180. Dating OS: Multi-dating and Serial Monogamy
Opening loot boxes can become addictive. Dating apps use loot boxes with real humans inside. Users are encouraged to open as many boxes as possible while not wanting anyone else to do the same.
Dating has gotten really complicated. In order to better explain it, I took Tinder but replaced the User Interface (UI) with the UI for Pokemon GO. This should make it easier to understand for my gamer readers who have never been on a date, or didn’t manage to open the loot box you get at the end.
Normally the rewards in mobile games are locked inside of a Loot Box which requires some sort of work to open. That could be a key, a 5km walk, paying for dinner, putting on some makeup, or something really difficult like listening to another human for an hour. When the developer sells you a loot box, or in this case an egg incubator, that’s called a microtransaction. When the app sells you a “match” the contents are what we call user generated content (UGC). In both cases the developer doesn’t have to do any “work” or provide anything of value. This is what makes modern loot box games so brilliant. In the case of UGC, the contents of the loot box might be really valuable, but cost the developer nothing as they were provided by another user.
The fundamental concept here is called a variable reinforcement schedule:
If you only get a reward one time out of 10, you will be trained to do a task at least 10 times. If you only get a reward 1 time out of 100, you will be trained to do the task 100 times. The harder it is to win, the harder the subject tries to win. Usually on Tinder the odds of a guy getting to the loot box are so ridiculously remote that men will do hilariously self deprecating things just to have a shot at it.
Conversely, this creates a huge opportunity for women. Their loot boxes often have free drinks and meals so there is incentive to open as many loot boxes as possible. As with men, there is a chance of winning the jackpot but that has a higher chance of being anti climatic for women. The odds of a negative result are also significant (like catfishing or an aggressive date partner) so this just makes the whole reinforcement schedule more variable, and thus more addictive.
BC: We call this “body count”. How many total different types of loot boxes you have opened. Note that while this player has a BC of 127, that’s not particularly high by modern standards and they still have another 123 to go to unlock them all.
MD: If you are opening nine loot boxes in one day, or at least making progress towards that, we call this Multi Dating.
RQ: Reward Quality. The higher this number is, and thus the more work you have to do to open the loot box, the higher the higher the average value of the contents will be. The process of creating this reward schedule is also called itemization.
TI: Time Invested. How much effort you have already put in. In this particular case, the loot box is ready to “pop”. I hope you get lucky!
As I described in the intro Dating OS paper, a small loot box like the 2.0km egg above might be a coffee date. A big egg like a 10km egg (not shown) could be the “Romantic Holiday” date I described there. That’s a big investment of time so make sure you properly vet and authenticate your date before making such a huge commitment! There are also opportunity costs, since you might be able to fit in 9 coffee dates in one day, but only 1 Romantic Holiday.
“Serial Monogamy”: Gaming the System
As a game economist, it’s always a constant battle to deal with people trying to exploit weaknesses in your design. Not my designs specifically, since I’m a perfectionist, but this happens all the time with products I parachute in to help.
People who find and exploit a weakness to get rich always self-describe themselves as smarter than everyone else. What they don’t consider is that others often report these same exploits but don’t use them. Thus the exploiter is often misidentifying “lack of moral compass” for “intelligence”. I said “often” there out of habit, but this is always the case. Thus people without morals that attempt to exploit others always self identify as really intelligent.
In my case I self identify as “poly amorous” which means I can love more than one person at the same time. In nature it’s normal for large male mammals to have somewhere between 3 and 4 partners. So I consider that natural. I’m a bit unnatural in that I’m on the asexuality spectrum and can be described as poly romantic (can have emotional connection to more than one person) or demisexual (only feel physical attraction if strong emotional connection is present).
Thus even though I matched with ~150,000 women between 2010 and 2020 when I was doing my dating economics research, my total lifetime body count is in the 20s. Half of that number was during that “slut” phase when I was doing my research. I’ve had monogamous relationships for 9 and even 12 years, and my current relationship has been monogamous for over 5.5 years now.
In 2019 soon after I arrived in Sydney, I met a woman with a very unusual occupation (not sexual). I like weird people, as normal people are boring. I let her know that I was philosophically non-monogamous and she made it clear to me that she was straight up monogamous. Fair enough. After our third date (I rarely invite anyone to another date after the first) she disappeared for a couple weeks and then admitted that she went on a sex spree with one of her exes.
