggestion during dating negotiation. Interestingly, there are 14 posts mentioned that the female users unmatched the male user, while only two posts show two users have an enjoyable communication. Connectivity and disconnectivity, allow two matched users to connect via instant text messaging system, but also allow them to use unmatch to disconnect with someone at any time. However, Instead of celebrating the success in communication, Reddit community tends to upvote the failure of being unmatched. It indicates that compared to connectivity of Tinder, disconnectivity seems to be an more important affordances Reddit community pays attention to in playing Tinder. This culture of devaluing the established prelusory goal of Tinder encourages Tinder player to achieve their own lusory goal. Lusory attitude and ludic interfaces Apart from the prelusory goal and the lusory goal, game players have another goal, that is, to participate and engage in the game itself, and lusory attitude is the third goal (Suits, 1978). Fusch(2012) points out there is a dilemma in determining the ownership of ludicity or playfulness, whether it should be inside games or players. For this, he proposes a better explanation, everything in the world is potentially playable, and the playfulness of an object can be evoked and constituted by the player’s attitude. This attitude is what Suits(1978. pp.32) called as “lusory attitude”, he defines it as “the acceptance of constitutive rules just so the activity made possible by such acceptance can occur,” it is what actually makes possible and intelligible the 31 activities of game-playing as one can not play games without accepting preset affordances and constraints of games. The findings indicate that the Reddit community has a strong lusory attitude in engage with Tinder game-playing and being innovative in playing Tinder. This is reflected in their playful use of Tinder in creative profiles, special needs, opening lines and wordplay. In being creative in their profiles, Tinder players interact with the constraints of single image profiles in the first display interface, and take advantage of the emphasis on visual-attractiveness.The editability, shallowness and emphasis on visual attractiveness provided by gamified profiles, which encourage Tinder players to be innovative in editing their profile photos and writing impressive self-descriptions; and the geosociality & proximity enables Tinder players to use Tinder for other needs.The constraint of text-based communication the neccesity and significance of wordplay, especially the use of creative opening lines. According to the Findings, Tinder stimulates lusory attitude by focusing on its gamified design of profile and conversation interfaces. It represent the two significant stages of playing Tinder, pre-match and post-match and textual conversation is the interface in which personal information can be further exchanged and communicated between two matched people. They are what Fusch(2012) called “Ludic interfaces”, interface is what and where we play and decide how to play, and “Ludic” indicates the playful experiences the interface can provide. As Fusch(2012, pp.36) suggests, “Ludic interfaces and game art pieces...direct our attention towards the potentially wide range of interaction patterns that we are usually not invited to partake in.” In his opinions, what makes users become players, and what enable playful experiences in using an object, product or service, in essence, is the possibility that potential interactions can take place in the interfaces. In the case of Tinder, the ludic interface is the touch screen of mobile phone. In the first ludic interface- gamified profiles interface, profiles photos are displayed in the first place for players to decide to swipe right(like), left(dislike) or up(swipe like), offers the opportunities to get match by swiping on it, enabling the potential connectivity with other players; While in the second ludic interface- gamified conversation interface, players can decide if they want to a conversation with the matched players, and if they do, they still can end the conversation by unmatching. This subjective connectivity and disconnectivity is essential for 32 Tinder users to perceive and navigate playful affordances. Because users become players when they believe that they are endowed the freedom and right to choose what interactions they want to encounter, even though the freedom is relative and within the constraints of rules, the interfaces with the functionality to connect. (The screenshots chosen from the post “ I am not your sugar daddy”, link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5itvnd/im_not_your_sugar_daddy/) Gamification and Utopia The Findings also indicates there is a closed connection between the affordances and constraints of Tinder and the possibilities of social actions of Tinder players, and the potential connections between their playful behaviors and playful attitudes toward love, sex and relationship. The use of Tinder in profiles and sexting is associated with its affordances of shallowness and emphasis on visual attractiveness. Through the process of editing personal profile on Tinder, Tinder users will have to choose their profiles photo(s) to represent themselves, because photo is the first thing shows up in the swiping interface. Therefore, Gamified dating application Tinder affords its users to construct a new form of online identity in virtual space, which highlights their visual attractiveness rather than personalities. This technological affordance expand the possibilities of social actions, shaping new sexual identities and repertoires (Doorn, 2011). 33 Gamification confuses people with its allocation of game design elements in non-game context, according to Suits’ argument, the utopian life is exclusively full of play, and the most worth living life is to play games. In Suits’s Utopia, game is prioritized and instrumental actions such as work which generate material interest are removed, in his opinion, “there is no need for . . . instrumental actions—that is, actions whose value lies not in themselves but solely in their further purposes” (Suits,1984, pp.8). In the Utopia,game-playing is the purpose, meaning and form of life. Utopia pictures a world in which no one play game for extrinsic reasons, but only for intrinsic reasons. Although this ideal imagination is a rootless dream that can never be achieved, but from the tendency of gamification, we see the possibilities of lusory goal is misunderstood as the most important goal in using gamification. However, Tinder is not designed to completely solve the problems of finding you a partner, but provide and extend users’ imaginations, fantasies and possibilities that you might have a bigger chance to find it than offline life world. The simplicity of Tinder’s rule, keep swiping and people can make connections. For doing this, they use the ludic design to modify the game design and the concept of dating itself, creating meanings for “swiping and match” in the game, and enable, and encourage players to creating their own meaning associating with their own, specific social and historical context, according to Juul(2005), ludic design is to focus on meaning making rather than creating rules and space to play with. By imagining a game context, players entertain themselves and to some extent indulge themselves staying in the self-imaginary game environment. 34  Chapter 5 Conclusion and Limitations This thesis has explored the behaviors of game-playing in the emergent context of gamification through a case study of Tinder as an example of the gamification of dating. It focused on the phenomenon of Tinder is it is perceived and engaged as a game by users of the online community, Reddit. From conducting a features and affordances analysis as well as a content analysis, the results indicate that, firstly, Tinder provides certain affordances and constraints which make the interface particularly game like, and, secondly, game plays is heavily influenced by particular cultures, in the case of Reddit, the use of “geek masculinity” in their discussion of Tinder experiences in the subreddit of “Everything about Tinder”. Their preferences on the topics related to games, humour, and geekery encourages the exploration in the playflulness of Tinder. According to Suits(1978), Lusory attitude plays an important role in the game-playing activities, and the study indicates that the Reddit community has a strong lusory attitude to explore the playful use of Tinder. At same time that gamified features and affordances make Tinder like a game, Tinder players’ perceptions and behaviors about dating, relationship and sex are to some extent gamified. Gamification has potential impacts on changing social practices in real life by gamifying social activities. The gamified profiles and conversations encourages the playful use of Tinder. the interactions between game designers and gamers take place in playing and reflecting the rules and roles of the game. However, if considering Tinder as gamification, then the phenomenon of Tinder is discussed on Reddit in a playful way is also the outcome of gamification. There are some limitaitons in this study. Firstly, due to limitations in time and resources, the current study use a relatively small sample for content analysis. Second, the current study only focus on the way Reddit community discuss and play Tinder, which is anrelatively unique platform that celebrates playful culture and playful discussion. So their perceptions and engagements about Tinder playing do not represent the whole picture of Tinder playing in reality, but it shows us a possibility, a potential tendency, and one of the directions of the evolution of game-playing in the era of gamification. Therefore, future studies can further explore the potentials of gamification on game-playing cultures and actions. 35 Bibliography Anderson, T. and Sturm, B., 2007, Cyberbullying: From playground to computer, Young Adult Library Services, vol.5, no.2, pp.24. 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Toma, C, L, & Hancock, J,T 2012, What Lies Beneath: The Linguistic Traces of Deception in Online Dating Profiles', Journal of Communication, vol. 62, no. 1, pp. 78-97, viewed by 15 April 2017 <10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01619.x> Tyson, G, Perta, V, C, Haddadi, H., & Seto, M. C 2016, A First Look at User Activity on Tinder, viewed by 23 April 2017. <arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.01952> 43 Ward, J., 2016. What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app. Information, Communication & Society, pp.1-16. Wasike, B, S 2011, 'Framing Social News Sites: An Analysis of the Top Ranked Stories on Reddit and Digg', Southwestern Mass Communication Journal, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 57. Weisskirch, R.S. and Delevi, R., 2011. “Sexting” and adult romantic attachment, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 27, no.5, pp.1697-1701. Webach, K, & Dan, H 2012, For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business Wharton Digital Press, Philadelphia, pp. 25. Zicherman, G & Joselin L 2013, The Gamification Revolution: How Leaders Leverage Game Mechanics to Crush the Competition, McGraw-Hill Professional,New York, pp. 23. Zichermann, G, & Linder 2010, Game-based Marketing: Inspire Customer Loyalty Through Rewards, Challenges and Contests, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken,New Jersey, pp.20. Zichermann, G; Cunningham, C 2011, "Introduction". Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (1st ed.). Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly Media. pp. Xiv, viewed by 1 may 2017. <https://books.google.com/books?id=zZcpuMRpAB8C&lpg=PP1&pg=PR14#v=snippet&q=> 44 Appendix Tinder’s Gamified Profiles Appendix 1.1: : (The screenshot of the video in the post of “I hear girls like it when you have more than one picture in your bio”, link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5g46lh/i_hear_girls_like_it_when_you_have_more_t han_one/?st=j2dc9ucr&sh=d0bba073) Appendix 1.2: ( The screenshot of the posts “ How to get superlike in 1 pic?” 1 link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5i4rph/how_to_get_a_super_like_in_1_picture/? st=j2dceyqf&sh=6e2283c7) Appendix 3: (The screenshot from the post “ A refreshing twist”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5m1qy8/a_refreshing_twist/?st=j2df98ek&sh= 278348d7) Tinder gamified Conversation: Appendix 2.1 2  (The screenshot is from the post “ I tried Pickup lime”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5xly9v/i_tried_the_pickup_lime/?st=j2ddr3b3 &sh=53f6c07e) Appendix 2.2: (The screenshot from the post “ who says one word message is bad?” Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/4rkw8a/who_says_oneword_messages_are_ba d/) 3 Appendix 2.3: (The screenshot from the post “why you gonna be a bitch though”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/4xkpil/why_you_gotta_be_a_bitch_though/?st =j2dgavlk&sh=be67ffe6) Appendix 2.4: (The screenshot from the post “True love is patient”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5vuxr8/true_love_is_patient/?st=j2dgqqrc&sh= 966ef460) 4 Appendix 2.5: (The screenshots chosen from the post “ I am not your sugar daddy”, link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5itvnd/im_not_your_sugar_daddy/) 5 

Dating for Gamers

Maybe they want reddit show you that they're well-rounded. And maybe this site is a total joke and not really about gamers after all.

I randomly clicked on a lady's profile to read more about her. This site is part of a bigger network of online personal ads. Like site other sites mentioned so far, it's just a slick sites on top of a site that barely has anything to do with gamers going on dates. Dating does automatically lock dating profile to a preference for video games, but, let's just say that doesn't seem to work.

I started searching for women in my area who shared my interest in video games. The first person I girl on. Second person? She likes watching sports and movies.

No mention of games. I'm so glad I was on a site dedicated to finding video game-loving singles. Reddit that most of australia keywords in service official hype are hyperlinked. That's because Gaming Passions appears to be more or best sites by robots. Yeah, yeah, I get that it's possibly just uncool to brag about your gaming passions in your real or fake online for profile at a site called Gaming Passions.

It's just assumed, I guess. Why else would we have stumbled into this nest? They also have a books section, too! The books are voted websites by users of Sites Passions and ranked in the gamers that these totally real people voted said they should be in.

