Cry it out from the rooftops: we survived 2018. (At least as of press time, so, y'know, probably.) And in this long, complicated year, a few games stuck out as the best, the most interesting, the most surprising, of the year. Whether you're catching up over the holidays or just looking for fuel to argue with your friends, here are our picks for the best videogames released in 2018. And yes, they're ranked. And no, your eyes aren't deceiving you: a certain Western-themed open-world game isn't in here. (Nor is Celeste, which honestly should have warranted making this a Top 11 list.) Games are a vast and varied field, friends; so are opinions. Argue away!

10. Monster Hunter World (Capcom, PC/PS4/Xbox One)

Monster Hunter has, for a certain variety of player, been a big deal for years. The once-obscure franchise has garnered a cult following addicted to its obtuse but idiomatically playable rhythms of hunting monsters, crafting gear, and hunting tougher monsters. World takes those rhythms of play and expertly makes them accessible to a broader audience, one that might have an interest in Monster Hunter but never had the time and will to learn how to play it. Using all the power of the modern gen, Monster Hunter World strikes a perfect balance between being welcoming to new players while still being challenging and strange. Explore a vast island full of prehistoric wonders, learn them, and then fight them to the honorable death.
[Original review; buy now]

9. Into the Breach (Subset, PC/Switch)

Giant robots! Time travel! Horrible aliens! If Pacific Rim went into a VitaMix with that one time-travel arc of Heroes when that show was good, this would be the videogame smoothie that resulted. Travel back in time repeatedly to try to save humanity from a horde of alien bugs—building, and losing, dozens of small squads of mech pilots while you do so. This is the rare strategy game that sings because of just the right amount of story, a veneer of melancholy and grief over the repetition. You've let a lot of people die to get to this point. But this run? It's going to be different. It has to be different.
[Original review; buy now]

8. Minit (Vlambeer, PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One)

What can a game accomplish in 60 seconds? Traditionally, not much—but Minit presents a strong argument to the contrary. Think a 2D Legend of Zelda game, only you die every minute. What this means is that everything in the game worth doing has been compressed into 60-second increments, a design conceit that grows beyond a gimmick and into something brilliant. Riffing on the original Legend of Zelda is a favorite hobby of gaming's commercial indie scene, and I usually have absolutely zero interest in it as a trend. But Minit brings something concise, and witty, and absolutely jovial to its deconstruction of the game that became a genre. Minit only asks for one minute of engagement at a time. But you're going to want to give it a lot more.
[Original review; buy now]

7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo/Bandai Namco, Switch)

This was something of an off year for the Nintendo Switch. Quality titles abounded, but first-party flagships were few and far between; the new Pokemon games this year didn't scratch that specific itch that Nintendo regularly crafts their games to scratch. That place of semi-nostalgic, simple wholesomeness. For that, the only game in town is really the multiplayer epic Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Far from a perfect entry in the series, it's still more playable than almost any other game released this year. Nintendo excels at building games that are just good, clean fun, and this is the best the company they put out this year.
[Original review; buy now]

6. God of War (Santa Monica, PS4)

The grimmer by far of the two PlayStation 4 exclusives on this list, God of War is a difficult game to anoint with cheerful superlatives—not because it doesn't deserve them, but because they don't really fit the mood. It is, after all, a game about a bad, violent man trying to raise a son only moderately less broken than he is. It's a game about butchering droves of monsters and supernatural warriors, for no other good reason than because they're standing in your way. It's a game about going too far and trying to dial it back, maybe just a little, maybe just until you can almost see something approaching decency. It's a great game. Just not exactly the sort you want to praise with a smile on your face.
[Original review; buy now]

5. Hitman 2 (Io Interactive, PC/PS4/Xbox One)

If I could take any game with me to a desert island, provided that island also had electricity and a compatible game console, it would probably be Hitman 2. Agent 47, the series star, is a murderous cipher in an infinite cycle of assassination and disguise, and this is his perfect outing. Io's latest refines the nontraditional stealth sandbox of earlier titles into a tightly wound, impossibly complex series of puzzle box levels that burst open with an explosive giggle. Sure, you can just run up and shoot your target before fleeing, but even if you survive, what fun is that? How about throwing them off a roof while dressed as a corporate mascot. Or pretending to be a tattoo artist and then taking them out when you're all alone. Hitman 2 rewards creativity and black humor, and it can be played pretty much forever. What a game.
[Original review; buy now]