We weren’t doing anything romantic, so this wasn’t multi-dating. This is what is called Serial Monogamy. Serial monogamists have the exploiter mentality I just described. When they say they are monogamy only, that means they won’t have sex with 2 people in the same day. See where I’m going with this? To them having a 3 year monogamous relationship followed by a 2 year relationship, these are both serial monogamy.
But if you have 14 relationships on 14 different days, and each “relationship” only lasts for 1 day, technically that’s still monogamy, right? Those relationships are in series, not in parallel. An ethical non-monogamist will notify all of their partners of all of their other partners, and get consent for all of their relationships from all their partners. Yes, it’s a lot of work and very few people can do it.
An unethical non-monogamist doesn’t want to do all that work. So instead they just tell you they are monogamists and that you can “trust them”. Since they know what they are doing is unethical (and also high risk) they will expect you to be monogamous with them, that’s why they say they are monogamous.
I never met that woman again. I had absolutely no issue with her having one or more other partners. But the whole point of dating someone is to determine their quality and if they have any major red flags. Being deceitful about something so important makes that sort of relationship very high risk.
Doing some very rough “napkin math”, this is what I think the distribution is in the general population. It varies by age with younger people having more partners but also being less ethical (since they are still learning responsibility):
<1%: Ethical non-monogamous. It’s hard to do, and a lot of work.
~60%: Unethical non-monogamous. These people self identify as monogamous. Often they are also married.
~40%: Monogamous. Likely a much smaller number with younger generations. Studies show that cis hetero women usually have a “backup roster” so they can transition to serial monogamy or unethical non-monogamy pretty quickly. Married men are often “opportunistic” and will “cheat” if given the chance. Both genders often don’t consider this unethical if there is no emotional connection.
The vast majority of people are some flavor of non-monogamous. But 99% of people will self identify as monogamous because they know they are much less likely to open a loot box if they say otherwise. Even when both people are unethically non-monogamous, they will go on social media to complain that the other person was “cheating on them” so they dumped them.
Why??
People playing loot box games are dopamine seeking. The more boxes they open, the more dopamine they get. Every time they open a box, they get less dopamine from the next box. This in turn means that to maintain the same feeling of pleasure/reward, they have to continually increase the rate at which they open loot boxes.
This is true for all loot box games (including all gambling games). This creates the mechanism of addiction that these games create by design, and that’s why they work. Developers will also often offer “high quality loot boxes” but pay gate them so that they require premium currency. There is no guarantee of better quality, especially when it comes to UGC. On Tinder and such, there isn’t even a guarantee the other person will match with you. They can rip you off and you get no refund. It doesn’t get any more “Dark Pattern” than this.
I do my best to limit my exposure to loot boxes. All loot boxes. That is the path to addiction, desensitization, and dissociation. The key to intense relationships is mutual vulnerability. If you are just plowing through UGC, pretty soon you become numb. Numb is a form of armor and this prevents vulnerability. In the case of Bonnie Blue and her 1057 sexual partners in 12 hours, she admits she only remembered 6 of those men. The event wasn’t unlike some of the 5+ hour ultra marathons I used to do when I was younger, that left me permanently crippled from arthritis later in life.
But the real damage is how much armor you build up, that allows exposure to that much UGC to be tolerated. Without vulnerability, there’s no significant oxytocin release. You won’t feel love, you won’t feel closeness. You could have 100 partners in a year and still be lonely.
This is the real cost of sex work, and lifestyles that mimic it. I talk a lot about the importance of vulnerability in my paper on Soulmates. If I’m right about the two-receptor system for dopamine that I describe here, all dopamine driven products will not only stop giving a reward over time, but they will increasingly cause illness as the dopamine pools in your body. The end game is increasing levels of depression and self harm until things turn out very badly for you.
You can see why I’m increasingly and loudly sounding the alarm about dopamine driven design in games and social media.
But at least Pokemon GO makes you get some exercise.
i think people should just be straight up if they're monogamous or not. if you want anything real it will save you trouble down the line.
At Wizards of the Coast in the 90s the team locked into the idea of reinforcement operant conditioning (which is what a booster pack is). But the twist to your description is that the reward comes at a reducing frequency. Studies show that this turbocharges the addictive nature of the behavior pattern.
If you get your dopamine hit randomly but predictably every 10 trials you will develop pattern resistance to further addiction. You can gauge your time investment and the ROI on your time pretty accurately. But if the frequency that you are rewarded drops over time it actually makes you much more likely to intensify your addictive behavior.
Your brain can't find a pattern resistance state where it can calculate an ROI so it becomes more and more frantic to get the dopamine hit, amping up the triggering behavior compared to a baseline.