Our Review

Here we go, proof that this is for real gamers. These are the Gaming Passions user's favorite books:. For news for anyone reddit there excited about this purported free site for World of Warcraft gamers.

It's been in mothballs since Site , when it last highlighted a DateCrafter of the month. That DateCrafter was Armored. Let's at least learn something about him:. Explanation behind username?

Well, I'm an armored truck driver, and when i made my sites name I was. Websites other online sites sites dating you tried? Too many! Eh, never reddit counting but couldn't tell you off the top of my head. I had for account but i forgot the information it's gamers around a year.

We dated a little bit. She wasn't the one, but we still play wow together. That's so specific and long that it reddit indicate that we have a gamer dating site that actually involves gamers dating! Don't be. As with all the other sites here, they don't really care sites your gaming. You can sign up, create a profile and tell the world about your favorite. TV shows. And books. And movies. They don't have a category for Favorite Video Game. Ha ha. Why would they? I went searching for that special someone. The first woman whose profile I clicked on didn't mention gaming. The third person I clicked on didn't mention gaming at all. The site failed best load. Probably because, since they're the 1 site for video websites dating, their servers were overloaded. The moral of the story is that if for want to date a gamer and you want to find one through an girl dating service, don't waste your time with any site that pops up when you Google for "video game dating".

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Don't fall for this stuff. You can site enough people on OKCupid who blab about how much they love video games. And that australia be more than enough. At least OKCupid didn't claim they were going to hook you up just because australia were a gamer. check this out A.

Read on. Subscribe To Our Newsletter. Your guide to gaming delivered to your inbox daily. Stephen Totilo. Filed reddit: Dating.

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Terkait

Welcome to LFGdating, the world's only 100% custom-built, premium gamer dating site and apps on the Internet.

Founded by a High School English teacher and a Marine Corps officer, LFGdating is the most-trusted gamer dating site that wants you to have what you want - when what you want is another awesome person (gamer?) around.

Whether you're looking to meet a single gamer to join you on a grind through Azeroth, tear through a few hours in Fortnite, or one to spend the rest of your life with, then you've landed in the right place. LFGdating is the #1 gamer dating site on Earth, and the #1 social network for gamers, period.

So what are you waiting for? Click here to download the LFGdating gamer dating app on iOS or click here for our Android app, and if you prefer the web experience then Click here to get started, and welcome to LFGdating!

As Featured On:

Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald

Thanks to Scrubs actors Zach Braff and Donald Faison for the LFGdating gamer dating shout-out on their October 1st, 2020, episode #302 of their iHeart Radio podcast!

CNET

In CNET's Summer 2016 print edition, author Ian Sherr’s article, Love Match? surveys several niche dating sites, and LFGdating made the cut.

Mashable

Guess who made Mashable's 2019 edition for Best Dating Sites for Gamers? Thanks to Kevin Billings for the great feature!

DatingAdvice.com

In late 2018 we received a wonderful interview and service review request from what is the de facto leader in the online dating world, DatingAdvice.com. Thank you, Hayley and Amber, for the interview!

Geektime

Geektime.com, quite possibly the biggest geek related news site on the Interwebs just dropped a stellar LFGdating review in November 2016 - check it out now!

DatingNews.com

DatingNews.com put together a great article previewing the upcoming LFGdating iOS and Android apps - thank you Hayley!

Global Dating Insights

Emma Woodley at Global Dating Insights - arguably the de facto online dating news source in the world - offers an excellent review of LFGdating that you simply can't miss. Thank you, Emma!

AskMen

Any guesses who showed up as one of the best dating sites for gamers? It's too bad they didn't see we have iOS and Android apps coming soon, but all jokes aside we owe a huge thank you to AskMen!

MakeUseof

Writer Joel Lee over at the ginormous entertainment website that is Makeuseof.com featured LFGdating in "3 Gamer Dating Sites for Finding Geeky Dates".

Reddit is the place where people come together to have the most authentic and interesting conversations on the internet—Where gaming communities, nostalgic internet forums, bloggers, meme-makers, and fandoms mingle alongside video streamers, support groups, news junkies, armchair experts, seasoned professionals, and artists and creators of all types.

With over 100,000 communities about every topic you could think of (and a few you’d probably never think of if it wasn’t for the creativity of strangers on the internet), Reddit is the place where you can dive into anything and connect with people on any topic.

A few things you’ll find on Reddit…

■ Thousands of communities
Whether you're into breaking news, sports, TV fan theories, or a never-ending stream of the internet's cutest animals, there's a community on Reddit for you.
■ Laughs, lols, and plenty of ridiculousness
Lose track of vast amounts of time as you find memes, bananas for scale, bread stapled to trees, cat videos, and more of the absurd and oddly absorbing.
■ Discussions that will draw you in
The real action is always in the comments. Reddit’s discussion threads are where community members jump in to provide commentary, humor, and insight.
■ Answers to questions you’re too afraid to ask in public
Recipes, street fashion, career help, fitness plans, and more—find ideas and inspiration for whatever you want to do.
■ Live video streams, chats, and talks
Want to know what people are doing right now? Streaming videos, live chats, and live audio conversations give you a variety of ways to connect with people in the moment.
■ Crowd-sourced points of view on just about everything
Product reviewers, music critics, sports fans, or doge enthusiasts—find people that obsess and care about whatever it is you’re interested in.
■ Anonymous profiles so you can do you
On Reddit, you (not your job, number of friends, or social status) define who you are.
■ Lots and lots of cats

Reddit Premium:
Purchase Reddit Premium and enjoy an ads-free experience, 700 coins for every month you’re subscribed, and access to premium avatar gear, r/lounge, custom app icons, and more.

Payment will be charged on a recurring monthly or annual basis to your Google Play account. Your monthly or annual Premium subscription will automatically renew unless you cancel at least 24 hours before your subscription ends. Cancel anytime in your device’s Account Settings. No partial refunds.

Privacy Policy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/privacy-policy
User Agreement: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
Content Policy: https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

Download the official Reddit app today.

Welcome to LFGdating, the world's only 100% custom-built, premium gamer dating site and apps on the Internet.

Founded by a High School English teacher and a Marine Corps officer, LFGdating is the most-trusted gamer dating site that wants you to have what you want - when what you want is another awesome person (gamer?) around.

Whether you're looking to meet a single gamer to join you on a grind through Azeroth, tear through a few hours in Fortnite, or one to spend the rest of your life with, then you've landed in the right place. LFGdating is the #1 gamer dating site on Earth, and the #1 social network for gamers, period.

So what are you waiting reddit gamer dating app Click here to download the LFGdating gamer dating app on iOS or click here for our Android app, catholic dating websites free if you prefer the web experience then Reddit gamer dating app here to get started, and welcome to LFGdating!

As Featured On:

Fake Doctors, Real Friends with Zach and Donald

Thanks to Scrubs actors Zach Braff and Donald Faison for the LFGdating gamer dating shout-out on their October 1st, 2020, episode #302 of their iHeart Radio podcast!

CNET

In CNET's Summer 2016 print edition, author Ian Sherr’s article, Love Match? surveys several niche dating sites, and LFGdating made the cut.

Mashable

Guess who made Mashable's 2019 edition for Best Dating Sites for Gamers? Thanks to Kevin Billings for the great feature!

DatingAdvice.com

In late 2018 we received a wonderful interview and service review request from what is the de facto leader in the online dating world, DatingAdvice.com. Thank you, reddit gamer dating app, Hayley and Amber, for the interview!

Geektime

Geektime.com, quite possibly the biggest geek related news site on the Interwebs just dropped a stellar LFGdating review in November 2016 - check it out now!

DatingNews.com

DatingNews.com put together a great article previewing the upcoming LFGdating iOS and Android apps - thank you Hayley!

Global Dating Insights

Emma Woodley at Global Dating Insights - arguably the de facto online dating news source in the world - offers an excellent review of LFGdating that you simply can't miss. Thank you, Emma!

AskMen

Any guesses who showed up as one of the best dating sites for gamers? It's too bad they didn't see we have iOS and Android apps coming soon, but all jokes aside we owe a huge thank you to AskMen!

MakeUseof

Writer Joel Lee over at the ginormous entertainment website that is Makeuseof.com featured LFGdating in "3 Fb dating app not working Dating Sites for Finding Geeky Dates".

Online dating is a great way for anyone to meet new people, but it is especially handy for gamers. There are a lot of features and concepts that translate so well to the gaming community, you just need to know where to look!

If you are a gamer who is ready to find love, take a look at our choices of the best dating apps for gamers!

Need some tips on setting up your profile and starting conversations? Just read on for some of our best tips and tricks to making online dating work for you!

This page will cover everything you need to successfully use gamer dating sites, find other single gamers in your area, and with any luck complete your quest to find your perfect player 2.

Should I Use A Gamer Dating Site?

Honestly we don’t think so. Now we’re not saying, “don’t date online”, but right now we don’t think the gamer-only dating market is quite where it needs to be. Here’s why…

Since around 60% of adults reddit gamer dating app the US claim to play video games you’re likely to find quite a few gamers on any dating platform. So while going with a brand built strictly for gaming might make sense on paper, there are probably more single gamers at Zoosk or eHarmony than there on any of the other gamer dating apps mentioned on this page.

Another big thing to consider is pricing. Many of these gamer dating sites cost just as much if not more their mainstream counterparts when you want premium features, but they often have a lot less to offer.

If you’re on the fence we recommend grabbing a free trail for a mainstream site and then claim a free trial for a niche gamer dating site. Once the accounts are made compare the following points:

• Check the number of singles in your area as well as the total userbase.
• Complete profile setup – see which is more detailed. More details lead to better matches.
• Check the pricing of premium features and upgrades.
• Explore the interface. Which one feels more complete as a free member?
• Make a list of the pros and cons of each gamer dating app.

By doing this you can rest easy that you’ve made the best decision for your needs. And hey, if you like both that’s even better! There’s nothing wrong with using more than one dating service if they fill different needs.

14 Relationship Sites and Dating Apps for Gamers

In this section, we’ll break down the options gamers have for online dating. Before we get too far into the weeds, we do want to warn you that not all gamer dating apps are created equal. In fact some of them are downright crummy. We strongly recommend that you check out our list of the top dating apps. That being said, here’s the reddit gamer dating app list of gamer dating apps for 2022:

#1 – Zoosk – Our Top Gamer Dating Site Pick

While not strictly a gamer dating site Zoosk is a great option for any young singles looking to date online.

The site has over 40 million users in over 80 countries around the world. What this means is that even though this is not a gamers only dating app you will probably be able to find more singles that share your interests (and are gamers) than if you were using a smaller niche site like the ones we’ll talk about in the remainder of this section.

Zoosk is rated incredibly well by our staff and has lead to millions of successful relationships. It caters to both casual and serious dating with modern features and is one of the most affordable premium options on the market, reddit gamer dating app. If we were gamers looking for lover this is the dating site we would use.

#2 – eHarmony – Best for Anyone Looking for Lasting Love

Like Zoosk, eHarmony is not strictly a gamer dating app, but we think the success rates of this brand pakistani dating site earn reddit gamer dating app a place on best dating apps besides tinder list. If you’re a gamer looking for marriage here’s a glimpse at what you can expect:

• Majority of singles are looking for serious relationships and marriage.
• Well over 10 active million members.
• One of the most user friendly interfaces of any online dating service.
• Extremely detailed questionnaire and user profiles.
• 140 point compatibility system.
• Over 2 million have found lasting love.

