Tactical Embodiment
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Washko, Angela
During her talk “Tactical Embodiment,” artist and activist Angela Washko will present several different strategies for performing, participating in and transforming online environments that are especially hostile toward women. She will introduce her long-term performative intervention “The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft” alongside several interventions, interviews, performances, written works and video games works she has created with the manosphere and online men’s seduction communities. In addition to walking the audience through her research, Washko will screen excerpts from her interview with a seduction coach who has been dubbed “The Web’s Most Infamous Misogynist” and highlight instructional DVDs, books, and hidden-camera videos created by a community of pick-up artists who teach men how to interact with and seduce women. The talk will close with an audience-participation based performative play-through of her most recent project “The Game: The Game,” a dating simulator video game presenting the practices of several infamous pick-up artists.
 Our next speaker is Angela Washkel. She's an artist, writer and facilitator based in D.U.S. where she currently is a visiting assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University. Angela's work revolves around mobilizing communities and creating new forums for discussions of feminism at places where they do not exist or which are frequently hostile, especially toward women. Her interventions, performances, written words and video games about which Angela will talk today in a few minutes, have been widely received and are critically acclaimed. Angela's work has been presented in numerous venues such as the LA Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of the Moving Image or the Rotterdam International Film Festival. This year she received the IMPACT Award at Indicate. Her work has been covered by, for instance, Art in America, The Guardian, The New York Times, Time Magazine and many, many more. To sum it up, we are very happy to finally have Angela here at Congress talking about strategies for activism and performance in hostile online environments. Give a warm round of applause for our next speaker. Angela Washburn. Okay, can you hear me alright? Is this working? My Britney Spears headset, I'm very excited about it. Maybe you can't see it because it's invisible. Okay, so thanks so much to everyone on the arts and culture, Curatorial Committee, that's a lot of Cs for inviting me tonight. I'm Angela Washcoe and I'm a research-based artist and activist making video games, written works, performances and interventions, often within video game and multi-user online environments. I'm also, as you heard, upgraded from visiting professor to assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University, so I now fully live in Pittsburgh. So today in my talk, I'm going to focus on my projects investigating niche languages formed in specific online communities and my activism-driven feminist interventions into the socio-cultural byproducts of our digital environments. I'll mostly talk about the game the game, a video game I recently finished based on online pickup artists' communities and seduction forums. And we'll also have an audience participatory play-through of the game at the end of my talk as well. So participation. I'm laughing a lot, but there's actually some very difficult content in this presentation, and I'll try to give adequate warnings to some of that difficult content when we get to it. But to start, okay, I'm going to start with this particular project to give a sense of what kinds of processes and politics we're informing the work that I'll show after it. I started playing the massively multiplayer role-playing video game World of Warcraft in 2006, a version of the game that veteran WoW players here might know as vanilla. Anybody? No, okay. Or silently just keeping it to themselves. That's fine. After years of playing in competitive guilds and feeling frustrated with how my social experience differed from men I regularly played with, in 2012 I decided to do something about it. I'd become tired of being told to get back in the kitchen and make male player sandwiches. I'd become incredibly uncomfortable with the number of male players aggressively soliciting me for sexual interactions as soon as they realized I was a woman. After years of working in public performance, grassroots activism, and collective organizing, I thought I could use this background that I had and apply it to this virtual public space and directly talk to players about why the community had become so homophobic, misogynistic, and racist in its public communication channels, at least on the U.S. servers that I've been playing on. So from 2012 to 2016, I created performative interventions inside World of Warcraft. So instead of killing enemies and getting bad-ass equipment like I had for six years prior to its founding, as the Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, I started traveling to highly populated virtual towns in the game to discuss the ways in which women were treated in the game space with other players. Again, WoW has had a player base that, at the time, and I would say still, is notorious for being quite hostile toward women, members of the queer community, and people of color, and this was, again, especially true on the servers that I primarily played on. In sessions with the Council, players came together in these public spaces to discuss inclusivity, entitlement, who gets to ask questions about the community's actions and language, harassment, why certain marginalized players were treated so poorly in the space, the feminism, why the politics of everyday life ended up so embedded in exchanges in this otherwise fantasy landscape where you can play as orcs, trolls, and cows, and so much more. The project shifted an intention from initially wanting to completely change the communal language in the space to fit something