Angela Washko: "The Game: The Game" Subject of Critical Essay

Catherine B. Heller Collegiate Professor Angela Washko’s video game and installation project The Game: The Game (2018) was recently the subject of a critical essay called Disturbing Romance: The Participatory Art of Dating Simulators. The article, written by Anna Skorodihina and published in Diggit Magazine, explores The Game: The Game and Doki Doki Literature Club! to analyze how the genre of dating simulators can serve as both a creative medium and a critical commentary on digital-age relationships.

A project called The Game: The Game, developed by an artist Angela Washko, is a dating simulator game based on the author’s research into online pick-up artists, which is available online but was also debuted as an exhibition in New York’s Museum of Moving Image and later in other museums as well (The Game: The Game, n.d.). The game’s setting is a first-person experience of being a woman during a night out in the club, as the main character gets approached by one ​‘pick-up master’ after another. The atmosphere of the game is meant to be unsettling; the music by the band Xiu Xiu sounds like it came straight from a slasher, and the art style looks eerie, all to accompany the distressing nature of ways the different men in the club approach the main character. The player is in charge of how the main character responds to the aggressive flirting they are met with from the men, choosing to either outwardly refuse their advances or play along to see through their strategy and witness the intentions behind their ways of behaviour.

Disturbing Romance: The Participatory Art of Dating Simulators