The First Date Question I Used to Dread

“So, what do you do for fun?”

If you’ve never been a gamer on a first date with a non-gamer, that question probably reads as harmless small talk. If you have, you know it’s a skill check. And in my twenties, sitting across from someone I’d met on a mainstream dating site, I failed it in every way a person can fail it.

I ran the whole decision tree. There’s the deflection build: “Oh, you know, movies, hanging out” — technically true, spiritually a lie. There’s the minimizer: “I play some video games sometimes,” delivered with a shrug engineered to communicate that I could quit whenever I wanted. And there’s honesty: that games were a real part of my life, that some of my best friendships lived inside them, that I’d rather spend Friday night in a raid group with people I liked than at a bar with people I didn’t. I almost never picked honesty. Not on the first date. The math never felt safe.

The disclosure tax

Here’s what that calculation actually costs. You spend the first twenty minutes of every date auditing yourself in real time — grading each answer for acceptable nerd content before you say it. You are, functionally, playing a character: you-but-safer, you-with-the-interesting-parts-redacted. And the cruelest part is that it works. The date goes fine. They like the character. Which means now you’re three dates deep with someone who’s never met you, holding a disclosure that’s grown heavier for the waiting.

The worst version wasn’t even the judgment. It was the polite curiosity — the date who heard “video games” and said “oh, fun, like on your phone?” with total sincerity, and I had a half-second to decide whether to explain that no, this was a guild, with a raid calendar and people I’d known for years, or to just say “yeah, sort of” and let the best parts of my week get filed under phone games. I said “yeah, sort of.” Multiple times. To multiple people.

Patrick and I both ran that gauntlet in our twenties, and it’s the actual origin of this site — we were tired of searching profiles hoping to find someone who fell, as I wrote back then, somewhere between tolerant and nurturing about gaming. Tolerant. That was the realistic ceiling: someone who would permit the thing that made you happiest. We built LFGdating because “permitted” is a miserable bar for a relationship, and because we knew we weren’t the only ones doing the redaction math on first dates.

I’ve said it on the site for years: introduce yourself as someone who plays video games, and you already feel a judgment coming. There is a large difference between sticking out as a gamer and standing out for your passion. On the wrong platform, that difference is the whole first date.

What we built instead

The simplest way to describe LFGdating is that it deletes the question. Not answers it — deletes it. When both people arrive through a gamer dating app, the disclosure has already happened, painlessly, before anyone picked out a shirt. “What do you do for fun” stops being a skill check and becomes what it always should have been: the best question on the menu. Now it’s an invitation. What do you play? How deep does it go? Turn-based or real-time? The conversation starts where the redacted version could never reach.

I’ve watched this play out for thirteen years now, and the pattern holds: the first dates that work aren’t the ones where two people discover they’re compatible. They’re the ones where nobody’s playing a character — where the energy that used to go into managing an identity gets spent enjoying an evening instead. Gamers on our platform don’t have better first dates because gamers are magic. They have better first dates because they get to attend as themselves, starting from minute one.

What the best first dates have in common

Someone asked me once what I’d tell a member heading into their first LFG first date, and my honest answer is: almost nothing, because the hard part is already done. But if you want the short list — pick a place where you can react to something together instead of interrogating each other across a table. Let yourself be specifically enthusiastic; specific enthusiasm is the most attractive quality a person can bring to a date, and it’s the exact thing the disclosure tax used to confiscate. And when they light up about the thing they love, ask the follow-up question. You know the one. It’s the question you spent your twenties hoping someone would ask you.

The question I used to dread is now the part of this job I love most — because somewhere tonight, on a first date we’ll never hear about, two people are answering it at full volume from the jump. That’s the entire site, working as intended. If you’re still doing the redaction math with strangers, come do the other thing instead.

Stay Classy,
Casey and Pat