This paper explores the user-perceived economy of contemporary dating application (dating apps) use. Beyond serving as facilitators of a “hook-up culture,” critiques of the digitalization of dating point to an ever-growing marketized and commodified form of intimacy (Bandinelli & Bandinelli, 2022; Hobbs et al., 2017; Minina et al., 2022). By interpreting users’ discourse and experiences of specific market logics they ascribe to dating apps and the perceived stakes of participation, revealing how marketization is lived and how it reconfigures users’ conceptualization of dating. Dating apps emerged not in opposition to, but as a digital structure built upon the broader cultural shift toward relationships shaped more by individual choice than by traditional and social institutions (Mackinnon, 2022), such as class, family, community, school, and spiritual-religious systems. Its algorithmically mediated system redefined how people meet and connect with new people outside their inner circle, through profile-based matches and interactive communication, providing unprecedented access to diverse potential partners quickly and with ease. However, to optimize engagement, most dating apps mediate through interfaces that strategically employ gamification principles (Nader, 2024). Gamification reframes dating into a game (Mackinnon, 2015), incorporating ludic mechanics (Deterding et al., 2011), such as swipes, variable rewards, metrics, and notifications, to sustain user engagement (Nader, 2024). Even though courtship, which denotes the initial stage of relationship formation, has been compared to games in the past (Mackinnon, 2022), dating apps formalize the game, embedding it into their design. The use of these gamified features reshapes relational dynamics by marketizing them (Bandinelli & Gandini, 2022; Isisag, 2019). Despite interface differences, most dating apps follow a three-stage process: profile creation, matching, and discovery (Markowitz et al., 2008). Users accept the app’s terms and conditions to start their online dating experience, creating a profile with photographs and descriptions of their interests and themselves. The apps use GPS to enable location-based matching and often employ mechanisms in which users indicate interest, such as swiping right for interest and left for not interested, with mutual interest resulting in a “match” that unlocks communication. For the suggested profiles that appear on screen, the app’s algorithm analyzes this data along with user behavior (e.g., time spent on the app, whom the user selects and rejects) to predict and rank potential matches (Courtois & Timmermans, 2018). The algorithm thus acts as the matchmaker, managing the supply of profiles suggested to peak users’ interest, representing a remediation of courtship (Duguay et al., 2022; Illouz & Kotliar, 2022). This remediation comes with criticism, such as how it restricts profile presentation and suggestions, the algorithm's opacity, and affordances shaping users’ experience (De Ridder, 2022). Additionally, by their nature, these platforms are companies offering a service to their users. In providing these services, the companies behind them employ gamification to increase user engagement, encouraging return and retention on the app, to maximize revenue. While the corporate deployment of gamification and its effectiveness are well-documented, far less is explored from the user’s perspective, prompting the main question of this study: how do users perceive and navigate the gamified market logic embedded in dating apps, and what do they understand to be exchanged for human connection? Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews (15 men, 13 women, and 1 non-binary person) were conducted between December 2024 and April 2025. The majority of participants were residing in Portugal (21) at the time of the interview and had current and past experiences using various dating app platforms ( e.g., Tinder, Bumble, Badoo, Grindr, and Hinge). The recruitment occurred via a snowball approach; our users encompassed a wide age range (18 to 57 years) and a diverse sociodemographic background. Sample size was based on data saturation (Guest et al., 2006) and aligned with the theoretical contributions regarding gamification and commodification of intimacy. Data saturation was achieved when redundancy in themes emerged, with recurring patterns and perspectives appearing without yielding new findings. Employing a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), the research process moved from iterative reading and initial coding to the emergence and shaping of definitive themes. Coding focused explicitly on participants' descriptions of their understanding of dating apps as a gamified marketplace, their strategies, investments, and perception of reward structures. This analytical process culminated in three main themes: The Internalization of a Gamified Marketplace, Time and Attention as Currency, and The Labor of Curation and Selection. Findings reveal that most participants (24) found that dating apps can mimic online shopping, and dating in general has always been a market. Users (19) perceive their engagement not just as a social leisure or entertainment, but as a demanding triad of labor: the creative labor of crafting a desirable profile, the temporal labor of persistently swiping, selecting, and scrolling through profiles, and evaluating others based on what kind of relationship or person they are looking for. For some (11), the emotional and relational labor of sustaining conversation and getting to know a person, whilst disclosing oneself to another. This labor constitutes a currency within the app’s economy. This stands in distinction to, yet is harvested for, the platform’s data currency. A majority of users (19) intuitively understand this dynamic; they feel something is being exchanged and often find it to be “time,” “attention,” and labor. As one participant noted, the profile is “the playing card and the card you can trade to win in a dating app.” In this gamified economy, the profile functions as a trading card. Profiles are where social and cultural capital (signifiers of taste, class, personality) are encoded, to be decoded and assessed by others to determine the potential worth of forging a relationship. We argue that this experience is structured by a platform logic that gamifies interaction to extract time, attention, and data, reframing the pursuit of connection through a consumerist lens of optimized choice, and encouraging a “liquid” approach to connection. Consequently, the goal to find someone or build a relationship becomes entangled with market principles of investment and valorization. In conclusion, according to the users of this study, dating apps as mediators of intimacy are perceived by users to operate as gamified markets, not to their benefit but in favor of the company. In demonstrating how users internalize and operate under this logic, it became apparent that the mediation is not merely technical; it is also profoundly ideological and is materialized in user-agency. Dating apps actively transform courtship into a quantified game riddled with transactions. Users, through their experiences, become increasingly aware of it and attempt to play according to its rules in order to connect with others. This study critically highlights this transformation and cautions against the significant consequences of intimate life being repurposed into a structured economy of attention, one that produces digital peripheries marked by inequality and marginalization of users who do not rank highly within algorithmic systems. Further research should explore how different cultural contexts mediate the adoption of or resistance to this market logic, as well as identify and analyze algorithmic biases that create peripheries within these markets.

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Gamification,Dating Apps,Time,Labor,Platform Capitalism,Thematic Analysis