Dating Apps Are Using Role-Playing Games to Fix Your Rizz

In September 2023, Adam Raines made a Reddit post revealing what feels like a near-universal problem for singles: His dating app conversations are painfully boring.

Attached to the post, titled “Sometimes, texting on dating apps feelings (sic) like hitting your head against a brick wall,” is a screenshot of a bone-dry Tinder conversation between him and one of his matches, in which Raines’ curiosity is met with short, dead-ended answers.

“The vast majority of my online dating interactions have been like that,” says Raines, 25, a gay man living in the UK who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his privacy.

Many users in the thread echoed his sentiment and offered explanations or theories as to why conversations on dating apps are often unsatisfying. “I see I'm not the only one getting that type of energy lol,” one wrote, as another noted, “It sucks, and if people swiped more mindfully this wouldn’t happen, but a lot of guys are so beaten down by the dating app experience they feel like they don’t have any other choice and want whatever validation they can get.”

People are sick of dating apps. Chatting feels like a chore, most conversations lead nowhere, and the novelty of swiping has worn off. Attempts to identify the apps’ critical flaws and theorize about how the profit incentive has run the user experience into the ground have proliferated over the past few years. Desirable potential matches are locked behind paywalls; matches and likes are limited. But some of the most ubiquitous dating apps seem to be suggesting that the problem may not be solved with better UX, algorithms, or paywalls—but by users learning how to actually talk to people.

Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Grindr are all rolling out features aimed at helping people court romantic partners and banter more successfully, suggesting an industry-wide reckoning with young users’ lack of dating experience.

“We can't solve for the fact that human interactions can be stressful or people may be apprehensive about them at times, but we can help make it more fun, and we can help you prepare,” Hillary Paine, Tinder’s VP of product growth and revenue, tells WIRED.

A study from The Survey Center on American Life found that only 56 percent of Gen Z adults said they were involved in a romantic relationship as teenagers, compared to 78 percent of baby boomers and 76 percent of Gen Xers. In a 2024 report, Hinge found that its Gen Z users in particular struggle in dating, and many of them attribute their unease in dating to the pandemic: They were 47 percent more likely than millennial users to say the pandemic made them nervous talking to new people and 25 percent more likely to say it lowered their confidence on a first date.

In March, Tinder partnered with OpenAI to launch The Game Game, which drops users into hyper-specific scenarios that have the potential to become flirtatious. An AI-generated voice begins flirting with you, and you—the user—are prompted to respond via your own voice.

I’m given the following scenario: I’m at a friend’s housewarming party and accidentally break a vase that turns out was a gift for the host brought by 35-year-old Caleb, a financial analyst from Annapolis, Maryland. “How will you handle this?” the screen reads. After responding to Caleb—a very eager robot with a deep voice who called me “hon” in nearly every sentence—with one-word answers that indicated my discomfort with seducing a computer, Tinder suggests that I “engage more in shared interests,” “provide more details about your hobbies,” and “show enthusiasm in the conversation.”

Announcement of the game was met with scorn by some social media users.

“This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” one person posted on X, while another said, “I already know I don’t have game. I don’t need ai to confirm it for me.”

“This was really meant to be sort of fun and campy,” says Paine, describing the prompts presented as “intentionally over-the-top rom-com scenarios.” According to Paine, internal research that informed this new feature indicated that one in four young daters said they lacked confidence in their flirting skills. “We built it as a way to give users a fun, safe playground to practice flirting so that they could go into real-life connections and scenarios with more confidence.” The Game Game is targeting daters between the ages of 18 and 22, not only because of their shortcomings in dating but because they expressed a willingness to allow AI into their dating experience, she says.

Raines says he’s “not hopeful” that a bot’s language models “are robust and realistic enough to properly simulate, or ‘teach,’ online flirting.”

While flirtations between humans and chatbots are becoming increasingly controversial, Tinder is framing its use of interactive AI as an aid to, rather than a force in conflict with, real-life dating. Tinder will analyze how its members use the feature to determine the future of voice-to-voice interactions on the app.

AI is “a really big part of Tinder's road map,” Paine says.

Tinder is not alone in that. Grindr has been testing a beta version of an AI wingman that can craft witty messages for users; the app is partnering with Amazon and Anthropic for wingman’s A-list feature, which will be able to prioritize past connections and summarize conversations, Bloomberg reported.

Real-life dating experts are also addressing their clients’ lack of rizz—and anxieties around talking to strangers.

“Men really hate the apps right now, and they're wanting to do a more in-person approach, but it's really scary because people don't know what to say,” says Emyli Lovz, who runs a dating and relationship coaching business. Her company offers not only human-to-human conversation practice but also full-fledged mock dates to help improve clients’ skills in conversation, flirting, and sexual escalation.

She attributes the phenomenon to the fallout of Covid-related social isolation but says some of her male clients also express a fear of coming off as “creepy.”

“I know the guys in my community love being able to practice their conversation skills in a judgment free environment where someone's just going to give them feedback.”

Flirting via the apps, on the other hand, poses an entirely new challenge: making your pickup line stand out among a sea of generic introductions.

“Everybody wants to say ‘Hi, hey, what's up, cutie?’ It becomes totally meaningless, even though that's what you could say in person easily,” Lovz tells WIRED. “It doesn't work on the apps because there are so many people on them that if you get that message a million times as a woman, you're like, ‘Please don't ever send me that message again.’ So there's a lot of coaching that could happen around the messages.”

According to Hinge, part of Gen Z’s hesitancy in flirting with new people comes from a fear of coming off as “cringey” or “overeager.” But the app’s love and connections expert, Ari Brown, recommends younger users “embrace Cringe Mode” by “doing something that requires vulnerability or risking rejection.”

In March, as part of its “One More Hour” campaign that encourages members of Gen Z to engage in more in-person interactions, Hinge released its guide to building connections, a step-by-step guide to starting and escalating both romantic and nonromantic relationships, which includes fill-in-the-blank suggestions to help users build momentum after meeting someone in person: “Hey friend! It was great meeting you at (social group). You mentioned that you like (insert activity). I love that too. Want to go together this weekend?” reads one prompt.

Bumble’s Instant Match, meanwhile, claims it eliminates the need for “awkward exchanges” by allowing users to match with one another by scanning users’ QR codes out in the wild. The feature, which the app says is primarily intended to serve attendees of Bumble’s “IRL” events, lets users skip the banter typical of a meet-cute by providing the two participants with a list of their shared interests, theoretically helping them more efficiently determine their compatibility. While Instant Match seems to tacitly acknowledge that Bumble’s users struggle with small talk, it’s not clear how it would help them improve on that front.

As apps like Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and Grindr realize that a user base of socially inept daters is making them look bad, a larger push to catch younger daters up on basic conversational skills (or eliminate the need for them) might be inevitable. But whether the tools on offer are actually useful remains to be seen.

In the two years since his Reddit post seeking advice, Raines says, he hasn’t met up with anyone from the apps. Though he still struggles to converse with potential mates online, he’s not convinced AI-based features in particular offer a long-term solution.

“There is perhaps a benefit in helping people who are unsuccessful feel less alone, maybe? Boosting their confidence? But in improving the dating app experience in any marked way? No.”