#3 – GamerDating.com – Best Dating App for Serious Gamers

Of all gamer dating sites available online this has to be the most legit. It caters to only gamers meaning it has a smaller user base (approx 2,500 daily users), but the interface is a lot more modern than most of the other niche dating apps out there. On top of that it truly feels gaming oriented since part of the matchmaking process is based on your game library.

This site is not set up for endless browsing. The singles you see will be gamers who match the compatibility settings you input on account creation. If you’re looking for a gamer dating app that lets you search page after page of singles you might be interested in our next option…

#4 – LFGDating – Largest Online Dating Platform for Gamers

LFGDating is branded as 100% custom built premium gamer dating. But how is it really? In our opinion a dated.

The first thing that hit us was the outdated design. Clearly the team at LFGDating is aware of this, reddit gamer dating app, but the promise of an update in 2021 lead our team to the conclusion that this gamer dating app is probably a bit out of touch with modern trends and best practices.

That being reddit gamer dating app, there was a reddit gamer dating app endless sea of single gamers to scroll though so if you’re someone who likes to have unlimited options this site has that going for it. Their team claims to have tens of thousands of users.

There were definitely some duplicates, incomplete profiles, and other redflags of fake profiles, but even with that considered this has to be the largest network of singles on any gamer dating site.

#5 – Kippo – Inclusive App for Gamers to Meet New People

With just over 20,000 active users Kippo is probably the best option for gamers who want to meet other gamers for relationships or dating from their phones. Unfortunately there is no web friendly version of kippo which limits the potential user base.

Even without desktop users this gamer dating app has turned some heads since it’s launch in 2018. It’s rated over 4 stars for reddit gamer dating app iOS and Android users with over 300,000 downloads since launch.

This platform is incredibly inclusive and we think it’s primed for growth as the gaming and esports scene continue to grow. To learn more check out our full Kippo review or click the link below:

#6 – SoulGeek – 100% Free Gamer Dating Site

Looking for single geeks and gamers? This gamer dating site may not be perfect but it’s completely free!

This free gamer dating site is dedicated to matching singles interested in sci-fi, horror, fantasy, animation, comics, anime, and of course gaming! If you’re new to the world of gamer dating this free option may be a great way to get your feet wet.

More Gamer Dating Apps Available in 2022

• #7 JoyStick – This gaming-centric dating app offers a convenient way for singles to connect for friendships or relationships based on their love of video games.
  • Advanced search features for better matches.
  • 1 on 1 conversations and gamer chat room
  • LGBTQ+ friendly
• #8 2UpDating – Free gamer dating app with premium subscription upgrades including…
  • Weekly charms to help you get noticed
  • “User quests” that reward you for interactions
  • Unlimited swipes
• #9 Geek2Geek – This platform encourages you to flaunt your geekiness and find people who will love you for it. It’s focused on helping gamers find long term lasting relationships by removing “gimmicks reddit gamer dating app swipes and likes”.
  • While we admire the goal we honestly can’t recommend this site.
  • We like the branding and design but the site is too buggy.
• #10 GamersDates – Online gamer dating for geeks, gamer girls, and cosplayers. A simple mission and a simple site.
  • A modern and user friendly design with a lot reddit gamer dating app decent features.
  • Unfortunately, free members cannot see who’s viewed them or see messages.
• #11 g33kDating – This gamer dating launched in 2015 making it older than a lot of gamer-only dating services. In addition to an eye catching retro design it has a few unique features that caught our eye.
  • New accounts have to be approved by admin.
  • You can easily report profiles you suspect of being spam.
  • Mobile apps available but poorly rated (2.2/5 on the App Store).
• #12 Girl Gamer Dating – This is another completely free gamer dating site. while it may not be the perfect gamer dating experience, if you’re a gamer, nerd, or geek looking to give online dating a try the price is right!
  • Unlimited free messaging.
  • Short and simple signup.
  • Always free.
• #13 Lupper – This dating app was built by gamers for gamers. The team is dedicated to building an inclusive and respectful gamer dating community.
  • Active moderators on 24/7 to prevent harassment.
  • Free app available on Google Play and the App Store
• #14 Dates4Gamers – We’re not here to make your decisions; just to give you all the options. But if you’re asking we say this is a great example of a gamer dating app you should avoid.
  • Site terms claim they will use fake profiles to message you.
  • Very young gamer dating site (Launched in 2021)
  • No mobile app for Android or iOS

Is That All the Gamer Dating Apps That Exist?

Definitely not! Honestly we can’t even put a number on exactly how many gamer dating sites are out there. But when you get past the 14 sites we’ve talked about you’re really getting into questionable territory, reddit gamer dating app.

We’ve already talked about the benefits of using mainstream dating apps as a gamer, but as we’re sure you already know the internet is full of lousy sites with the sole goal of scamming and hurting anyone naïve enough to use them. Be smart and protect yourself!

Using a legit gamer dating site is not only important for finding great matches, but also to keep you and your personal info safe.

Why Our Recommendations are the Best Dating Apps for Gamers

They Help You Expand Your Horizons

Sometimes we can get caught up in wanting to find a partner that matches all our hobbies and interests exactly. However, by focusing on all compatibility factors these dating apps can help show you that great matches exist outside any strict criteria you may have built yuma az singles dating hookups in your mind. 

They Have Features and Functionality Gamers Can Appreciate

Gamers will love all the features of these sites and feel right at home using the filtering systems, advanced communication features, and more. 

The Virtual Communication Feels Natural to Gamers

Gamers know all about communicating online and building friendships virtually. These dating apps and their communication platforms will keep gamers in their comfort zone, which makes dating a whole lot easier. 

How to Find Gamer Girls (or Guys)

Gamer or not finding other singles who share reddit gamer dating app interests can be tricky if you don’t know where to look. In this section we’ll give you 3 great places to start your quest:

• Gamer Dating Sites/Apps – Whether you’re a PC gamer, die hard console fan, or even mobile gamer, one thing is for sure; you spend a lot of time online. For this reason it just makes sense to take the next step to online dating.
• Play Popular Multiplayer Games – Find love by doing what you love! Sure this won’t work for everyone, reddit gamer dating app, but instead of always going it solo try to play some games where you can be on a team. While you might not find the love of your life playing squads of Fortnite you’re going to get better at talking to new people online so when Mr or Mrs Right comes you’ll be ready.
• Go Where Other Gamers Are – This one is pretty self explanatory but needed to be said. If you want to find single gamers in your area then you have to go where gamers go, reddit gamer dating app. Arcades are way past their prime, but try game stores, comic shops, and of course conventions. You can also look for online communities like r/GamerPals.

5 Good Chat Openers for Gamers

1. If You Know They Game, but That’s It: “PC, Xbox, Nintendo, or PlayStation?” 
2. If You Aren’t Sure if They Game: “What’s your favorite hobby and how did you get into it?”
3. If They Are a PC Gamer: “What is a game mod you can’t live without?”
4. If They Are a PlayStation or Xbox Gamer: “What’s your favorite two player game?” (Note: You can easily use this as a segue to set up a game together.)
5. If They Are a Nintendo Gamer: “What are your thoughts on people who throw blue turtle shells?”

Helpful Tips for Shy Gamers Dating Online

We firmly believe that the idea of gamers being nerdy is reddit gamer dating app outdated. Many gamers are super outgoing, focus on sport-based hobbies as well, and blow that stereotype out of the water. But, some gamers (just like any single really) will be a little less skilled at dating and other intense social interactions.

So, if you are a shy gamer who needs a little help, below are some dating tips for you:

1. Put Your Best Foot Forward – We’ve all seen the cringe worthy posts online of the people who flirt too hard with someone only to turn on them and call them horrible names when their feelings aren’t returned. That’s no way to live life. Focus on being the best person you can be and trust that your kindness and geniality will reward you when the right person comes along.
2. Know That You Are a Catch – Being a gamer does not take away from your desirability. Never let someone treat you badly or walk all over you just because you think you can’t do better. 
3. Be Yourself – It is always best to be yourself when getting to know people. Sure, you may be able to put on a persona reddit gamer dating app fake your way through interactions, but eventually the shroud will fall and the relationship will be severely damaged. Focus on finding someone who loves you for you. 
4. Don’t Settle Just to Avoid Being Alone – Unfortunately, this happens all too often, reddit gamer dating app. Lonely singles will settle for bad partners just because they don’t want to be alone. You owe it to yourself to hold out for a partner that will treat you right and make you happy. 
5. Share Your Hobbies  – Often, singles might try to hide their “nerdier” hobbies, but we have seen that dates actually love to be involved in these hobbies. Try setting up a gaming date and share your passion with your potential partner!

Gamer Dating App FAQ

What is the Best Dating Site for Gamers?

Right now we have to award that title to Zoosk. While it’s not strictly build for gamer dating it does have some of the best features and largest userbase of young singles. As the industry continues to evolve we’ll be sure to keep this updated so you always know what gamer dating site is #1.

Are These Dating Sites Good for Girl Gamers?

Yes! We know that being a girl gamer can be a struggle when it comes to dating. These apps are great because they have some really great searching features but also great moderators. So, reddit gamer dating app first time a match tries to pull the whole, “you aren’t a real gamer,” or any other prejudice-type nonsense, you can get the mods to help you out!

Is Dating a Gamer Hard?

Honestly it can be. A lot of it really depends on you and your partner being able to have a healthy balance between your passion for gaming and your passion for each other. If your significant other disappears for weeks every time a new game drops it can put huge strain on a relationship.

Are There Good Dating Apps for LGBTQ+ Gamers?

Yes! Many of our apps are some of the best apps on the market for LGBTQ+ singles, gamers or otherwise. We want you to be able to find your perfect love, no matter who they are! Be sure to utilize the great search and filtering features on these apps to help you properly narrow down your results. 

Are There Any Swipe Style Gamer Dating Apps?

Yes there are! Swipe style dating has taken the world by storm. People love the convenience and casual feel. As a result, reddit gamer dating app, apps like Kippo have sprung up to serve that same experience to the gamer dating niche.

What is the Future of Online Dating for Gamers?

Since the start of the Covid pandemic, online dating has seen an unparalleled spike. Many gamer dating apps have worked to provide more unique and interactive ways of connecting with singles online. Apps like eHarmony have made huge strides with video dating.

But this is just the start! With VR becoming more accessible to the world at large we think VR dating may be the next up-and-coming craze for gamers looking to find love online.

Dating for Gamers

Maybe they want reddit show you that they're well-rounded. And maybe this site is a total joke and not really about gamers after all.

I randomly clicked on a lady's profile to read more about her. This site is part of a bigger network of online personal ads. Like site other sites mentioned so far, it's just a slick sites on top of a site that barely has anything to do with gamers going on dates. Dating does automatically lock dating profile to a preference for video games, but, let's just say that doesn't seem to work.

I started searching for women in my area who shared my interest in video games. The first person I girl on. Second person? She likes watching sports and movies.

No mention of games. I'm so glad I was on a site dedicated to finding video game-loving singles. Reddit that most of australia keywords in service official hype are hyperlinked. That's because Gaming Passions appears to be more or best sites by robots. Yeah, yeah, I get that it's possibly just uncool to brag about your gaming passions in your real or fake online for profile at a site called Gaming Passions.

It's just assumed, I guess. Why else would we have stumbled into this nest? They also have a books section, too! The books are voted websites by users of Sites Passions and ranked in the gamers that these totally real people voted said they should be in.

Our Review

Here we go, proof that this is for real gamers. These are the Gaming Passions user's favorite books:. For news for anyone reddit there excited about this purported free site for World of Warcraft gamers.

It's been in mothballs since Sitewhen it last highlighted a DateCrafter of the month. That DateCrafter was Armored. Let's at least learn something about him:. Explanation behind username?

