Gamifying intimacy: AI-driven affective engagement and human-virtual human relationships

This article examines the gamification of intimacy with AI, through China’s XingYe, a multimodal AI companion platform that integrates role-playing game (RPG) mechanics, algorithmic responsiveness and user-generated markets to reconfigure human-virtual human relationships. Drawing on 9-month autoethnographic engagement, we argue that XingYe operationalises what we term the gamification of intimacy – a design paradigm that commodifies emotional labour by rendering affection efficient, quantifiable and achievement-oriented. Users engineer customisable AI companions through ludic acts of co-creation, navigating tiered progression systems and gacha-style rewards that transform intimacy into a structured, transactional process. Simultaneously, XingYe blurs boundaries between fiction and lived experience, enabling real-time narrative remediation and the monetisation of AI agents as tradable commodities. This hybrid relationality challenges traditional notions of parasociality, positioning AI-mediated intimacy as a liminal space of technocultural negotiation where algorithmic agency and user desire converge. By framing emotional bonds as both labour and leisure, XingYe exemplifies the industrial production of connection under platform capitalism, raising critical questions about agency, data sovereignty and the neoliberal optimisation of vulnerability. The study contributes to debates on human-machine communication by interrogating how gamified AI systems reshape intimacy into a crowdsourced, market-driven practice, urging scholars to transcend anthropocentric frameworks and address the ethical implications of affective commodification in digital ecosystems.