Sometimes I think back on the arrival of Achievements, when suddenly every minuscule or major accomplishment in an Xbox 360 game earned you a little congratulatory chime and persistent points to fuel your bragging rights. We didn’t know it then, but it now seems that was a harbinger for the modern era, in which companies give people fake little treats for engaging with all kinds of apps and services. In an effort to build brand loyalty and keep you coming back, plenty of mobile apps reward you for daily logins, completing certain tasks, and making their specific product or service so entrenched in your life that it becomes part of your routine to use it. You see it in everything from Duolingo’s language lessons to Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket’s pack cracking and Snapchat’s streaks, gained by sending pictures and videos to the same person each day. With so many things vying for our attention, this drip feed of dopamine was bound to move into unexpected places. But I gotta say, the last place I thought I’d find dailies was in an app for long-distance sex toys.
Lovense is a company that creates sex toys that sync up across long distances through an app. So if one person is using a vibrator on one side of the world and another is using a synthetic Pringles can on the other, you can use the company’s app to control vibration intensity, get approximate sensations that mirror what your partner is doing with their toy, and try and close the distance between the two of you for an evening. That’s all well and good. Long-distance sex is a time-honored tradition and has only become more prominent in the days of the internet. However, the dystopian twist is that this app has dailies like your favorite live-service game.
I was first clued into this by a Tumblr post by user yokowan that made a joke reading “Why does my butt plug have dailies” with a screenshot of an app that listed daily tasks, such as connecting a toy to the Lovense Remote app or controlling a toy for at least 3 minutes. At first, I thought this post was just a joke about how every product or service we use is trying to embed itself into our lives with live-service nonsense. Then I downloaded the app myself to check, and lo and behold, there’s a whole section of the app dedicated to daily tasks, prizes, and in-app currency.
Sooner or later, everyone who plays a live-service game reaches the point where it starts to feel like a job. The game becomes an obligation that gets in the way of you playing other games or doing anything else and ultimately makes something you might have loved doing once feel like a ball and chain. We tether ourselves to so much in this life trying to make numbers go up; why the fuck would you want to attach this bullshit to sex as well? Humans are creatures of habit, and that’s why companies build these systems into everything. But we need things that aren’t tied to some routine, things that can be spontaneous, impassioned, and not something we do just to satisfy a daily quota or make a number go up. When you have something you enjoy doing like using long-distance sex toys to connect with someone across the pond, maybe you should be in the moment instead of worrying about whether you’re gonna get imaginary points in the app. I’m already envisioning some insane scenarios this kind of thing could lead to, like one person saying, minutes into a sexy FaceTime call, “Don’t cum yet, I have to keep controlling your vibrator for 45 more seconds to finish my daily tasks.” Stupid!
Anyway, if someone ever asks if you want to play with sex toys so they can do their dailies, leave their ass. Or just play with sex toys by yourself so you know everyone involved will be giving you their undivided attention.