Marketplace Morning reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning report wherever you get your

podcasts. Who comes out a winner when we play the game of love on a dating app?

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty-Kirino.

It's been about a decade since a new generation of mobile apps brought online dating out of the

shadows and onto our phones and turned swiping right or left into a kind of romantic roulette.

It's become the most popular way for couples to connect, but it's also a multi-dillion-dollar

industry that relies on keeping users hooked. San Gita Singh Kurtz is co-host of the podcast

Land of the Giants Dating Games. She explained how dating apps have been gamified.

In terms of dating apps, it just means designing it, so it's fun, so they'll sort of

integrate game-like features into the platform. So when you swipe and match with someone,

it'll like bing-bing-bing, like give you a little digital bit of approval, fun colors,

points, coins, things like that. So it's really just like any other online game, but they've

integrated that into the digital matchmaking system. All right, I want to play a clip from the

first episode of your podcast. It's from Allison Davis, who's been a longtime user of dating apps,

and this is her talking about the act of swiping. Swiping and matching and swiping and matching

was like constant little pings and great little distractions, and then when you get a message back,

it's like pulling that lever at a Vegas slot machine, like you just feel like the king of the world,

and sorry, that was really dorky. I mean, that sort of seems like the comparison to a slot

machine that is not accidental, I'm imagining. It is not, but you know, we'd heard it from so many

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