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Gaming (Exchange Fandom)
| Synonyms: | |
| See also: | Matching |
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Gaming is the practice of gift exchange participants in AO3 exchanges attempting to influence who they will be matched to during the sign-up phase of exchanges with public requests. Participants may game either "towards" a fellow participant's sign up (with the intention of being matched to that participant) or "away" from a fellow participant (with the intention of not being matched). "Gaming" can generally be used for any situation in which an exchange participant adjust their offers or requests to influence matching.
Example Usage
A lot of my burnout used to come from matching on stuff I wasn't really excited to write. Now that I'm much more careful about what I offer by technically usually gaming the system to make sure I only match to the handful of requests that I'm comfortable with, my burnout has decreased significantly.[1]
A lot of my burnout used to come from matching on stuff I wasn't really excited to write. Now that I'm much more careful about what I offer by technically usually gaming the system to make sure I only match to the handful of requests that I'm comfortable with, my burnout has decreased significantly.[2]
I would absolutely recommend gaming your signup. It will reduce your anxiety greatly to know you can only match to a person and prompts you’d be ecstatic to write for. Offer pairings that no one is requesting to pad out the rest of your offers! If your time zone allows you to be online during the hour before when signups close, do a double check in the requests summary (not just to check for late signups, but also to ensure people haven’t added ships to existing requests), you’re guaranteed to be fine. If you’re only offering the minimum number of fandoms, it really does only take five minutes to check. [4]