4. Donut County (Ben Esposito, PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One)

Donut County is not a long game, nor is it particularly complex. The puzzle premise, of sucking objects into a hole in the ground, never really gets more challenging than that, and the rhythms here are more those of a scenery showcase than a traditional puzzle game. But it's still a delight, bright and goofy, written with a shining wit and an effervescent joy. This is a comedy critique of capitalism disguised as a game about mischievous citygoing raccoons, and, like, honestly, I'm not sure what more you really want from your videogames. It ticks all of my boxes. I waited for this one for years, and it did not disappoint.
[Original review; buy now]

3. Dead Cells (Motion Twin, PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One)

Dead Cells is an almost peerless action game. There, I said it. Within the framework of a simple roguelike structure—die, progress, die again, slowly eking your way toward an ultimate goal—Motion Twin has built one of the most satisfying 2D combat systems I've ever had the joy of getting my hands on. Every sword slash, bomb throw, and slammed door bristles with energy. The visual and auditory feedback, the speed, everything in this game's design is built to make the action absolutely soar. Dead Cells is a morbid, challenging game, which in 2018 isn't exactly a strong differentiating factor. But I've rarely, if ever, played a game that just feels so good.
[Original review; buy now]

2. Dragon Ball FighterZ (Arc System Works, PC/PS4/Switch/Xbox One)

Honestly, the only reason this didn't get my top spot is because fighting games are about as niche as they come. Still, this game is stunning. A distillation of everything that makes Dragon Ball one of the most influential and enjoyable pieces of Japanese comic media of all time, Dragon Ball FighterZ is also just one of the best fighting games ever. Responsive, surprisingly easy to learn, and predictably difficult to master, it turns the clear visual language of the anime it's based on into brilliant play. FighterZ (pronounced "fighters," to settle that bet) is also home to some of my favorite videogame moments of the year as a spectator. No other competitive game has such a fascinating sense of visual energy, or such clear mechanical drama. It absolutely slaps, is what I'm saying. Play it, watch it, pretend to be 13 again.
[Buy now]

1. Spider-Man (Insomniac Games, PS4)

2018 was a conservative year in videogames. There were some gems, and a few exceptionally innovative titles in the indie scene, but nothing earth-shattering happened. No paradigms shifted this year. Expectations were rarely, if ever, subverted. Spider-Man likely wouldn't have made the top of a list like this in a bigger, stranger year. It's a conservative title, a triple-A open-world game in a world full of them. But don't let that fool you: even if Spider-Man is a game well suited to a quiet year, it's still an excellent game. It's pure comfort food in a year where even the best stuff rarely provoked that warm, happy feeling. Insomniac Games has crafted a title that adores its source material, that shapes its entire form around celebrating it. Spider-Man loves Spider-Man, and Spider-Man is a welcome, fun, bright presence in 2018. This is a quintessential Peter Parker adventure, perfectly translated into game form, and my impression of it has only grown more fond with time. One of my big litmus tests for games is if I find myself going back to it after I'm done covering it for work, and this was one of the few this year to pass. If you have a PlayStation 4, you owe it to yourself to check this one out.
[Original review; buy now]

Last summer, the actor Jay Duplass found himself in the middle of a lush forest in Washington state, his body struggling under the weight of a giant space-helmet. The actor was filming scenes for the sci-fi drama Prospect, in which he plays a planet-scavenger hoping to get rich. Duplass' otherworldly get-up—like nearly all of the film's costume and props—had been designed and hand-made by a team of earthbound artists. But while his beat-up headgear looked cool, wearing it was "a goddamn nightmare," the actor says. "It was heavy. Those helmets are not designed to be worn all day, or walked around in. It messed my neck up for a good six months."

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Such sacrifices were a near-daily requirement on Prospect, which opens this Friday in select cities, and expands next week. It's a defiantly DIY indie, one that takes place in a richly designed sci-fi world, full of gonzo weapons, clunky spaceships, and lived-in locales—yet focuses largely on three primary characters. "The insane ambition was to try to capture the essence of huge movies like Dune, Star Wars, and Blade Runner," says co-writer and co-director Zeek Earl. "We tried to capture a slice of a world, but with a very low budget."