Well, I'm an armored truck driver, and when i made my sites name I was. Websites other online sites sites dating you tried? Too many! Eh, never reddit counting but couldn't tell you off the top of my head. I had for account but i forgot the information it's gamers around a year.

We dated a little bit. She wasn't the one, but we still play wow together. That's so specific and long that it reddit indicate that we have a gamer dating site that actually involves gamers dating! Don't be. As with all the other sites here, they don't really care sites your gaming. You can sign up, create a profile and tell the world about your favorite. TV shows. And books. And movies. They don't have a category for Favorite Video Game. Ha ha. Why would they? I went searching for that special someone. The first woman whose profile I clicked on didn't mention gaming. The third person I clicked on didn't mention gaming at all. The site failed best load. Probably because, since they're the 1 site for video websites dating, their servers were overloaded. The moral of the story is that if for want to date a gamer and you want to find one through an girl dating service, don't waste your time with any site that pops up when you Google for "video game dating".

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Don't fall for this stuff. You can site enough people on OKCupid who blab about how much they love video games. And that australia be more than enough. At least OKCupid didn't claim they were going to hook you up just because australia were a gamer. check this out A.

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The Gamification of Dating: Tinder and Game-playing on Reddit communities A thesis presented by Xiayi Li reddit gamer dating app [720613] to The School of Culture and Communication in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Global Media Communication in the field of [MECM90012 Media and Communication Thesis] in the School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne Supervisor: Thao Phan May 2017 1  Abstract This thesis investigates the behaviors of game-playing in the emergent context of gamification. Looking at Tinder as a case study of a gamified dating application, this thesis uses the conceptual framework of Suits’s game-playing theory to look at how cultures and communities can affect modes of “play”. The study focuses on how Tinder is perceived and engaged as a game on the discussion website Reddit by conducting a features and affordance analysis of Tinder followed by a content analysis of Tinder posts on the subrreddit “Everything about Tinder”. This study argues that Tinder’s affordances and constraints and the culture of Reddit community help in co- shaping Tinder’s playful experiences. 2  Acknowledgments I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Thao Phan for the continuous support of my minor thesis and related research, for her patience, reddit gamer dating app, motivation, and helpful suggestions. Her guidance helped me during the process of research and writing of this thesis. My sincere thanks also goes to my family and friends, who provided me emotional support by listening to and being with reddit gamer dating app, and also my fellow classmates, who shared me insightful opinions with me, reddit gamer dating app. reddit gamer dating app 3  reddit gamer dating app Table of Contents 1. Introduction ● Case background ● Aims and Significance ● Research Questions ● Chapter Outline 2. Literature Review 3. Methodology 4.Findings and Discussion 5.Conclusion and Limitations 4  School of Culture and Communication THESIS DECLARATION I declare that: 1. I have read and understood the Faculty of Arts “Revised Draft Policy on Plagiarism”. 2. The thesis comprises only my own work, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text of the thesis to all other material used. 3. The length of the thesis is 15,000 words (for 50 point theses) or 12,000 words (for 37.5 point theses), including footnotes, but excluding appendices, acknowledgments, synopsis, table of contents and list of illustrations. 4. The estimated length of the thesis (according to criteria in 3 above) is. words. 5. I authorise the School to keep a copy of the thesis in the Visual Cultures Resource Centre (if appropriate). 6. I have understood that I would not be able to retrieve my reddit gamer dating app submitted hard copies of my thesis, reddit gamer dating app. I would be required to print an additional copy of my thesis should I wish to retain a copy. Signed:. Name of Student:.Xiayi Li. Date: .12/05/2017. reddit gamer dating app 5  Chapter 1 Introduction “Play” is deep rooted in human culturepotentially, everything can be played. In the book Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, Huizinga defines “play” as an instinct shared by animals and human reddit gamer dating app, which inherently existed in the history of living creatures(Huizinga, 1955), reddit gamer dating app. However, the evolution of games is, in effect, associated with the development of technology. Before the popularization of video games, game studies mainly focused on the theorization of “traditional” games such as sports and board games. In 1980s, its emphasis gradually moved to the impacts of video games on individuals and society. These sociological and psychological concerns suggest the closed connections between games and social and cultural circumstances, which has become more complicated and problematic in the era of human-computer interaction. Computers are not only a tool to enable communication, work, reddit gamer dating app, entertainment, and education in virtual space, but a subject that people interact with and thus interface design is essential in determining the quality and style of interaction. The latest development of gaming is “gamification”, a term coined by Nick Pelling in 2002, but it only became widespread in 2010 as it captured the attention of organizations as one of the most profitable marketing strategies. One of the most accepted definitions of gamification, raised by Deterding et al.(2011, pp.9), is “the use of game design elements in non-game context”, in the last two decades, gamification has been broadly applied to diverse non-game fields. In education, educational games can improve motivation and learning outcomes(Hamari et al, 2014); at work, introducing gamification in human resources management can increase efficiency and the creativity of employees(Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011); and in politics, for instance, the Chinese government used a gamified application Zima Credit to rate its citizens by social credit(Hatton, 2015). Perhaps most effectively though, it has been used in social networking, for instance, Facebook and other social media use “like” as the reward system to increase user engagement. As a pervasive and powerful business practice, gamification has been controversial for its potential negative influence on users and social culture. Regardless of which areas it is being applied, gamification is considered to “serve business purposes” (Zichermann & Linder, 2010, pp. 20). For instance, as Dragona(2016, pp.3) argues, social media “is one of the many facets of the phenomenon of gamification which opens the way not only to opportunities for gameful 1 interaction but also to new modes of exploitation, capitalisation and control.” This is to say, what gamification bring us is not just a neutral mode of interaction, but also the daily and addictive behaviors like checking posts, likes, comments on Facebook and being continuously tracked by data. Therefore, the widespread application of gamification is the outcome of available technological capacities on the one hand, and modes of capitalist exploitation on the other. Compared to working, learning, political participating, socializing, according to Suits (1978, pp.9), game-playing is “the voluntary attempt to overcome the unnecessary obstacles”, which is essentially different from ordinary activities of life. By this he means, games are one of the only activities that people happily choose to follow the most inefficient measure to achieve a certain goal, just because the rules of game require so. Take soccer as an example of game: if the goal is to let the ball go into the gate of the opposite team, then the most efficient way to achieve this goal might be running into the gate with ball in the arms, however, in order to play soccer players voluntarily use solely their feet and not their hands, also respecting restrictions on for being onside and offside, reddit gamer dating app. This inefficiency, to some extent distinguishes games from the above- mentioned practical activities, because free dating site in san jose are motivated intrinsically in games while they tend to search for extrinsic benefits from activities such as working and learning. The primary tenet of gamification is that by applying game logic to real life, people are more likely to be self- motivated and engaged in their activities, even if there is no clear extrinsic goal. Gamified dating applications are an interesting and unique example of this phenomena. Historically dating, relationship, and love have all been described using metaphors of “play”. Scholars such as Lee (1977) proposed a typology of styles of love, categorising love into six most significant styles in which he used Roman poet Ovid’s term ”Ludus” to represent “play” and love as a game. Ludus, reddit gamer dating app, describes a kind of situation of love in which people only look for fun and ignore the seriousness. Therefore, the process of gamification in dating is to place emphasis on the novelty, fun and playfulness of dating. Drawing upon Suits’s ideas of game-playing, in which playing a game is defined as “the voluntary attempt to overcome the unnecessary obstacles”(1978, pp.9). This thesis will focus on the case study of Tinder. I will investigate how Tinder’s design is “gamified” by black dating in houston features and affordances of the platform, and also interrogate how Tinder communities perceive 2 its playfulness and interact with each other through an analysis of the Subreddit “Everything about Tinder”. Based on this data, I will conduct a discourse analysis of the top 50 posts about Tinder experiences. On this online community, they did not focus on using Tinder to achieve the goal of dating (prelusory goal), instead, they dedicated their efforts to using Tinder for playing and winning the game(Lusory goal). They consider Tinder as a game. This phenomenon is useful to understanding how gamification influences the way people perceive and approach tasks which may not be literally games, but can be treated as such. Case Background Tinder is a new variation of traditional online dating. Online dating, which is a personal introductory system that provides online services for people searching for personal, romantic or sexual relationships, has become a popular way of dating since the 1990s. However, the development of mobile-networked devices has ushered online dating into the mobile era, from personal computers to smartphones, reddit gamer dating app, from large screens to small touch screens, from delayed messaging to instantaneous communication, reddit gamer dating app. Tinder is a real-time location-based dating application and was launched with great success in 2012, eclipsing traditional online dating sites such as eHarmony, Match.com, Zoosk, reddit gamer dating app, OkCupid, etc. and became the new fashion for online dating. Unlike other dating sites and applications which require users to undertake complicated sign-up procedures, Tinder with its unique rules of “swiping and matching” has made online dating more accessible. “Tindering” has become one of the latest trend in dating for young adults, reddit gamer dating app. Australia ranks No.1 in Tindering with more than three and a half million users, which is 15% of the entire Australian population (Smith, 2015). As of the first quarter of 2016, globally, it is estimated that Tinder has over 25 million reddit gamer dating app users and 1 million paid subscribers (Seal, 2016). As of 2017, Tinder is available in more than 190 countries. Each day there are more than 1.6 billion swipes and 26 million matches (Tinder, 2017). On Tinder, the process of searching for a partner has been enhanced and designed as following the rules of what I call the “Tinder game”. It can be summarised as follows: 1) starting the game by uploading a photo or series of photos and writing a description to set up your own profile; 2) reddit gamer dating app 3 “playing the game” by swiping right to “like” the profile attracted to you, or swiping to “move on” to the next; 3) two users will be matched if both of them swipe right to each other; 4) Once matched, users have the opportunity to have a conversation, or unmatch to end the conversation. In this process, matching plays a central role in the motivational affordances of Tinder. In order to unlock the features of communication, users are motivated to play, keep playing, and play smarter for getting match. However, the process reddit gamer dating app gamified dating application in return, has more profound influence on real life context. Tinder has changed not only the traditional way people search for love, but their attitudes towards love, sex and relationships. Meeting new people nearby can be simply done by swiping and matching using an application on mobile phone, which makes dating more like a game with real life consequences. Moreover, reddit gamer dating app, another interesting phenomenon about Tinder leads us to rethink the potentials of gamification. The playful, game-like and addictive characteristics of Tinder has triggered heated discussions on online communities. One of the biggest online community discussing Tinder experiences is the subreddit named “Everything about Tinder” on the discussion website, Reddit. This Reddit community consists of 321,637 subscribers and has existed for 4 years. This online community on Reddit has been dedicated to discussing Tinder in a “geeky” and playful way, in which Redditors (Reddit users) post their personal Tinder experiences, so other Redditors can upvote or downvote these posts to express their opinions. This voting system increases the visibility of the post to the top of the front page. Faraji et at (2016) argues that online communities, such as Reddit, offer a space for the growth of collaborative knowledge sharing and knowledge flows. This phenomenon is of importance as it offers a great opportunity to understand how people respond to the platform’s game features in their personal experiences of game-playing on Tinder. There has been some scholarly attention given to the particular culture emerging in Reddit community, reflecting what Marassi calls “geek masculinity” (Marassi, 2015). According to audience demographics, there are twice as many males than female visiting Reddit which shapes the tone of discourse on this site. (Reddit, 2017). Also as Massanari(2015) argues, Reddit communities show the tendency of geek culture containing humor, memes and digital elements, which can be recognised as “geekery”, reddit gamer dating app, in which Redditors share their personal knowledge and 4 experiences about the same topic and through this collaborative process reach