Overview
Dating apps today aren’t all that great. For many, it’s a huge time waster. People feel unloved or overwhelmed. For every 10 matches, people may only go on 1-2 dates. Conversations are often boring or non-existent. Yet, despite this all, dating apps are now the number one way couples meet each other. People like the convenience of dating apps. But surely, there must be a way to make it fun and fulfilling too.
A dating-focused game, specifically an MMORPG, will let us do exactly this. It will make showing interest in potential matches more natural. It will make conversations and first dates easier and more easygoing. And it will reduce frustrations that arise from having to pay for premium dating app features. Let’s dive in.
I am focusing on heterosexual, cis couples here since that is what I know best.
MMORPG — massively multiplayer online role playing game. Players control a customizable character in an open world with a focus on leveling up their character, interacting with others, and completing quests.
Core Values
Dating should be fun. It is not supposed to feel like drowning in an ocean. It is not supposed to feel like dying of thirst in a barren desert.
Dating should be limited. Making everyone able to talk to everyone at the push of a button leads to immense imbalance in the dating market.
Dating setup should be minimized. People intrinsically want to go on exciting dates. They don’t want to spend much time matching with many people, vetting them, and setting up logistics.
Problems with current dating apps
There are huge imbalances in the market. First, the Male:Female ratio is wildly unbalanced—70:30 on average. By itself, this fact means the average woman will receive a lot of interest and the average male will receive little.
Dating apps are easy and dopamine-driven. Everyone is no more than a swipe, tap, or a “hey” away. So, men end up spamming likes in a shotgun approach. This leads to the average woman receiving far too many matches to sort through. Conversely, the average man has to swipe a lot to receive even one match. If you believe in “leagues” (which I do, although they are far fuzzier than most people think), women receive more matches from people above their league. In that case, why would you accept a match from someone in your league when there are higher-league people matching with you? So, men receive fewer matches from people in their league than they might in the real world. Of course, this isn’t great for women either. Getting hundreds of matches a week is exhausting. Plus, they’re usually low-effort. You’d need a personal assistant just to weed out the uninteresting matches. Overall, women get unbearable amounts of attention; men get almost none.
Swiping is easier than conversing with your existing matches. Intermittent reward schedules (where an action is rewarded at random times) form addictions—just think of gambling. Swiping is gambling (for men, at least). Even worse, there’s no cost to swiping. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Conversing with a match, on the other hand, is hard and risky. If you don’t say the right things, you lose that match. And creativity is hard, especially with the limited information on profiles. Even Hinge, with its 3 prompts, doesn’t give all that much to work with. Additionally, the ease of swiping means that FOMO is amplified. If a conversation slightly dips in quality, then there’s another match waiting around the corner.
Dating profiles suck. It’s hard to encapsulate yourself in 6 photos and 3 prompts. It’s even harder to get good photos and to think of good prompts. It takes a lot of time to create a good profile and users don’t have the patience to do that.
Current dating apps don’t make it easy to find high quality matches. They face the above problems too, but on top of that, they have an inherent need for profitability. This leads to match restrictions (limited number of swipes, paying to match with certain people). This has 2 effects: people who don’t pay get frustrated with the limitations, and people who do pay still don’t see great results because of the other mentioned problems. Both think paying for premium is not worth it.
Ghosting occurs all too often when people try to meet up. Dating apps often have no way to verify whether ghosting occurred or not so they can’t punish ghosters.
So, how do we fix these issues?
A Dating MMORPG
Online games have created many relationships—organically, too. An MMORPG that has a dating element solves all of the problems mentioned above. I envision an MMORPG where the goal is to find a partner to do a quest with. A user can go up to another user and ask to do a quest together; this is the analog of swiping. The other user can either accept or deny; this is the analog of matching. The quest doubles as the conversation and a mini first date. This approach solves the dating app problems listed above.
Market imbalances: right off the bat, MMORPGs can have significantly better gender ratios. Genshin Impact, for example, has a 55:45 M:F ratio. On top of this, we can restrict new player usage so that the M:F ratio is close to 50:50. For the restricted users, the game can still be accessible but it could be single-player while they wait to be let in. They can train or go on solo quests while they wait. We could even have GPT-3 powered NPCs to help users practice while they wait.
Showing interest is too easy: in MMORPGs, you have to walk up to a person to chat with them and you have to devise your own message. There is no simple swiping. It will feel similar to approaching someone in a bar; you have to go up to them and devise something to say. If someone rejects your offer, the rejection will be explicit. This is a good starting point of difficulty since it closely mimics real life. If we see low offer rates though, we can slowly dial down the difficulty without jumping to extremes such as swiping.
