I am Blank, Blank, and, Blank: Gameplay Emergence in the Internet Dating Site OkCupid
With nearly three decades of digital and analogue gaming experiences, mixed with a decade of online dating, I suggest that online dating might be the ultimate role-playing game (RPG), sharing common traits of fantasy, quests,identity creation, and rule subversion. In particular, this writer found that the dating site OkCupid.com to be particularly playful, brimming with remediated game elements and terminology. Essentially, the goal of my project is to examine similarities between games and online dating communities as well as possibilities and potentials for “emergent” forms of play.
Noting the recent popularity of “emergence” game scholar Jesper Juul defines it: “Emergent gameplay is usually taken to be situations where a game is played in a way the game designer did not predict.”1 If we are relating this to our examination of OkCupid, than we must imagine that the web developer is the game designer. While some features and terminology within the website overtly allude to the gamelike nature of online dating, the “game” element of dating encourages alternate uses of their product perhaps altering the original intention of the web developer a.k.a. game designer. Juul suggests that in a game with many connections between objects and rules players are more likely to discover unpredicted rule combinations. A game with many connections and many people or users would be considered more a game of emergence than a game of progression. When playing the dating game on the OkCupid site, matching with a potential partner is just one of the goals and one of the many “endgame” conditions.
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