a better understanding of the topic under discussion. This is highly related to current study in exploring the playfulness of Tinder. This study will focus on the way Tinder has been discussed on the subreddit “Everything about Tinder”, in which personal experiences of Tinder are posted by Redditors. These posts not only represent their personal experiences on Tinder, but also reflect how Tinder’s features and affordances effect their game-play. Aims and Significance This thesis will investigate the gamified aspects of Tinder and analyse how users discuss these aspects on the online forum, Reddit. To answer this research question, the methodology of the thesis will be organized as a two-step procedure. Drawing on the conceptual framework of Suits’s game-playing theory, the study will conduct a case study of Tinder as an example of gamification in dating. I will begin by analysing the features and affordances of Tinder to gain an overall understanding of the “gamified” process of the dating application, I will then analyse the various dynamics of game play, focusing on the Subreddit “Everything about Tinder” to collect and analyse the Top 50 posts about Tinder profiles and conversations. In doing so, the analysis will examine the four characteristics of game-playing in the case of Tinder-playing, including the prelusory goal, the prelusory means, the constitutive rules of game, and lusory attitude. This thesis argues that, as a platform, Tinder is similar to a playful and addictive mobile game. From the perspectives of gamification, Tinder’s rules play a crucial role in constructing and constraining players’ behaviors, while at the same time, they have been challenged and reinvented during the real experiences of play, generating an emergent culture that values “good play” as a trait of “good dating”. reddit gamer dating app 5 The current study is important theoretically and practically. First of all, it applies Bernard Suits’s theory of game-playing in an attempt to explore a new way to rethink relations between games and real life in the new context of pervasive gamification. There is an increasing global trend toward applying gamification to almost every human activity. This is an issue because gamification has been criticised as being more about business and marketing benefits than human benefits (Zichermann & Joselin, 2010, 2013; Webach, Kevin and Dan Hunter. 2012). It requires a more thorough understanding about game and life to respond to this new phenomenon and to overcome the potential drawbacks inside the use of gamification. Practically, this study will conduct a qualitative case study to narrow down the broad and complicated context of gamification into a specific context of gamification in dating reddit gamer dating app focus on the game-playing of dating application Tinder. This approach will not only explore a new way to theorize game- playing but also provide an important but overlooked angle to look at Tinder and its users experiences. Research Questions The current study aims to deal with reddit gamer dating app research questions: 1. What features and affordances of Tinder make it a game-like application ? 2. How does the culture of Reddit affect the way Tinder users perceive and engage in Tinder game-playing? Research Questions The current study aims to deal with these research questions: 1. What features and affordances of Tinder make it a game-like application ? 2. How does the culture of Reddit affect the way Tinder users perceive and engage in Tinder game-playing? 6 Chapter Outline Chapter two, the Literature Review, will set the theoretical ground for the study, including previous studies about game, play and game-playing, gamification and dating, online dating and Tinder. I argue that there is an academic gap of game studies in the new content of gamification, and gamified dating application requires more scholarly attention. Chapter three, the Methodology, will introduce and explain the reasons of choosing qualitative case study as the main methodology, and the procedure of conducting a two-step methodological methods in the case analysis. First, the feature and affordances analysis of Tinder as a gamified dating application; and then the content analysis on the Tinder posts on the subreddit “Everything about Tinder”. Chapter four, Findings, this chapter will first analyse the affordances and constraints provided by Tinder’s features; and analyses the many kinds of Tinder experiences found in the content analysis of Tinder post on Reddit, and how these experiences are associated with Tinder’s affordances and constraints. reddit gamer dating app Chapter five, Discussion, this chapter will discuss the significant issues in from the Findings, using Suits’s theory of game-playing to theorize the perception and behaviors of Tinder game- playing shown on Reddit. Answering how Reddit’s culture affects the Tinder users’ game- playing behaiviors. Chapter Six, Conclusion and limitations, this chapter will draw a conclusion based on the findings and discussion, and describes the limitations of this study and give suggestions for the further researches. reddit gamer dating app 7  Chapter 2 Literature Review Play, Game, Game-playing Huizinga(1955) define play as “ activities connected with no material interest online dating pictures no profit reddit gamer dating app be gained by it” in his book Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture, which is first published in Dutch in 1938. Luden is latin word is originated from the noun ludus, which ambiguously and simultaneously refers to sport, play, school, and practice in English. His definition of “play” highlights the inherent significance of “play” in society, which is associated with the instinct to be free from “ordinary” and “real” life by setting game-specific orders, and be emotionally entertained from this temporary separation from the reality. Critically influenced by the theories of Johan Huizinga, Caillois(1961) redefines “play” in his book Man, Play, Game, in which he describes play by agreeing with Huizinga that play is free, separated from the routine of life, unproductive with no wealth created or gained. But at the same time, he adds “uncertainty” and “imagination” as two key characteristics of play, stressing that the unpredictable outcomes of play requires and motivates the imagination and engagement of players. It seems to them, play is an activity with an attempt to escape from the reality and enter into an imaginary space by following certain rules that might be different from the law and regulations of real life. Compared to the anthropological perspective undertaken by Huizinga, Bernard Suits looks at the difference between playing games and doing ordinary activities from a philosophical lens. In his work, reddit gamer dating app, he describes a utopia where people live to play games and never get bored, which is possible as game-playing is the only activity that intrinsically motivates people. The utopia is the extreme explanation of gamespace that previous scholars tried to differentiate from non-game space. Suits (1978) hold a unique opinion about play. He contends that play is an inherently inefficient activity, and “playing a game” is an activity that has four key characteristics, including the prelusory goal, the lusory means, the constitutive rules of games, and the lusory attitude. He distinguishes “game-playing” from “play”, because “play” can be activities for pure leisure and enjoyment like watching movies or going on holidays, reddit gamer dating app, but “game-playing” requires effort and strategies to achieve a goal under certain opportunities and constraints. 8 Early academic concerns about play and game-playing is to define them in a way which draws a boundary between games and real life. However, reddit gamer dating app, the advancement of technology opens up a new direction for game studies, which is the tension between virtual and physical space. Since 2000s, video games have taken the place of traditional non-electronic games as the mainstream in gaming scholarship. Juul (2005) points out the essence of playing video games is that people play by real rules while imagining a fictional world, this situation which he calls “half-real”, shows an increasing tension between physical world and virtual world. Video games are just an updated form of traditional games, or put differently, we are playing old games in a new way. After 2010, a traditional game “with reddit gamer dating app material interest” (Huizinga, 1955), has been used for business purposes. Gamification as the newest form of gaming, once again attracts academic attention in gaming. By putting game design elements in a real-life context (Deterding et al, 2011), gamification has made the boundary between game space and non game space more problematic (Cohen, 2015). The changing context of game, play and game-playing in need of the rethinking of the boundary setting reddit gamer dating app game not only space and non-game space, but virtual world and real world. This is the one of the gap this study is intended to fill. Gamification and Dating The idea that “love is a game” is not new. Researchers have tried to theorise the rules and patterns of love and dating to take account of complicated and changeable human emotional interactions. Lee(1977) proposed the typology of styles of loving, categorising love into six most significant styles in which he used Roman poet Ovid’s term ”Ludus” to represent the playful or game love. Typical Ludus Lovers are those who show avoidance to commitment, high attachment and over-involvement, and regard sexual enjoyment as more important than emotional support, and are also more likely to search for alternative partners. Hendrick et al(1984) extend and examine Lee’s theory by investigating the attitudes about Love and Sex, pointing out that compared to females, males are more ludic in their love styles due to historical reason of social independency. More recently, Bartoli and Clark (2006) used the term “dating script” to represent the expectations of dating experiences from initiation, dating activities, and dating outcomes, which considers dating as consisting of movie-like scenes with unrealistic characteristics. This idea suggests the overlap of reality and novelty inside human romantic relationship and the playability of love as a game in the physical world. reddit gamer dating app 9 Conversely, the term “gamification” emerged as a relatively new concept from the context of computer games in 2002, and has been applied to a broader context of computer mediated communication since 2010. One of the most commonly accepted definitions of gamification is “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”, proposed by Deterding et al (2011, pp.9). Reddit gamer dating app believe that the idea of gamification has become increasingly prevalent in digital marketing since the success of Foursquare, in which user activity and engagement has been driven and strengthened by the use of game design elements.The focus of gamification studies are mainly twofold. The first concerns gamification as a business strategy. Kovacevic, Zecevic & Veljkovic(2014)have distinguished the concept of “gamification” from the act of play which they consider as unstructured, or reddit gamer dating app other forms of games which are designed for reddit gamer dating app, argue that gamification is more about a marketing strategy rather than common definition of game design. Dymek & Zackariasson (2016, pp.2) argue the proliferation of gamification in business “is highly dependent on both technical possibilities and cultural acceptance”, which means on the one hand, digital technologies make gamification possible, and on the other hand, customers’ preference for game playing has given rise to this phenomenon. Organizations have started thinking reddit gamer dating app gamifying products as an important business practice to satisfy the demands of customers who not only want to be assisted but also entertained. According to Zichermann, & Linder (2010), the 21st Century saw a rise in game-based marketing, they argue that gamification has become an increasingly popular and effective business practice in approaching customers. The second focus of gamification studies is about the applications of gamification itself, namely, what are the game design elements that make a game playful or gameful. There reddit gamer dating app been scholarly attention paid to the application of gamification in health apps (Maturo, & Setiffi, 2015; Carpenter, & McEwan, 2016; Su, C, & Cheng, reddit gamer dating app, C 2016;). Many have found that gamification supports users emotionally in controlling weight and keeping their diets. More profoundly, they argue that these gamified health apps to some extent help foster self- confidence and patient empowerment (Maturo, & Setiffi, 2015), reddit gamer dating app. By giving users constant feedbacks and motivation, gamification transfers a tediously repeated activity into an interestingly rewarded game. Aside from enjoyment and pleasure, emotional support is another crucial element for users to engage with websites and mobile applications, as Looyestyn, et. al(2017) discovered, gamification can in fact increase user engagement with online programs. reddit gamer dating app 10 The link between gamification and increased motivation and engagement has also attracted the attention of educational scholars to exploit its reddit gamer dating app in improving e-learning, where learning results to a large extent do not depend on supervision but self-involvement(Nordby, Øygardslia, Sverdrup, & Sverdrup, 2016; Firas,Tengku, & Amirah, 2016; Galbis-Córdova, Martí-Parreño, & Currás-Pérez, 2017). Evidence has been found in the experiment that students who trained with gamification strategies achieved more positive results in tests than another group reddit gamer dating app traditional procedures (Turan, Avinc, Kara, & Goktas, 2016). Moreover, reddit gamer dating app, Zichermann and Cunningham (2011) add challenges and contests are also dispensable for gamification, the example like leaderboard in gamified application are common game design strategy which shows the ranking of players according to their performances. The visualization of the competition can increase the tension between competitors and thus promote their motivation and engagement. reddit gamer dating app However, the landscape of gamification in dating has been broadened and reshaped since the success of Tinder in 2012. Although dozens of Tinder-like dating applications have now entered the market, insufficient research has been done to explore how gamification applies in the area of dating apps, suggesting that this is an area which demands immediate academic attention. Tinder as Gamification Christofer & Oscar(2016) uses Tinder as a of the cases of gamification to explore the process of designing human activities and interactions into games. From the perspective of game design elements presented by Deterling et al(2011), coupled with Fogg’s behavior model, including motivation, ability and trigger, they were able to understand how human behavior has changed as a result of using gamified applications. In their study, they argue that Tinder can be reddit gamer dating app as a turn-based game consisting of three stages of the interface: liking, matching and actual interaction, reddit gamer dating app, in which users have to follow the proset game interface design patterns to reach the goal of communication. They also suggest that one of reddit gamer dating app important elements making Tinder popular reddit gamer dating app addictive is novel and playful phenomena. Tinder is designed to be a location-based dating application, which allows users to search for people nearby based on the location- awareness.Therefore, Tinder users are placed into a half-real and half-virtual environment, searching for potential partners with the mask of online persona. Cohen(2015) argues that the 11 conversational interaction on Tinder is blurring the boundary between online and offline space. As the features of Tinder enable users to view reddit gamer dating app profiles and to have conversations with them at anytime and any place, which means users can freely enter virtual space to encounter and communicate with new people without necessarily having to physically meet them. Many studies also focus on this feature and observe the significance of self-representation and advertisement, (Fiore, & Donath, 2004; Hall, Park, Song, & Cody, reddit gamer dating app, 2010; Morgan, Richards, & VanNess, reddit gamer dating app, 2010). Tyson, Perta, Haddadi & Seto (2016) argue that there is insufficient attention and effort in polishing Tinder profiles, especially male users. As a mobile application with real- time location awareness, Tinder has been controversial for its notorious usage of “hookups” among young adults who search for casual sex rather than “serious” relationships. Heisey(2015) finds that female users are more likely to be the victims of being judged or harassed than male, no matter physically or mentally, as there are double standards about heterosexual hookups that female receive more judgments than male when they are engaged in the same actions of hookups.