That task required Earl and his partner, Chris Caldwell—both making their feature-film debut—to spend much of last year in a Seattle workshop, where they constructed their own on-screen galaxy. The 31-year-old filmmakers had first produced Prospect as a short film, which drew attention after premiering at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival, ultimately becoming a hit on Vimeo. Afterward, the two former Seattle Pacific University students toured Hollywood, trying to sell producers on a full-length Prospect. "It was a startlingly long process," says Caldwell. "But we were pitching a very unique production plan." The duo wanted seven months to make the film's ships, costumes, and weapons—an almost unheard-of amount of prep time for an indie. "Most people were like, 'Oh. Cool,'" remembers Earl. "They were clearly thinking, 'This doesn't fit in to how things work.'"

Earl and Caldwell finally secured financing from Canadian company BRON Studios (the film's budget, Earl says, came in under $4 million). In late 2016, they got to work, moving into a former ship-building warehouse in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, where they were sandwiched between an Episcopal bookstore and a marijuana dispensary. "We hired a lot of people who'd never worked on a movie before: industrial designers, carpenters, mechanics, cosplayers," says Caldwell. "They were working with us as the script was being written, and by the time we got the green light, we had this kind of art collective under one roof."

Working-Class Grunts of the Future

It was a fittingly hands-on environment for a sci-fi tale that focuses not on aerial battles or inter-world politics, but on the day-to-day life of the working-class grunts of the future. Prospect casts Duplass as Damon, a small-time explorer who lands his dinged-up spaceship on a gorgeous but toxic moon, accompanied by his young daughter, Cee (played by Chicago Med’s Sophie Thatcher). They've landed a contract to collect elusive, oyster-like gems, with a potential payday big enough to get their lives back on track. But the family's search is interrupted by a mysterious traveler (Game of Thrones and Narcos alum Pedro Pascal) who's just as desperate as they are. What follows is a slow-boiling showdown with hints of noir-westerns like Deadwood and The Treasure of Sierra Madre, albeit with bulky air-filtration devices and gnarly spear-guns instead of whiskey and pistols.

All of Prospect's exterior shots were filmed on a private land trust adjacent to Washington's Olympic National Park, where Earl and Caldwell had backpacked during college. "A few times," says Earl, "Fish and Wildlife officials would wander in and see a bunch of people in space helmets, and get really confused." They probably overheard some mild gasps from the actors, as well, as they were spending hours in the meticulously designed gear. "Their airflow was restricted, and we were making them hike all over the forest," says Earl. "It was pretty arduous."

CGI would have made everyone's lives easier, of course: In mega-budgeted sci-fi films like The Martian, the performers’ costumes—including helmet visors—are often created with digital assistance. But everything in Prospect had to at least appear fully functional, in order to amplify the film's realism. Back in the filmmakers' warehouse, which also served as a film studio and editing bay, the production team used a CNC (Computer Numeric Control) kit to create much of the ship's interiors. "We spent a week figuring out how to put it together," says Caldwell, "so that we could design all these sets digitally, and just cut them out." Even the particles of poisonous dust that flutter across the moon-forest were the result of practical effects: Earl threw dust around the basement of his home, filmed it, and overlaid the results into the finished movie.

That analog approach makes Prospect its own sort of satellite in the world of recent science-fiction films. It's a big-screen genre dominated by well-known properties and steroidal budgets: Solo: A Star Wars Story, Ready Player One, The Predator. But there's always been a place for cerebral, less showy tales of futures yet to come, from George Lucas’ dystopic THX-1138 to Shane Carruth’s time-traveling Primer to Duncan Jones’ far-flung Moon. After its premiere at SXSW this year, Prospect was picked up for distribution by DUST, a sci-fi-focused division of the indie company Gunpowder & Sky. The imagination found within next-wave sci-fi stories like Prospect—and the determination of studios willing to back them—hints at not only an alternative world, but also an alternative Hollywood, one where big ideas are just as important as big budgets. "I've never been a fan of large spectacle sci-fi, or large spectacle movies in general, because I feel like they almost always drop the ball on character and emotion," says Duplass. Growing up, the actor's sci-fi tastes gravitated toward movies like the scaled-back 1985 drama Enemy Mine. "It's a weird little chamber piece about two enemies who are stranded, and rely on each other to survive," he says.