This is what happens when collecting cards from booster packs. At the start, every pack you open has a rare you haven't seen before. But soon you start to see repeat rares - the frequency of "new" goes down. After a while, finding a "new rare" is increasingly unlikely - but it does still happen. Your brain probably knows how many rares are in the set, so it knows that if it keeps opening packs eventually it will get all of them.
Chasing that final rare is a totally dysfunctional ROI. You'll spend enormous amounts of money to get it, that's just the nature of statistics. Of course you can offramp from this behavior if someone will sell you that card as a single - which is one of the fundamental reasons the aftermarket for trading card (games) remains strong. A fair number of people understand that after a certain point you should buy singles, not packs, to complete your collection.
When I made trading card games I attempted a new, less dark pattern, we called "Rolling Thunder". In this model the rarity levels were simplified meaning that a buyer would likely get all the cards in a set with a reasonable number of pack purchases. But we were strictly limiting the production run on the theory that the scarcity of the cards would drive collectors into the aftermarket, and reward buyers who wanted to liquidate excess rare cards. It didn't work.
Another model I wanted to try but did not was selling booster packs with one rare card in them and nothing else. One of the wasteful things about collectible card (games) is that you buy 8-15 cards per pack but you really only want the rare. Most of the rest of the cards are discarded (luckily, they are recyclable). My model would have allowed you to buy sets of the common & uncommon cards for a fixed price. This would not have affected the darkness of the collecting pattern but would have reduced its environmental impact.
The addition of new even rarer rarity levels into the trading card game scene is a darkening of the pattern. So far, with a handful of exotic exceptions, Wizards has made these "rarer than rare" cards purely aesthetic variants (different art or foiled special paper, rather than mechanically distinct cards). Many people can resist the lure of chasing these ultra rare collectables, but people who do fall into that trap find it a deep, expensive hole.
Some of Wizards' competitors though HAVE made rarer than rare cards mechanically distinct and often superior to other cards in the set, which creates a form of what you would call a Supremacy Good. In games that feature them the best players are effectively locked out of the victory podium unless they participate in the rarer than rare aftermarket or have so much money that they can buy booster packs on an unlimited budget.
The upside (if you want to see it as such) is that most Magic sets can be collected (barring chasing rarer than rare) for a few hundred dollars. So the cash investment is not crippling like it is in drug or many other forms of addiction. Most active Magic players probably spend $500 to $1,000 a year on booster packs which in the grand scheme of entertainment expenses isn't much for a middle-class or wealthier household.
AND those cards are a store of value. Many of them can be sold back into the aftermarket for more than the original cost to obtain them (at least as long as the Magic community continues to grow). If you take good care of your cards (sleeve them) you can "get out" of your "investment" pretty close to whole. Most people never do this but a meaningful number will; and if you are a person with limited means that is an escape hatch from what may otherwise have been really bad financial decisions driven by addictive behavior.
How does this relate to dating?
I think that for many people there's a reducing frequency of reward in dating. When they start off they may find a high sense of satisfaction from their dates but as time goes on they get that thrill of a "great date" less and less often.
I think partly that's a filtering factor where they start to see issues and incompatibilities with their date partners faster; partly it's the accumulation of Bad Date Experiences; partly it is an erosion of mental health from participating in a lifestyle most are not well suited for (very nonmonogamist).
I haven't been on a "real date" in a long time (happily married) but I observe friends & associates going through what looks like hell in the dating scene and I think it exposes a reducing frequency of happiness with the outcome - which ironically leads people to date more and more as their brains pursue that elusive high.
Some people react by trying to make themselves "rarer than rare" (although a lot of people who try it are deluding themselves; they are attempting to "manifest" qualifies that they don't actually possess - or faking qualities they don't actually possess which most people are really bad at (I think in many cases if they were good at faking those qualities they'd rapidly acquire those qualities!))
If you get trapped in the hole of chasing "rarer than rare" dates you're going to be in for a real world of heartache - especially if you actually get one once in a while. The extraordinary high from that is going to take a buzz-saw to your brain. It will be like meth for a lot of people.
I know a friend of a friend who dated Sharon Stone for a while. Reportedly all he'll say about it is that two of the best days of his life were the day the relationship started and the day the relationship ended. He's a reasonably successful person and appears to have survived contact with that level of stardom with his mind intact but I bet many people aren't as lucky.
He'll always be the guy we know who dated Sharon Stone. But his brain will also always be the brain that was in the body that dated Sharon Stone. I bet it was deeply affected by that experience.