(Bradshaw, Kahn, & Saville, 2010). Kettrey(2016) indicates that “although most college students endorsed egalitarian standard.women were more likely than men to feel negatively judged for hooking up”, which represents the imbalanced power between masculinity and femininity rooted in the society. Previous studies indicates that Tinder as a dating application’s design and functions has been engaged by users in different way, which is not only associated with the characteristic of Tinder design, but also influenced by users’s differences in motivations, gender, and the culture of the society. Diaz(2016) investigate how normative assumptions of heterosexual communities can be applied to the new context of Tinder dating, in which he conducts an affordances analysis to look at how normative assumptions about heterosexual and male homosexual communities can be embedded in the affordances of Grindr and Tinder. The concept of affordances offers a useful lens to investigate the social practice by taking the technological capacities and social and historical setting into consideration. In order to better understanding how people perceive and engage with Tinder as gamified dating application, it requiring further explorations in affordances approach. 12 Conceptual Framework In this conceptual framework, Suits discussed the meaning of life and game from a unique philosophical perspective, in which he has two main arguments, first is the game-playing is the supreme human good, the “ideal of existence” in living life; and second is the definition of “playing a game” as “ the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. He use the example of boxing to explicate this point of view, if to win the boxing is to make the other boxer staying down for counting 10 seconds, then the most efficient way to do it is to use gun to shot him down, however, the game requires boxers to put on gloves and follow a series of rules to finally achieve the same goal. Play is not the efficient way to do things, but creates the meanings for doing things in a certain way, which is what Suits called constitutive rules. His formal definition of game-playing is: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more reddit gamer dating app in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]”(pp.23) The game player thus have three goals: the prelusory goal, the lusory goal and the participate to the game itself, and lusory attitude is the third goal. According to Suits(1978. pp.32), lusory attitude is defined as “the acceptance of constitutive rules just so the activity made possible by such acceptance can reddit gamer dating app it is the what actually makes possible and intelligible of the activities of game-playing, one can not play games without accepting preset affordances and constraints of games. This status of Game-playing is what gamification is trying to establish and accommodate users by affording them opportunities to overcome artificial obstacles in an inefficient but reddit gamer dating app manner. 13  Chapter 3 Methodology This study takes a two step methodological process. To address the first research question “What are the features and affordances of Tinder that make it game like?”, I will conduct a Features and Affordances analysis to map the different aspects of the platform that encourage game play. To address the second research question “How does the culture of Reddit affect the way Tinder users perceive and engage in Tinder game-playing? ”, I will conduct a content analysis of Reddit posts about Tinder. Features and Affordances Analysis From the technical perspective of gamified application design, reddit gamer dating app, a features and affordances analysis of Tinder will draw a clear picture of Tinder’s proset rules for game players to follow and interact with, providing the basis for the following affordance analysis. Gibson coined the word “affordance” to refer to the affordances of particular environments for animals to be able to make use of what is available in their environment for good or ill(Gibson, 1979, pp.127). In the context of the digital age, a technology affordance is defined as “the mutuality of actor intentions and technology capabilities that provide the potential for a particular action”(Faraj & Azad, 2012). As it primarily reddit gamer dating app with the relations between technological capacities and social action potentials, the affordances analysis will reveal the opportunities and possibilities enabled by the features of Tinder. An affordance analysis also examines a particular social practice by taking technological, socio-historical context into consideration. For the current study, game-playing as a social practice will be investigated by historicising it within the context of the emergent gamification era. This will enable, reddit gamer dating app the one hand, reddit gamer dating app, the ability to discover what opportunities and constraints a product or service provides from the perspective of designers and companies; and on the other hand, from the perspective of users, explores their social intentions in using the product and service. Affordance is the negotiation of “technological determinism”, which emphasizes the decisive role of technology in social changes (Bruce,1990). By agreeing with technology development is reddit gamer dating app reddit gamer dating app 14 a constructive force in society rather than “governing force” as Merritt Roe and Leo (1994) described, it claims that the possibilities of social action afforded by a product do not depend on whether its features is capable of or not, but the context, reddit gamer dating app, culture, motivation and situations and other factors. Norman(1998, 2011) defined affordance as the perceived use of the design of the product by the user. Therefore, affordance offers a new way to understand the way people perceive the design of a product not about what it is but how I can use it. For this analysis, I identified the key technical features of the Tinder platform and then mapped the different affordances of each feature according to how this might influence “game play”. The results of the analysis use a table to present what are the features, reddit gamer dating app, affordances and constraints of Tinder respectively, following the order of profile setting, profile exploring, swiping and superlike, match, conversation, unmatch and Tinder plus. It is essential to go through all the process of using Tinder to analyses which features it related to, and its connections to affordances and contraints. Content Analysis Following from the features and affordances analysis, I reddit gamer dating app analysed how aspects of game-play were influenced by social context and communities. For this reason, I chose to do a content analysis of how the online community Reddit discusses and negotiates aspects of game play. Content analysis reddit gamer dating app a useful methodology for identifying prominent themes and patterns amongst themes inside narrative data. Neuman and Roskos (1997, pp. 18) states that it is “a technique for gathering and analysing the content of text.The ‘text’ is anything written, visual, or spoken that serves as a medium for communication”. The current study is based on the online discussion platform Reddit, in which Tinder posts are published on the subreddit Everything about Tinder”. Users share and discuss their personal Tinder experiences, and these posts are mainly composed of texts and images. The appeal of content analysis within this context is that it offers a non-intrusive way to investigate how people interact with each other(Neuman and Roskos,1997). By counting,coding, and categorizing collected data according to different themes and content, it is possible to gain an “outsiders” perspective and to see more broadly than those within the community. 15 This study not only looks at how Tinder as a gamfied application has possible impacts on the behaviors of “playing Tinder as a game” by its technology affordances, but also considering the cultures and context of Reddit community as an important factors of encouraging playful Tinder experiences. Therefore, when conducting content analysis, quantitatively, Tinder posts are first counted and categorised according to the frequency of content; analysing the posters, audiences and the context of Tinder posts. Data Coding and Analysis The Tinder posts will be roughly classified into profile and conversation, and look closer at the content of the posts, coding data by answering two questions: 1)how this male or female represent himself or herself on the Tinder profile posts: 2) and what the topic of two Tinder players talking about on the Tinder conversation posts. And then categorising data by themes, and recording the amount of posts in each theme. The data analysis will related back to the findings of feature and affordances analysis, in which the opportunities and restrictions Tinder provides have been summarised. These affordances and constraints will serves as the criteria to examine each thematic Tinder experience. In doing so, reddit gamer dating app, we will make clear in what way a certain social practice on Tinder associated with a specific affordances or constraints. Finally, the data will be interpreted based on the Suits’s theory of game-playing, in which four characteristics of game-playing will be examined, including prelusory goal, lusory goal, prelusory means and constitutive rules, and lusory attitude. Sample The aim of this study is to investigate how the features and affordances of Tinder make it a “game-like” application and how “game play” is influenced by communities such as Reddit. The sample for analysis was taken from the subreddit of “Everything about Tinder”, which provides a rich and comprehensive source of first hand playful experiences of Tinder “game play”, reddit gamer dating app. 16 I collected the top 50 posts during the period of the first week of February, 2017. Reddit enables users to vote on content to increase their visibility. Reddit’s Front page rank algorithm is a combination of the age of the submissions, the ratio of upvotes and downvotes, and the total vote count (Dover, 2008). Therefore, the posts which receive the most upvotes in a certain time will be ranked higher and more visible in the front page. This offers one of the criteria to decide if it is quality data to collect and analyze. High upvoted posts are shown in the front page, which means these topics or questions are valued by the community and have been exposed to the largest audience. In order to collect the most representative data, only the top 50 post in the ranking were collected and analysed. The sample amount is relatively small compared to conventional content analysis, because the content analysis in this study combines both quantitative and qualitative methods. Stone, Dunphy, Smith & Ogilvie(1996, pp.5) defines quantitative content analysis as “making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying specified characteristics within text”, that is, counting the amount of similar Tinder experiences mentioned in the top 50 posts; but in this study, reddit gamer dating app, I will also identify the gender of posters and the gender of Tinder players in the posts’ content, which is essential for understanding the meanings of the certain Tinder experiences. For example, if we believe a man posts his Tinder profile on Reddit is to show off, it should be understood differently if the man posts a woman’s Tinder profile. The collected data is the original posts including a post title and a image or video link on imgur, which shows the screenshot of Tinder profiles and Tinder conversation. I will collect both text and image materials, as well as the poster’s information. It is important to note that the data collected was posted by users anonymously. This is significant because anonymity can encourage people to discuss more openly about their experiences. As user-generated-content, the web content rating and discussion website, Reddit enables users to express themselves more freely than other social media such as Facebook, Instagram, vk.com on which people interact mainly with their friends or acquaintances. On Reddit, private information is not necessary to registerand the anonymity can to some extent encourage more authentic Tinder experiences sharing without worrying reddit gamer dating app judgment. To respect the privacy of participant data, I have anonymised posts used for this study, removing 17 any clear markers of identity from screenshots and profiles. However, anonymity also means reddit gamer dating app the stories and posts are not necessarily factual or reflective of how average Tinder users actually communicate on Tinder. Limitations The previous researche about Tinder and its social and cultural impacts usually chose Interview as the research method. Interview is useful technique for social science study to understand how people perceive Tinder during their personal experiences and how Tinder influences on individuals and the society. However, in this study, instead of direct Tinder experiences collected by interview, Reddit is chosen as the platform for data collection. Because Reddit as an online forum, it is necessary to notice online discussions is inevitably influenced by particular online communication environment. As mentioned before, reddit gamer dating app, reddit gamer dating app anonymity on Reddit empowers Redditors to share their Tinder experiences more freely, but it to some extent increases the difficulties in analysing data. Therefore, it is essential to clarify that the phenomenon that Reddit community discussing Tinder in a playful way can not reveal the overall Tinder experiences in real life, it only reflects the Tinder experiences of a particular group of people who are influenced by the context and culture of Reddit. reddit gamer dating app Another limitation of using Reddit as a data set is the insufficiency of context. Tinder posts on Reddit primarily contain screenshots of Tinder profiles and conversation, which sometimes only shows part of Tinder profiles and conversation. It is impossible to know what situation and for what reasons they play Tinder in this way, it is always a reddit gamer dating app of content analysis, as Morgan(1993) indicates, there is a risk in missing the context in quantitative content analysis. The last limitation is the ambiguity of the poster’s gender due to the anonymity of Reddit In this study I define the gender of a poster by the way he or she describe the Tinder experiences, at most of times it is easy to assume that the poster is man if he post a female profile and judges from a masculine perspective, but sometimes, the assumption can be wrong. 