Prospect has some of that same weird-little-movie vibe, though it hints at much larger stories just beyond the moon planet's horizon. After the movie's debut, Amazon approached Earl and Caldwell about developing a TV sci-fi series, one that would employ "the same apparatus" the duo used for Prospect, Earl says. They said yes, and a pilot is currently in the works. A piece of advice for prospective actors: Bring your own headgear.

Is there a screen trope simultaneously more loved and reviled than real-time hacking? Not a chance. From the early 1980s, movies and TV shows have developed a seemingly endless appetite for scrolling gibberish, 3D interfaces, pop-up windows, and other kinds of eye candy that scream L33T H4X0R ATTEMPT UNDERWAY. But now, on the latest episode of Technique Critique, security researcher Samy Kamkar blazes a trail of destruction through the chicanery, diagnosing what each famous sequence gets right—or, as is much more likely, wrong.

All the classics are here: Swordfish. The Net. Hackers. Skyfall. Tron: Legacy. They range from utter crap (Swordfish and its reliance on fancy visual interfaces) to maybe not as utterly crap as we assumed (Hackers may feature a gratuitous flame war between Crash Override and Acid Burn, but as Kamkar points out, patching a target to foil other hackers while leaving a back door for yourself is actually a valid technique) to being decent enough for a participation trophy (Skyfall gets credit for including the idea of polymorphic code, but demerits for including invalid hexadecimal code.) But for each one of those, there's a surprising example of truth and accuracy—like Wargames ’80s-faithful move of dialing directly into a school's admin systems like a BBS, or Mr. Robot's portrayal of a hospital that runs its security on a hopelessly outmatched Windows 95 machine.

Of course, those aren't even half of the shows and movies that Kamkar dissects and explains. And none of those are the clunker that makes him laugh, look hopelessly offscreen, and say "I don't know what we want to say about this. No more pop-up windows!" Enjoy his bemused befuddlement—and relive some of hilarious hacking sequences ever—in the video above.

Talk about Dragon Ball long enough, and you're bound to hear a joke about shirtless men screaming at each other while their hair gets inexplicably sharper. In much of the popular imagination, the franchise evokes thoughts of a kids' anime show in which animated characters yell and power up and flex for several episodes in a row, an endless prelude to actual fighting. Nevertheless, in 2019—35 years after the original manga, written and drawn by Akira Toriyama, premiered in Japan—Dragon Ball is a sensation.

The story of Goku, a boy with a tail looking to grow stronger, and Bulma, a genius girl seeking wish-granting orbs, has long grown into an international pop cultural juggernaut, but almost two decades after its original animated run came to its completion in the United States and Japan, Dragon Ball is having a moment. Last year, the finale of the newest Dragon Ball anime, Dragon Ball Super, drew record audiences, filling stadiums in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America drawing tens of thousands of people. Dragon Ball FighterZ, one of the best games of last year, became the hottest new title on the competitive fighting-game circuit. And this week a new feature film, Dragon Ball Super: Broly, earned over $7 million dollars on its first day in theaters—an astronomical number for a limited-run anime film.

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"It is very surprising to me," says Chris Sabat, a Texas-based voice actor and producer who has voiced Vegeta, Goku's rival, in just about every piece of Dragon Ball media created since the mid-’90s. "I honestly thought this was going to be a job that lasted me a year or something like that. I had no clue." Instead, it's lasted him about 20, with no signs of slowing down now. But while Sabat's work for a long period was either redubbing remastered versions of the anime or rehashing the same old stories in a dozen or so mid-budget videogames, now he's working on entirely new material, with a higher budget and more attention than ever before.

Why now? How did a niche childhood sensation—Sabat says he used to describe it to confused parents as "Pokemon but with fighting"—become a resurgent cultural juggernaut?

Partially, it's just the right demographic at the right time. "Dragon Ball was first sold as a kid's show, because back in 1998 the networks still believed that cartoons were for children," Sabat says. But, he continues, those kids are now the same age as the franchise's very first fans: "The people who loved Dragon Ball in Japan in 1998 and 2000 were people of all ages, particularly people in their twenties who were reading these manga on the subway on their way to work."

