AvaPeeps: Flirt Nation

Everyone seems to know someone who knows someone who has had a successful blind date. Tracking that someone down for a first-hand account of the event is no easy task, however - like every urban myth on earth, somewhere along the line it's more likely the truth has been left behind in favour of a more entertaining fiction. In my experience, blind dates usually equate to wasted nights spent with people who have body odour. Or worse - you end up marrying them!

AvaPeeps: Flirt Nation attempts to convey the appeal of a blind date from the safety of your mobile phone, allowing you to 'hook up' with folk all around the world without even a whiff of BO. Describing just what this entails is far from straightforward; Flirt Nation is essentially an odd take on social networking that exploits our seemingly endless need to recreate ourselves online. In short, it's a program that lets you create and date avatars.

Yes, Digital Chocolate is very keen to point out that the dates themselves are carried out by third-parties - girls and boys you create at the very start of the game. You play the role of advisor rather than hooking up with the randoms yourself. The avatar creation tool itself is fairly simple, yet results in teams of people who look nothing like each other. Everything from the shape of your chin, to your gender, eye colour, skin colour and hairstyle is customisable, as well as the kind of date you're interested in - straight, gay, but strangely not bisexual.

Once you've determined your AvaPeep's personality (broadly defined by three hobby types and a style of music to play in the background) and posted what is effectively a personal ad, it's then time to start looking for prospective dates. AvaPeeps from all over the world reside in one of the game's locations, whether it's a nightclub, library or down at the beach, and dressing your Peep appropriately can be the difference between picking someone up and being passed off.

This is when your guy or girl will head out into the world on his or her own, and all you can do is advise what kind of approach they appreciate when being hit on, and the kind of moves they should make themselves when trying it on with a guy or girl of your choice. For example, if your prospective mate is a romantic, telling your AvaPeep to open with a crude joke probably won't go down very well. The challenge here, as in life, is determining what someone will appreciate based on nothing more than what they look like.

If you make more right moves than wrong, then further dates can follow - though one successful outing doesn't necessarily mean the second or third will go quite as well. Not that being shunned will hold you back for too long - there are almost too many dates to be had here, in truth. You can literally try it on with people all day every day, with the only thing holding you back being the fact that you have to wait for their response before the game determines whether you're a good match or not.

No doubt, AvaPeeps's potential to serve up a social networking revolution on the mobile is one that could rival Digital Chocolate's own Party Island franchise. After all, mobiles were designed to connect people with one another, so it's no great leap to understand why an application like AvaPeeps could be big business. But it's hard to work out just what the people who will, no doubt, invest weeks and months of playtime will get out of it; while you can add other users to your friends list and leave them pre-determined messages, just what comes next is up in the air.

Indeed, though AvaPeeps asks for your age from the very outset (and presumably blocks underage contact), it relies on people being honest, and the fact that I saw people using the headline of their profiles - the only part of the game that allows you to type freely – to post their phone numbers on a couple of occasions suggests that some people may want to use AvaPeeps as a way of setting up real encounters, rather than fictional ones.

That aside, if used as intended, AvaPeeps: Flirt Nation is a smart little application that allows users to have a bit of light, flirty fun without getting dolled up and heading down the local Chicago Rock. It's going to rely on the community keeping an eye on activities, no doubt, but Flirt Nation is perfectly pitched at a mobile market fusing with the Facebook generation, and there's enough here to suggest that a sequel or two could result in AvaPeeps being hit squarely by cupid's arrow in the future.