that was more affirming to me, but ultimately I realized that this was also a colonial impulse and started shifting toward trying to create a presence and public visibility for the issues of exclusivity that players faced in the space by meeting and talking about it regularly. So we started just kind of literally taking up space and altering the game experience with these underrepresented perspectives that were otherwise silenced within the community. The project over time gained a large in-game following, and an intentional inclusive guild was created as a part of these discussions on the primary server I operated on. My biggest goal from the start was that this project could create a prototype or set of tactical guidelines for productive, performative actions of protest by others in WAU and also other multi-user virtual environments. Oh, and if it wasn't clear, this is some video documentation from one of the meetings of the council. This is sort of a fast description of the project. There's a whole lot of nuance and a lot of self-criticality missing. If you are interested in some of those elements and some of the background and politics and process from the project, I wrote an essay called, Why Talk Feminism in World of Warcraft, which also has a lot of video documentation from the project as well, and it's available widely online. Writing is a big part of my practice, so every project I do usually has some kind of written component along with it. So in the midst of that long-term project, I started another one, which was also focused on facilitating dialogue within niche internet communities that are not inclusive to women and together very disparate perspectives. So starting in 2014, I became interested in a figure named Roush V. His writing and his ideologies started coming up during conversations with WAU players who identified themselves to me as men's rights activists or members of the manosphere. In case you're not familiar, Roush V is a professional pickup artist, or now he's sort of reframed himself as a professional seduction coach, but he's been called the most infamous misogynist on the internet, and he has a lot of competition for that title, as you might know. Thanks. Roush V spends his time traveling around the world teaching men how to perform in particular ways in order of sex with as many women as possible across geographic, language, and cultural barriers as quickly as possible. He writes a series of seduction-centric travel guides called Bang, Daybang, Bang Iceland, Bang Poland, and so on. One of his community fans made this image, not me. After reading so much of his writing for his devoted community of followers, one thing really stuck out to me. In Roush's accounts of his sexual exploits, the perspectives of the women he's explicitly talking about in great detail in his books and blogs are never represented. So I decided that I wanted to create a web and book project through which I'd hope to give the potentially hundreds of women Roush V's had sexual exchanges with using the extremely aggressive strategies outlined in his books and blogs, an opportunity to anonymously report their experiences. After pursuing mainstream media distribution of my call for these women, it occurred to me that Roush knew about my project as he wrote about it on his Twitter account. His awareness of the project changed it for me. He became less of this sort of abstract villain that I was free to run a sphere campaign on and more of a complex person and more of a subject. I decided that I should stop mimicking the shock media tactics that his own community would use for definitely different ideological purposes, but still, I moved toward investigating further into actually trying to understand the tactics within his community, his personal motivations, and the appeal that he and his practice held for his growing community of followers, and ideally come up with systems to respond to it. And many of this community of followers later became what's politically called the alt-right or part of it. So I pursued getting Roush V to do an interview with me via Skype. This took months of email negotiating. The video interview ended up being unintentionally two hours long and was very exhausting. I'm going to play two short clips from the interview to give you a sense of what it was like. I will say there is some sexually explicit talk in this clip. So if you're uncomfortable with hearing Roush V talk about female orgasms, now would be the time to leave because he will. Okay. Can you just, for the audience that may not be familiar with the books that you've written, can you just describe a little bit about bang, daybang, and Iceland's opening landmark and so on? I loved the landmark. Each book is basically trying to help men learn how to meet women and initiate sexual relationships. I'm going to start a conversation with men, how to build a traction with women, how to get out into bed. If you don't mind, I do want to read a section from bang that maybe you could sort of respond to because I think based on what you're saying, some of the things that in bang are maybe a more extreme version of what you're practicing now. You may want to try and play this kind of complex type of game, or you could close it. No, that's alright. I don't want to tell you this. I'll let you respond to it because I don't want you to get a separation. This is just called, if you don't feel like you're free, you're not pushing hard enough. She's not going to invite you upstairs like in the movies. She's not going to tell you she wants to have sex with you. She's not going to graduate taking a foot in. You must always be making the first move and always be pushing. If you're scared or think that you're the creep that means you're on the right path, remember that girls who like you are required to be honest with them, so moving quickly is an indirect way of showing interest that can be helpful for new relationships. Get her to your place, our heart is the same night you need her. Get her into the bedroom, take off her clothes and keep