In other words, Dragon Ball has managed to keep pace with its audience. Quickly after Akira Toriyama began the manga, which was at first a madcap adaptation of Journey to the West, the narrative started to shift, emphasizing fighting and superhuman strength over hijinks. After a significant time jump near the middle of the manga's run, hero Son Goku was revealed to be not a monkey boy but in fact a member of a race of superpowered alien warriors—because sure, why not?

From there, the series leaned heavily into melodrama and impossible action, a direction that it's only doubled down on during its current revival, a renaissance that began with the 2013 movie Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods. From a specific, goofy adventure story, Dragon Ball has grown into something more totemic and straightforward, something almost like professional wrestling: A collection of stories about larger-than-life heroes and villains brawling, with stakes that are both impossibly high and completely absent. The good guys will win and the bad guys will bleed; justice meted by cartoon fists and psychic energy beams.

But there's another reason for the Dragon Ball resurgence, too, and that's just that it's been so damn good lately. When the original Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z anime series were created, they were modest operations, with limited budgets, questionable dubbing, and no direct involvement from Akira Toriyama himself, who was busy writing the manga. Now, the new movies and the Dragon Ball Super anime (which, while discontinued, is rumored to return) are all being created with Toriyama's direct involvement and an increased focus on the value of good animation. While Super, as any fan will tell you, has its rough moments in terms of visual quality, moments late in the series are incredibly visually compelling, and Dragon Ball Super: Broly is the best the franchise has ever looked.

The truth is, the detractors joking about men screaming and flexing weren't necessarily wrong. The original anime is packed full of filler and repeated animations to save money and buy time for Toriyama to write more of the manga, leading to fight scenes that are questionably paced and not nearly as visually compelling as they should be. Recent Dragon Ball media, particularly the Broly movie, works hard to correct this, and in the process captures the power that fans' imaginations have always imbued Dragon Ball with. This is vibrant, fast, world-destroying heroic conflict, with each moment rendered in vivid color and with striking visual flair. Dragon Ball as it's always deserved to be.

Dragon Ball Super: Broly, then, is a culmination of years of slow building and at least a year of popular resurgence. And it might be, pound for pound, the best piece of Dragon Ball animation ever produced. The plot could be stronger, and the series has more iconic moments in its history, but it's never looked or sounded so good. It's never had the style it has here, with a new type of animation helmed by animator Naohiro Shintani, designed to give the series a more hand-drawn look drawn directly from the manga. Every frame is graceful and striking. It's one of the most lushly animated films I've ever seen.

If this resurgence continues, maybe the cliché conversations about Dragon Ball will change. Instead of evoking what the series used to be at its worst, maybe they'll more quickly reference the best. Something big and goofy and violent, and also kind of beautiful. Just the way some of us have always wanted it to be.

Thursday marked one of the most important days in congressional history for diversity. A record 102 women took office, 35 whom were newly-elected. They include Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, the first Muslim women to serve in the House of Representatives, and Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first Native American women. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now the youngest congresswoman in history, also took the oath of office. The night before her swearing-in, a nearly decade-old clip of the 29-year-old began to resurface online, where she and other students dance to Phoenix’s then-hit song “Lisztomania.” It was uploaded to YouTube the year before she graduated from Boston University in 2011.

There’s nothing remotely scandalous about the video, but that hasn’t stopped right-wing Twitter users from attempting to weaponize it against Ocasio-Cortez, who is a Democratic Socialist. The New York representative is likely used to these types of attacks. Since winning her election in November, Ocasio-Cortez has been criticized for the clothes she wears, her bank balance, her modest childhood home, and now, apparently, for dancing in college.

But the reason Ocasio-Cortez’ detractors were able to find the video on the internet in the first place is far more interesting than their criticism. The story demonstrates how copyright law is often used to squash free expression on the internet—and sometimes even potentially erase a video featuring a future member of Congress.