For women, this mechanism will reduce the number of offers received to a manageable amount. Since spam-liking is no longer an option and it takes time to offer to a single woman, it will reduce the number of men out of their league from approaching them.
For men, this means it’s more likely they will match with someone in their league too (as opposed to the top 20% of men receiving 80% of matches on dating apps).
Talking to a match is harder than swiping: this is where the game element of an MMORPG really shines. Instead of having to start a conversation from scratch from 3 prompts, the match interaction here revolves around a game quest. The conversation will naturally start out with discussing the quest and how to approach it. It’s an organic and deep conversation topic. Plus, doing the quest will give the two users a sense of how well they collaborate. As they get into the quest, especially during in-game travel, they can broaden to normal first-date topics.
Quests are also fun in their own right; they have their own variable reward schedule. You may discover some treasure along the way, you may lose to a hard boss, you may unlock a new quest. People play MMORPGs solo for a reason: the core game loop is exciting and even addictive.
In essence, we make the match interaction easier to do and more fun. This will shift the balance from a matching focus to a conversation/questing focus. If we see that users are still matching over questing, we can introduce more rewards into the quests themselves.
Dating profiles suck: people don’t spend a lot of time creating their dating profiles. It’s hard to find good photos and encapsulating yourself in 3 prompts feels limiting. This isn’t how attraction in the real world works. People see each other in 3D and conversation (and body language) determines personality fit. You don’t know if someone is a software engineer or an artist before you talk to them. However, people spend lots of time creating their characters in games. With all sorts of sliders, users can and will design their character to their heart’s content. Although it will take effort, it’ll be easier and more fun than digging up good photos. Plus, depending on the theme of the MMORPG, the accessories you put on your character can show off a bit of your personality. To reduce catfishing, we can institute manual reviews of avatars to ensure they match users’ looks; this can also serve as a waitlist to ensure 50:50 M:F ratio.
Current dating apps focus on return usage and monetization: here again, games provide a win-win solution. The goal here is for users to return to the game, not necessarily to date though. For example, if users are fed up of dating, they can play through solo quests or quests with friends. Even better, if two users end up being a couple, they can still do quests together on the MMO as part of their relationship or dating life. In this way, it’s a good MMO first, good dating app second. The best part is we don’t need to restrict users’ dating in order to have this return usage: MMOs are fun by themselves. We can focus on MMO-related monetization instead of dating-app-related monetization. Instead of charging for extra swipes, we can sell cool avatar accessories or quest items. Instead of showing a “Most Compatible of the Day” everyday, we can have new quests to play. Instead of having users pay to show interest in top-tier users, we can sell DLC. Users will still pay, but they won’t feel like they have to pay just to stand a chance in dating. They’ll feel like they’re paying to enjoy a fun game.
Apps can’t detect and punish ghosting: in the MMO, the first date is the quest. It’ll be easy to detect if a user didn’t show up to an accepted quest. We can punish this with lower health or attack stats, for example.
Why isn’t someone already doing this?
They are, it’s just not in the form of dating apps. People form relationships all the time on World of Warcraft and other MMOs. It’s just that those are not thought of as dating apps and the games don't prioritize it. Existing MMOs could add on all these features, but it would be a significant disruption to their existing gameplay loops and userbase. E.g. clans won’t have much of a place in a dating-focused MMO.
Dating apps won’t do this because it is a lot of effort and completely counter to their hypotheses of low matching friction. Since they are venture-backed, they’d have a tough time convincing investors and employees to completely switch their model to do this.
Of course, there are problems with this MMO dating approach too.
Building good games is hard. For this to work, the base needs to be a good MMORPG. That isn’t easy to build and it’s not guaranteed users will play it.
The traditional dating userbase may not be interested in games. Although the percentage of women playing MMORPGs is increasing, it’s not 50/50 yet. Many people also don’t consider themselves gamers so they may not play a dating-based MMORPG either. Of course, if there is a large supply or demand on the game, people may reconsider.
Avatars may not be good representations of people. We aren’t quite at the graphical fidelity to represent every user accurately in an MMORPG. Avatars may not be enough for users to decide whether to match or not.
People might want the easy way out (sticking with current dating apps). Why leave the comfort of easy swiping and the ego boost of numerous matches? It’s harder to show interest in the MMO so the payoff is further removed. The MMO aspect can help here though.