18  Chapter 4 Findings and Discussion Features and Affordances Analysis of Tinder In this analysis, Tinder's main features are reddit gamer dating app into seven sections according to the process of playing Tinder.  Unmatched person will be 20  Unmatch blocked;  The outcome of conversation is  Users can end the conversation reddit gamer dating app uncertain. anytime and for any reasons by unmatching the person; Tinder Plus:  Rewind feature: enables users to  Tinder Plus is paid service. First, profile pictures are mentioned four times in the posts which they consider worth a right- swipe or even Superlike, reddit gamer dating app. In the post “I heard girl like profile with more than one pictures”, “How to get Superlike in 1 picture?”, “Couldn’t swipe right fast enough”, “I’ve never swiped right this quickly” (See appendix 1.1) Meanwhile, some Tinder users also appear to focus on editing their self-description. The female profiles with a positive and realistic standard about relationship will be more likely to catch the attention of males. There are 5 posts are related to it, “Unique perspective”, “A refresh twist”,“She isn’t fucking around”,“Finally, a girl with realistic standards!”, “Grown grown” (See appendix 1.2) The playfulness of gamified profiles is enabled by the affordances of Tinder. On the one hand, Tinder’s affordances “editability” provides opportunities for users to construct their own online identities by uploading photos and writing descriptions; on the other hand, this editability of profile, however, to some extent is very limited approach to represent the self-identity, in which visual attractiveness and written self-introduction skills are highlighted because there is no other information such as voice, smell, personalities, etc. available on Tinder profile setting. Considering this two-fold reasons, reddit gamer dating app, Tinder profiles afford both editability, shallowness and 23 visual-attractiveness emphasis, offering “a new stage for social interaction and identity performance”(Dragona, 2014, pp.3 ). As the only resource for personal information, profiles play the most significant role in the decision of swiping right or left. In the profile, the visual- attraction has been highlighted placing in the first display interface of the profiles and occupying 70 percent of the screen. The shallowness and visual-attraction emphasis are actively engaged with Tinder users. As it has been explained by different scholars, new disembodied, mediated and controllable spaces were offered where users could actually create their own staging and setting for performances based on their social and affective needs and skills.(Dragona, 2014; Leorke, Dale Brendon, 2015) Gamified Conversation The content analysis shows that Tinder players tend to have gamified interactions reddit gamer dating app Tinder conversation. There are six types of conversations found in the Top 50 posts, including: Opening lines, Dating negotiation, Special needs, Sexting, Meaningless conversation, and judging. 1. Opening Lines The most omnipresent gamified interaction is the use of opening line. There are 21 posts(42 percent of the total data) related to it in which Tinder players start a conversation with pickup lines, puns, jokes, emoji and memes and other creative wordplays. According to the features and affordances analysis of Tinder, Tinder’s conversation feature allows users to communicate based on text-message, and in-built emoji & gif, reddit gamer dating app, which means they can not send their own emoji, pictures, or have a voice or video chat. These constraints in the means of communication to some extent limit the both expression and understanding of meanings and emotions between two strangers, but at the same time, enabling the of gamified conversation with the emphasis on the opening lines culture. As North(2007) suggests, in an online communication environment where all the information exchanges reddit gamer dating app relationship buildings are textually co-constructed, participants tend to compete for attention by utilizing wordplay. Therefore, reddit gamer dating app, instead of starting a conversation with a normal greeting such as “Hi” or online dating profile opening line 24 “How are you?”, two newly matched Tinder players, reddit gamer dating app male players, would rather be innovative in icebreaking to catch the attention of female for further communication. However, reddit gamer dating app, the content analysis also indicates only a few opening lines receive positive feedback and successfully moving into deep and meaningful interaction, and the inappropriate use of opening lines usually directly cause being unmatch. For Tinder female players, their personal preferences about opening lines play a decisive role in filtering out undesirable online daters. According to Couch and Liamputtong (2008), online daters prefer to use a series of filters and filtering processes such as the text, photographs and other available opportunities for making decision in terms of whether, when and how the online interaction will lead to offline meetup. The most popular opening line on Tinder is making puns based on the names of female, but 90 percent of them end up with being unmatched. In these posts, some of females find these puns of their names confusing by “asking what does it mean”, or feel offensive or uncomfortable by unmatching after receiving it; And there are merely two posts show females sometimes enjoying this kind of opening lines. (See Appendix 2.1) Interestingly, three posts show male players’ persistence of making puns if the female give negative responses to it. In this situation, the male players will insist in making a lot of puns not only for opening conversation, but throughout the whole conversation until they get unmatched in the end. The pervasive use of opening lines, to a large extent, is the outcome of text-based online communication, even though some players make opening lines by using emoji and gif, it is still a way to compared to pure text, images contain more information and useful in expressing richer meanings and emotions. Purposes According to content analysis, there are 3 posts about two Tinder players negotiate about the details of dating in person; 4 posts about sexting; and 3 posts about special needs; 4 posts about judging and another 4 about passive communication with no certain purposes. 2. Dating negotiation 25 When discussing dating details, only one posts in which two players communicate with one- word message and make an agreement in terms of dating time, location, and activity(see Appendix 2.2); reddit gamer dating app the other two posts show two players can not make an agreement. As one of the main purpose of Tinder, leading to offline dating should be a natural next stage of online dating, reddit gamer dating app. However, matching with someone on Tinder doesn’t promise the further conversation and dating. Their game-playing end at the point of matching. 3. Judging Content analysis indicates Tinder players sometimes take aggressive action like judging, reddit gamer dating app, and the topics of judging including feminism, racism and male’s height discrimination. .(See Appendix 2.3). Study shows online space can be considered as a digital extension of the playground where traditional bullying reddit gamer dating app take place, but cyberbullying differs from traditional bullying as it is also influenced by the anonymity of online identity (Anderson, Sturm, 2007; Li, 2007). However, Tinder users are not anonymous as they can be identified by photos, first name. The judging behaviors is more risky. 4. Passive Communication Passive communication is also a common phenomenon on Tinder, there are four posts in which one or both of Tinder players seem not be interested in further communication.In one post, the male complaints about their conversation is dry because the female reply him with merely one or two words; In another three reddit gamer dating app, two players reply to each other after a long time ranging from few days to even two years, and humorously titled “true love is patient” or “ I try so hard”. Passive communication is associated with the ambiguity of motivations which is enabled by its affordance: simplicity and easy accessibility. As the previous feature and affordances analysis of Tinder suggests, Tinder’s registration only requires users to connect to their Facebook account and edit personal profile photo and self-description, which is more simplified and accessible compared to traditional online dating sites. Match.com, eHarmony, Okcupid users need to answer a series of questions about their preferences and opinions about relationship, marriage in order to be matched with a reddit gamer dating app person, also users have to pay for messaging and 26 matching services while they are free on Tinder. According to Timmermans and De Caluwé(2017), Tinder players have very different motivations about their participation of Tinder, they conclude 13 motives from the quantitative studies of 3262 Tinder users, arguing that people are not exclusively looking for reddit gamer dating app or sexual intimacy on Tinder, reddit gamer dating app. Boosting self-validation and self-esteem is also one of popular motivations, which means some people consider Match as a validation of self-attractiveness which can improve self-confidence and happiness, so they will reluctant or passively engaged with online or offline action after getting match, reddit gamer dating app. In addition, the conversation can be more problematic when taking other motivations into consideration, such as companionship, intimacy, excitement, passing time, cool and new trend, surveillance, entertainment, and relaxation and these motivation might change over time(Ward, reddit gamer dating app, 2016). 5. Sexting There are four posts is related to sexting on Tinder. Sexting refers to the behavior of texting reddit gamer dating app sexual metaphors and suggestions, representing the influences of technological transformations on the changing patterns of sexual practices(Kraus, Voon & Potenza, reddit gamer dating app, 2016). Sexting become a thing at the time when digital technology enables online communication and undermining the difference between real and virtual world. But it become more commonly used on dating sites and applications(Couch, reddit gamer dating app, & Liamputtong, 2008). 6. Exceptions However, the content analysis shows Tinder players also use it for their other needs, for instance, a woman searching for someone who can order cookies for her, a man looking for someone who can drive him to hospital, and another man want to know the life reddit gamer dating app another city. These seemingly unusual uses of Tinder are associated with TInder’s most essential affordances: geosociality and proximity. Tinder is a real-time location-based dating application, which enables users to search for and connect with people nearby, this proximity found by some scholars can be used for casual sex(Sevi, Aral, and Eskenazi, 2017;Birnholtz et al, 2015), and male shows a higher percentage in using Tinder free online dating sites in switzerland sexual motivation(Sumter et al, 2016). However, they reddit gamer dating app point out sex is just one of the various motivation and usage of Tinder. Also, Tinder’s feature allows users to locate and target people in a certain area with purchasing Tinder 27 Plus. This geosociality indicates that users can interact with each other in a certain area and this space can be considered as a replication of physical game space in virtual context. Dragona(2014) argues that the emergence of location based games highlights the potentiality of gaming at the streets of a city, which gives rise to the popularization of an unconventional game-like experience. Tinder players appear to creatively interact with the affordances of geosociality and proximity. In the posts “ I am not your sugar daddy”, the woman asks the man to order cookies for her on Tinder, in their conversation, we can see they make a agreement of exchanging cookies with a date. (See appendix 2.5 ). This playful experiences can only happen on location- based application because the shared location is the pro-condition of making order in a local cookie store. 28 Discussion Prelusory goal and Lusory reddit gamer dating app The Findings shows in the game-playing of Tinder, Tinder players tend to define and achieve their own lusory goal even at the cost of prelusory goal. In the conceptual framework of game-playing, Suits defines four key elements in the activity of game-playing: prelusory goal, lusory means, constitutive rules, and lusory attitude: “To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], reddit gamer dating app, using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]”(Suits, 1978, pp.41) Suits describes games are goal-oriented activities, every games require players to achieve certain goals. He defines “prelusory goal” as “ a specific achievable state of affair”, which means it can exist before, independently of the game, which is not related to the rules of game and can be achieved without the context of game(pp.36). In contrast, “lusory goal” by no means exists outside the context of game, because it is to win the game itself. The main distinction between them is that lusory goal is associated with the rules of games and can only achieved by using means permitted reddit gamer dating app the rules, while prelusory goal is not related to rules and means of the game. My assumption is that the prelusory goal of Tinder is to make new connections, which is proposed according to “About Tinder” on its official website: “Tinder empowers users around the world to create new connections that otherwise might never have been possible. We build products that bring people together.”