The Ocasio-Cortez “Lisztomania” video was inspired by a separate YouTube clip uploaded in March 2009 by a woman named Sarah Newhouse (it has since been deleted; more on that later). Newhouse mixed the song with parts of iconic dancing scenes from 1980s “Brat Pack” movies like The Breakfast Club, which originally featured Karla DeVito’s “We Are Not Alone,” and Pretty in Pink starring Molly Ringwald and Jon Cryer.

“The video itself came as a product of being a creative type with too much time on my hands, having then-recently lost my job, spending time just editing goofy nonsensical videos to keep myself sane,” Newhouse said in a Twitter direct message. “I was also a fan of using YouTube Doubler to play with video and audio, and that combined with Phoenix's then-new album making me dance Molly Ringwald-style in my kitchen.”

Newhouse’s video quickly snowballed into a meme. Dozens of copycat clips were uploaded to YouTube, all featuring people doing The Breakfast Club dance to “Lisztomania,” including Ocasio-Cortez at Boston University. One of the earliest videos is from a group of dancers who filmed themselves on a roof in Brooklyn; their take was uploaded only several months after the original. According to Newhouse, Phoenix thought the video and subsequent mashups were great. “Oh, they loved it, they offered to have me come to a show and meetup, but they weren't playing anywhere nearby at the time, so that never happened,” she said.

This is where the copyright law portion of the story begins, which was first brought to WIRED’s attention by Parker Higgins. Back in 2013, Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and longtime copyright reform activist, uploaded a video to YouTube of a talk he had given at a Creative Commons event two years prior. It featured several of the Breakfast Club/Phoenix mashups, to help illustrate the point that “remixing” is an important part of culture.

Liberation Music, Phoenix’s record label, soon served Lessig with a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, demanding the video be taken down for violating its copyright for “Lisztomania.” Lessig quickly filed a DMCA counter-notice, arguing the his video constitutes “fair use,” since the song was excerpted for educational purposes—ironically to teach people about why copyright laws can stand in the way of cultural production. (This wasn’t even the first time a company had gone after the “Lisztomania” mashups. In 2010, Julian Sanchez uploaded a video to YouTube about the cultural importance of “remix culture,” which also featured the Brat Pack/Phoenix mashups. It also received a takedown request.)

Liberation Music threatened to sue Lessig, were he not to retract his counter-notice within 72 hours. Lessig then teamed up with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation to file another lawsuit, which Liberation Music settled for an undisclosed sum the next year. The record label also promised to adopt new policies that respect fair use. In this case, proponents of the freedom to remix, like Lessig and the EFF, won. But were Liberation Music to have gone after less copyright-savvy YouTube users, it may have been more successful in getting clips that featured “Lisztomania” removed. For instance, the video featuring Ocasio-Cortez may have been lost, erasing a small part of the story of an historic congressperson.

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The WIRED Guide to Memes

Similar DMCA takedown requests are regularly issued to YouTube users and those of other social media sites. Videogame companies have also issued DMCA takedowns against streamers, for instance. “The real danger of overzealous copyright enforcement isn't usually from targeted attempts to silence speech (although those happen to), it's from the Kafkaesque scattershot approach of just taking things down without caring about the consequences. The Lessig stuff definitely fell into that latter camp,” says Higgins, who worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation during the time of Lessig’s case and is now at the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The problem also extends far beyond just YouTube mashups.

Copyright policy often polices the expression of underrepresented groups, says Higgins, making it more difficult for them to freely create art. For example, judges have previously hindered hip-hop musicians from sampling other music in their work, an integral feature of the genre. “For a decade or so, courts basically put forth an interpretation of copyright law that said this whole art form that was being created and shaped and enjoyed by black communities was basically illegal, and that there was no way to make it legal without getting permission from (largely white) artists and record label executives,” he explains. Three songs on the 1994 Notorious B.I.G. album Ready to Die no longer feature samples after two record labels won a lawsuit in 2006, for example.

Meanwhile, Newhouse, who created the original Breakfast Club/Phoenix mashup, says her entire YouTube account has since been deleted—for copyright infringement. “It was a three strikes rule, I got three copyright claims and poof!”

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Dating in 2018 can be a challenge. I'm sorry, let me rephrase: It suuuuuuuuccckkkkksssss.

Apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, and others are the dater's tools of choice , and yet hating them is the one thing we can all agree on these days. They're often more hazard than help, and the forced psychoanalysis of every picture and witty answer can shake even the most durable of confidences loose. Why am I not getting more matches? Why didn't they respond? But is it your fault, or the app's? Is it really possible to find true love with just your thumbs? I set out on a journey to find out, and it starts with defining love itself.

The heart of the matter is the heart itself. Like any muscle, it must be worked on to grow. And love for most people seems to emulate that—a laborious growing process. A symbiotic relationship where two people don't just grow together, but toward each other. But how do you decide on the person, the deciding factor of your success? I asked some of my friends that question and got varying answers: Someone that makes me laugh. Someone that's empathetic. Someone that gets me snacks. But how do you filter for that? Will Tinder ever have a checkbox for "level of snack-readiness?"

So if we agree that common interests and values are the types of things we're all looking for in relationships, how can we be expected to find them in an app that sorts for first-glance aesthetics and the ability to write one clever sentence about yourself? It's Romance Roulette. Your filters aren't set for love; they're set for lust, and their equation for it is faulty at best. Your best chance at not getting eliminated before you even start is to conform, in which case you arrive safely in the dating pool without any of the things that make you, you. Dating apps reward homogeneity, sifting everyone into two-dimensional profiles that look the same, sound the same, and in some cases, even algorithmically identify which picture is best to represent you for the largest possible audience.

Of course, people don't love each other for what makes them the same; they love them for what makes them unique. I wanted someone insatiable, someone whose eyes set ablaze when they talked about something important to them. I wanted someone who was a good friend, a motivator, someone who enjoyed being a blessing to those around them. I wanted someone to invest their love in me for exactly the things that make me different. For those looking for a simple standard, a dating app can provide you with a sea of able-bodied mates. I wanted more than a flat photo and a single sentence could provide. So I chose to swipe dating apps right off my homescreen.

Bye Bye, Bumble

Moving away from dating apps sounds liberating—and it is. You'll realize characteristics that only matter inside your phone screen—What picture is best of me? What's one sentence that describes me? Why am I not getting the matches I want?—have been worrying you way too much outside of it. If you try to game love, you can expect love to game you. Hookups and temporary flings can be easy to find on apps, but when deep connections keep evading you, it's not the app you question. It's yourself. It can chew on your confidence to the point where it's no longer raising your chances by widening the pool, it's hurting them by leaving you at half strength during the times that really matter.

But how does one even meet people without an app anymore? Approaching strangers in bars is harder than it's ever been; we leave our dating to our phones, and real life is spent inside the confines of our tightly knit friend circles. Anyone trying to date outside of their phone has the potential to come off, well, creepy.

The New Old Fashion

So to find old-school love I went old-school. I went speed dating for some face-to-face conversations, and it changed everything. I could gauge my interest within 30 seconds of talking to each person, and didn't have to make plans and text awkwardly all week just to get to there. They didn't have to tell me through a text they were passionate, I could see it. I didn't have to endure the difficult work of predicting if they would make me double over laughing; it either happened or it didn't. But—maybe even more importantly—it was a better shot for me.

There were no filters—and therefore no excuses—they were actually getting me. My personality, my humor, my empathy, even my snack-readiness, with no thumb-crafting involved. We know humans crave connection—real, deep, meaningful connection. Yet it's difficult to find that depth over text; it happens with body language. It happens with the dance and tempo of real conversation. The chemistry isn't very complicated if the ingredients never touch.

I went on to take a boxing class, and joined a new gym. I joined a social kickball team. I went to concerts of my favorite artists. I swapped my swipe for a tap into all the social events the internet could offer. Now instead of conforming, I formed it to me. I filtered for the things I liked doing, and indirectly filtered for the types of people I would meet. Add to that the kicker: When I showed up to the online dates I wasn't interested in, I had wasted a night. But if I didn't meet someone while my favorite musician bathed me in a searing guitar solo? It's a win-win. It's not that it's impossible to find love on dating apps—it certainly isn't. But it is a brute force trial and error approach. Instead of taking a route chosen for me, I considered my strengths and chose something fitted to them. For some, dating apps will widen the pool and lead to success. For others, like me, you might be better off on the road not taken. I may not have found true love just yet, but I'm enjoying the journey a helluva lot more.

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