Someone Turned the Futility of Tinder Into an 8-Bit Game

Dating just got even more gamified.

Aug 21 2015, 4:20pm

Screengrab: Millennial Swipe Sim 2015

Sometimes the best way to understand the exact moment in time that your generation occupies is through an 8-bit, dadaist game.

Millennial Swipe Sim 2015 is a pixelated mini game that turns the experience of using dating apps like Tinder into even more of a pointless challenge than it already is. It's best played on a phone to get that authentic swiping action, but you can take it for a spin on your computer too.

As the opening screen explains, the point of the game is to swipe (left, right, it honestly doesn't matter) quickly and consistently on random profile pictures. If you take too long, your boredom level increases and you risk dying of ennui.

The game was created by Will Herring, a creative director at Buzzfeed and hobbyist game developer who previously made a game about his asshole cat. Herring told me he just wanted to make people laugh.

"Dating apps are these weird, kind of frantic information dumps of personalities and profiles flying at you from every direction, and I think that can be overwhelming to anyone—and I think that makes them very easy to joke about," Herring said via email. "It's this weird mix of, 'oh, we're not taking this seriously,' but also this has very quickly become the standard for how we meet and start relationships. It's something I'm still trying to wrap my head around."

Give it a spin if you want to get a chuckle while simultaneously gaining a newfound disappointment in the state of our generation.