The Game: The Game

Angela Washko

2016 - 2019

In Angela Washko’s dating simulator The Game: The Game, the player is placed in the perspective of a femme-presenting person who encounters a series of men in a bar setting. The men are all prominent figures in the so-called seduction community, an internet-fueled subculture of “pick-up artists” (PUAs). The men portrayed in The Game: The Game treat social interaction as a contest, with sexual conquest the goal, and they employ various tactics to cajole and coerce the player into a sexual encounter.

Based on Washko’s extensive research in the seduction community, The Game: The Game exposes the unsettling, deeply misogynistic practices of a real community of men that gamify the unequal gender dynamics of everyday life.

Still image from Angela Washko, The Game: The Game, 2016–2019.

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Content note: Your experience may include sexual situations, sexual violence, and/or offensive language. This game is not advised for players under the age of 18.

The Game: The Game draws directly on techniques and strategies preached by professional seduction coaches, six of whom appear in the game.

Among the multiple-choice response options available to players, Washko sometimes provides clever comebacks and impassioned retorts, while at other times emphasizing the player’s lack of agency or the PUA’s disregard for their boundaries or consent.

Still image from Angela Washko, The Game: The Game, 2016–2019.

“If their techniques are systematically manipulative, The Game: The Game allows you to tactically explore, expose, and defuse them. But it also makes you complicit in their frequently dehumanizing behavior: refusing their advances results in a brief game. Only by actively consenting to participate in your suitor’s methods—which can range from cheesy to violent—will you be able to more fully understand them.” — Jason Eppink, Museum of the Moving Image

The images in The Game: The Game are drawings on cyanotype backgrounds. With their limited color palette and paper-like texture, they evoke the aesthetics of detective or pulp novels—an appropriate reference given the gendered violence often rehearsed in those genres.

A pulsing, droning soundtrack by Xiu Xiu further suffuses each encounter in the game with a feeling of doom.

Still image from Angela Washko, The Game: The Game, 2016–2019.

The Game: The Game is often shown in a gallery setting along with research materials, interviews, and the series Severed Women as Objects—cyanotype prints that are used in the game.

It premiered in a solo exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image (NYC) which ran from January 10—March 25, 2018, and was released online in June 2019.

Still image from Angela Washko, The Game: The Game, 2016–2018.

“I think it is totally possible to be empathetic toward men who find these teachings appealing and useful for building the confidence to approach and meet women...and still be critical of those pick-up artists who ultimately undermine, disregard, and fundamentally loathe the concept of consent.” — Angela Washko