If you’ve spent much time on the tabletop gaming internet, you’ll have seen memes about the overlap between polyamory and tabletop gaming – jokes that the real reason for non-monogamous relationships is neither sex, nor companionship, nor financial stability, it’s a regular group of people you can play D&D and board games with. Adventurous dating app Feeld says it’s got data to back up the memes – among its users, tabletop gamers are 65% more likely than non-gamers to be polyamorous or practice another form of ethical non-monogamy (ENM).
Feeld advertises itself as the dating app for non-traditional relationships. It doesn’t exclude people looking for long-term, straight, monogamous relationships, but its marketing focuses on every other kind of connection you could try to make. It’s an app for LGBTQ+ folks, kinksters, swingers, couples looking to meet a third, poly folks, people searching for ethically non-monogamous hookups and relationships, and so on. Combine that with all of a dating app’s regular data about people’s interests, and the analysts have found some interesting correlations.
According to a report by data analyst L Nichols published on Feeld’s website on September 15, 33% of Feeld users practice ENM; for tabletop gamers (encompassing everything from running a Dungeons and Dragons group to playing the best board games), that figure rises to 52%. Tabletop gamers on Feeld are 65% more likely to practice ENM than non-tabletop gamers. Conversely, poly and ENM Feeld users are more than twice as likely to list ‘tabletop games’ as one of their interests, compared to monogamous app users.
Now you could infer from the data that something similar happens in the general population: while rates of ENM are lower in the general population than on Feeld, a similar proportional increase may exist among tabletop gamers. The article has a lot of fun theories pointing to similarities between ENM practice and tabletop gaming that might explain that overlap: an acute awareness of time management, appreciation for the importance of rules and boundaries, a diverse community that often include marginalized folks.
But I’m gonna be a real stats Grinch about this. The data shows that ENM tabletop gamers are more likely than ENM non-gamers to appear in this data set, and that may just mean that being a tabletop gamer is a very effective vector for ENM folks to learn about the app. It’s a social hobby and a great vector for the spread of information; nerd media is also clustered around online micro-celebrities who talk about very different topics compared to the average magazine columnist or TV pundit.
While Feeld’s article leads with the stats about tabletop gamers, that’s not the only group it’s got data for. Anime fans and cosplayers are apparently 38% more likely to practice ENM; comic readers are 50% more likely; the grouping of tabletop gamers and fantasy literature readers is 65% more likely; and sci-fi fans are a whopping 80% more likely. What happens at Trekcon doesn’t necessarily stay at Trekcon, it seems.
My stats Grinch could keep grumbling about the lack of n values here – we don’t know if the sample sizes are large enough for those data to be statistically significant. Despite how much the report resembles my own experiences of tabletop gaming and ENM, I wouldn’t draw any firm conclusions about the wider population from it. But if you’ve ever wanted an app to help you find a D&D party? It turns out you could do a lot worse than Feeld.
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Source: Wargamer