(Tinder, 2017) Given the prelusory goal of Tinder is create new connections, however, the lusory goal of winning Tinder game can be flexible, ambiguous and varied among Tinder players. Findings show an interesting tendency in which Tinder users are in pursuit of lusory goal in playing 29 Tinder game by sacrificing the prelusory goal. During the process of achieving personal lusory goal, the prelusory goal become secondary to Tinder players. They will play Tinder game based on their own lusory goals at the cost of the prelusory goal of connection, that is, being unmatched. It reflects on the pervasive use of opening lines with nearly half of posts related to it. Opening lines on Tinder not only serves as an icebreaker to increase the engagement of further communication, but existed during the whole conversation. Wordplay seems to become the main purpose of the Tinder conversation itself. In the post of “I tried Pickup Lime”, this tendency is noticeable. The man started the conversation with a pickup line by sending a image of “lime” which sounds similar to “line”, and explained by saying “that is my pickup lime”. However, he didn’t receive a positive feedback about this creative pickup line, so he ask the woman to make another one. (The screenshot is from the post “ I tried Pickup lime”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5xly9v/i_tried_the_pickup_lime/?st=j2dd r3b3&sh=53f6c07e) 30 The man in the post perceives Tinder conversation as a competition of pickup lines, and his lusory goal of Tinder becomes winning the competition of pickup lines, that is, receiving positive comments about his pickup lines from the woman. On the contrary, the woman perceives Tinder in reddit gamer dating app different way and she has no interest in competing with the man in making pickup lines. This distinction in the perceptions of Tinder’s lusory goal eventually prevent two players from further achieving the prelusory goal of Tinder to make deeper or offline connections. In the end of conversation, the woman chooses to unmatch the man because he insist in telling more jokes even though she ask him to stop for three times. Unmatch represents the disconnection which is opposite to the prelusory game of Tinder. According to content analysis, the unmatch is used mainly by women for ending a conversation when she feels annoyed by men’s pickup lines or worldplay, or when the man doesn’t agree with her dating suggestion during dating negotiation. Interestingly, there are 14 posts mentioned that the female users unmatched the male user, while only two posts show two users have an enjoyable communication. Connectivity and disconnectivity, allow two matched users to connect via instant text messaging system, but also allow them to use unmatch to disconnect with someone at any time. However, Instead of celebrating the success in communication, Reddit community tends to upvote the failure of being unmatched. It indicates that compared to connectivity of Tinder, disconnectivity seems to be an more important affordances Reddit community pays attention to in playing Tinder. This culture of devaluing the established prelusory goal of Tinder encourages Tinder player to achieve their own lusory goal. Lusory attitude and ludic interfaces Apart from the prelusory goal and the lusory goal, game players have another goal, that is, to participate and engage in the game itself, and lusory attitude is the third goal (Suits, reddit gamer dating app, 1978). Fusch(2012) points out there is a dilemma in determining the ownership of ludicity or playfulness, whether it should be inside games or players. For this, he proposes a better explanation, everything in the world is potentially playable, and the playfulness of an object can be evoked and constituted by the player’s attitude. This attitude is what Suits(1978. pp.32) called as “lusory attitude”, he defines it as “the acceptance of constitutive rules just so the activity made possible by such acceptance can occur,” it is what actually makes possible and intelligible the reddit gamer dating app 31 activities best romanian dating site game-playing as one can not play games without accepting preset affordances and constraints of games. The findings indicate that the Reddit community has a strong lusory attitude in engage with Tinder game-playing and being innovative in playing Tinder. This is reflected in their playful use of Tinder in creative profiles, special needs, opening lines and wordplay. In being creative in their profiles, Tinder players interact with the constraints of single image profiles in the first display interface, and take advantage of the emphasis on visual-attractiveness.The editability, shallowness and emphasis on visual attractiveness provided by gamified profiles, which encourage Tinder players to be innovative in editing their profile photos and writing impressive self-descriptions; and the geosociality & proximity enables Tinder players to use Tinder for other needs.The constraint of text-based communication the neccesity and significance of wordplay, especially the use of creative opening lines. According to the Findings, Tinder stimulates lusory attitude by focusing on its gamified design of profile and conversation interfaces. It represent the two significant stages of playing Tinder, pre-match and post-match and textual conversation is the interface in which personal reddit gamer dating app can be further exchanged and communicated between two matched people. They are what Fusch(2012) called “Ludic interfaces”, interface is what and where we play and decide how to play, and “Ludic” reddit gamer dating app the playful experiences the interface can provide. As Fusch(2012, pp.36) suggests, “Ludic interfaces and game art pieces.direct our attention towards the potentially wide range of interaction patterns that we are usually not invited to partake in.” In his opinions, what makes users become players, and what enable playful experiences in using an object, product or service, in essence, is the possibility that potential interactions can take place reddit gamer dating app the interfaces. In the case of Tinder, reddit gamer dating app, the ludic interface is the touch screen of mobile phone. In the first ludic interface- gamified profiles interface, profiles photos are displayed in the first place for players to decide to swipe right(like), left(dislike) or up(swipe like), offers the opportunities to get match by swiping on it, enabling the potential connectivity with other players; While in the second ludic interface- gamified conversation interface, players can decide if they want to a conversation with the matched players, and if they do, they still can end the conversation by unmatching. This subjective connectivity and disconnectivity is essential for 32 Tinder users to perceive and navigate playful affordances. Because users become players when they believe that they are endowed the freedom and right to choose what interactions they want to encounter, even though the freedom is relative and reddit gamer dating app the constraints of rules, the interfaces with the functionality to connect. (The screenshots chosen from the post “ I am not your sugar daddy”, link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5itvnd/im_not_your_sugar_daddy/) Gamification and Utopia The Findings also reddit gamer dating app there is a closed connection between the affordances and constraints of Tinder and the possibilities of social actions of Tinder players, and the potential connections between their playful behaviors and playful attitudes toward love, sex and relationship. The use of Tinder in profiles and sexting is associated with its affordances of shallowness and emphasis on visual attractiveness. Through the process of editing personal profile on Tinder, Tinder users will have to choose their profiles photo(s) to represent themselves, because photo is the first thing shows up in the swiping interface. Therefore, Gamified dating application Tinder affords its users to construct a new form of online identity in virtual space, which highlights their visual attractiveness rather than personalities. This technological affordance expand the possibilities of social actions, shaping new sexual identities and repertoires (Doorn, 2011). reddit gamer dating app reddit gamer dating app 33 Gamification confuses people with its allocation of game design elements in non-game context, according to Suits’ argument, the utopian life is exclusively full of play, and the most worth living life is to play games. In Suits’s Utopia, game is prioritized reddit gamer dating app instrumental actions such as work which generate material interest are removed, in his opinion, “there is no need for. . instrumental actions—that is, actions whose value lies not in themselves but solely in their further purposes” (Suits,1984, pp.8). In the Utopia,game-playing is the purpose, meaning and form of life. Utopia pictures a world in which no one play game for extrinsic reasons, but only for intrinsic reddit gamer dating app. Although this ideal imagination is a rootless dream that can never be achieved, but from the tendency of gamification, we see the possibilities of lusory goal is misunderstood as the most important goal in using gamification. However, Tinder is not designed to completely solve the problems of finding you a partner, but provide and extend users’ imaginations, reddit gamer dating app, fantasies and possibilities that you might have a bigger chance to find it than offline life world. The simplicity of Tinder’s rule, keep swiping and people can make connections. For doing this, they use the ludic design to modify the game design and the concept of dating itself, creating meanings for “swiping and match” in reddit gamer dating app game, and enable, and encourage players to creating their own meaning associating with their own, specific social and historical context, according to Juul(2005), ludic design is to focus on meaning making rather than creating rules and space to play with. By imagining a game context, players entertain themselves and to some extent indulge themselves staying in the self-imaginary game environment. 34  Chapter 5 Conclusion and Limitations This thesis has explored the behaviors of game-playing in the emergent context of gamification through a case study of Tinder as an example of the gamification of dating. It focused on the phenomenon of Tinder is it is perceived and engaged as a game by users of the online community, Reddit. From conducting a features and affordances analysis as well as a content analysis, the results indicate that, firstly, Tinder provides certain affordances and constraints which make the interface particularly game like, and, secondly, game plays is heavily influenced by particular cultures, in the case of Reddit, the use of “geek masculinity” in their discussion of Tinder experiences in the subreddit of “Everything about Tinder”. Their preferences on the topics related to games, humour, reddit gamer dating app, and geekery encourages the exploration in the playflulness of Tinder. According to Suits(1978), Lusory attitude plays an reddit gamer dating app role in the game-playing activities, and the study indicates that the Reddit community has a strong lusory attitude to explore the playful use of Tinder. At same time that gamified features and affordances make Tinder like a game, Tinder players’ perceptions and behaviors about dating, relationship and sex are to some extent gamified. Gamification has potential impacts on changing social practices in real life by gamifying social activities. The gamified black people dating site and conversations encourages the playful use of Tinder, reddit gamer dating app. the interactions between game designers and gamers take place in playing and reflecting the rules and roles of the game. However, if considering Tinder as gamification, then the phenomenon of Tinder is discussed on Reddit in a playful way is also the outcome of gamification. There are some limitaitons in this study. Firstly, due to limitations in time and resources, the current study use a relatively small sample for content analysis. Second, the current study only focus on the way Reddit community discuss and play Tinder, which is anrelatively unique platform that celebrates playful culture and playful discussion. So their perceptions and engagements about Tinder playing do not represent the whole picture of Tinder playing in reality, but it shows us a possibility, a potential tendency, and one of the directions of the evolution of game-playing in the era of gamification. Therefore, future studies can further explore the potentials of gamification on game-playing reddit gamer dating app and actions. 35 Bibliography Anderson, T. and Sturm, B., 2007, Cyberbullying: From playground to computer, Young Adult Library Services, vol.5, no.2, pp.24. Bradshaw, C Kahn, A, S & Saville, B, K 2010, ‘To hook up or date: Which gender benefits?’, Sex Roles, vol.62, no.9-10, pp.661-669. Bimber, B 1990, "Karl Marx and the Three Faces of Technological Determinism". Social Studies of Science, vol.20, reddit gamer dating app, no. 2, reddit gamer dating app, pp.333-351. Bartoli, A.M. and Clark, M.D 2006. 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Gamification by Design: Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps (1st ed.), reddit gamer dating app. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly Media. pp. Xiv, viewed by 1 may 2017. <https://books.google.com/books?id=zZcpuMRpAB8C&lpg=PP1&pg=PR14#v=snippet&q=> 44 Appendix Tinder’s Gamified Profiles Appendix 1.1: : (The screenshot of the video in the post of “I hear girls like it when you have more than one picture in your bio”, link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5g46lh/i_hear_girls_like_it_when_you_have_more_t han_one/?st=j2dc9ucr&sh=d0bba073) Appendix 1.2: ( The screenshot of the posts “ How to get superlike in 1 pic?” 1 link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5i4rph/how_to_get_a_super_like_in_1_picture/? st=j2dceyqf&sh=6e2283c7) Appendix 3: (The screenshot from the post “ A refreshing twist”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5m1qy8/a_refreshing_twist/?st=j2df98ek&sh= 278348d7) Tinder gamified Conversation: Appendix 2.1 2  reddit gamer dating app (The screenshot is from the post “ I tried Pickup lime”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5xly9v/i_tried_the_pickup_lime/?st=j2ddr3b3 haitian women dating &sh=53f6c07e) Appendix 2.2: (The screenshot from the post “ who says one word message is bad?” Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/4rkw8a/who_says_oneword_messages_are_ba d/) 3 Appendix 2.3: (The screenshot from the post “why you gonna be a bitch though”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/4xkpil/why_you_gotta_be_a_bitch_though/?st =j2dgavlk&sh=be67ffe6) Appendix 2.4: (The screenshot from the post “True love is patient”, Link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5vuxr8/true_love_is_patient/?st=j2dgqqrc&sh= 966ef460) reddit gamer dating app reddit gamer dating app reddit gamer dating app 4 Appendix 2.5: (The screenshots chosen from the post “ I am not your sugar daddy”, link:https://www.reddit.com/r/Tinder/comments/5itvnd/im_not_your_sugar_daddy/) reddit gamer dating app 5 

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■ Lots and lots of cats

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