going. As she resists, take a break and start over again. Break her down in bang hard and then take her out in bang hard again. And then on page 90 something. How long have you liked the jackhammer until she gets tired and gives in? This is when an elegant approach but it works. Any human resistance can be broken down with no pressure. I was feeling just a little bit more extreme than what you were explaining earlier on. How did I not ruin the no-go of times? Let's imagine that I do somehow find 20 women that have slept with you. What do you think these women might say about the seduction process and your sexual performance? I would say that they would be able to say that I approached them with good energy, I didn't scare them, I made them feel comfortable, I didn't become really strong. At the same time I didn't become as much of an energy that they were interested in. I am really good at keeping the conversation going even if it was not giving me a lot of energy. I make everything feel natural. I touch and kiss. I mean it's rarely a question about how I grow up. I just don't know how to say it and I get touched because I can read and I know but based on how they act, how they talk, how they move when they want me to do the next step. And after sex I get lazy because now I already got most of what I wanted. So I just want to go to have the lowest possible expectations. I don't want to try. So it's actually a blessing and a curse to be good at bed. But I'm not. You mentioned your orgasm is of primary importance and that you don't go down on women. That's true. Can I ask why? Because nature has deemed the male orgasm to be more important. If right now a magic cloud of gas surrounds the earth and infected girls and prevented them from ever having a female orgasm again, the human species would go on still. But if this cloud of gas only affected men and prevented the male orgasm, what would happen? The human species is done. It is freaking done. Therefore nature, not me, nature has declared that the male orgasm is essential to life. But the female orgasm is like a cherry on top. If she gets it, hey, that's great. But if not, it doesn't matter. So I believe in what nature has said about it. Oh, the things that have been said in defensive nature. What is it? Does you know if I'm in a manifesto, if nature is unjust, change nature? Okay. And aside. The text in this video is from one of the many emails that I got nearly daily over the course of this project from Roush's community members. The project ended up taking a lot of unusual turns and a lot of unusual forms. Roush was initially enthusiastic about my search on the project in general, likely because of the media attention it gave him, something which I started to feel quite uncomfortable about. However, he and his community became increasingly frustrated over time that the media still had an overall negative view of Roush, despite me posting an unedited two hour long interview with him in mainstream media. His community began to harass me and additionally sent me rape and death threats over email, social media, comment sections of mainstream news sites, and a massive and still ongoing comment thread on the Roush V community forum. And additionally wrote threatening statements to collaborators, employers, friends, peers, and colleagues in an attempt to discredit what I was doing. I'm not talking about this issue to play up a victim narrative as I recognize myself as an artist with agency who started this whole thing, but as a performer who had seen real impact on the space in World of Warcraft as a result of my actions as the council, I naively applied some of the same logic and strategies to this project without realizing the primary difference in my position in these two spaces. In World of Warcraft, I was recognizable as a long term high level member of the community with high level gear only obtained through years of commitment to the game, clearly a participant and not an outsider. By virtue of just being myself on the baseline of a woman with a job, I was always going to be an outsider in the manosphere that I was going into. Here we'll let this play out for a second. If you're not familiar with the acronym WNB, that's would not bang. Thanks, M. Normally I say more about this, but if you do end up trying to follow me on Twitter, you might find that my account is now private. This is all related to this, and now you know. But I'm sure that all of you will make it through my betting process, so follow. So toward the end of this bang project, my individual pursuit of this somewhat Sisyphusian exchange with Roushvi and the online manosphere community felt riddled with the symptoms of the artist as hero slash savior complex. Perhaps internalized from formative years spent working for male tactical media artists, who I admire, like the yes men. I became more and more critical of my own processes, and instead of ignoring the blind spots, I decided to fold them into the project, acknowledging them in a variety of project manifestations, including multimedia storytelling performances, art installations, videos, an interactive dungeon crawler video game, and quite a lot of writing. And the shift in politics and self-criticality led directly into the research and form for the game the game. Toward the end of the bang project, something I felt was getting in the way of the work was my own performance role. The project became very much about my personal experience operating in the field. Despite my somewhat bad experience, I haven't abandoned this field as you'll see in this project. I'm just putting myself out of the spotlight and making the project less about my personal mediation of an intervention into this space, and more about creating an embodied way for people to digest experiences from and ideologies of these manosphere seduction communities. There's so much information, so many micro communities, and a lot of inaccessible lingo in this field, and a lot of the tactical information is very painful to process, especially if you're a woman. And so with all of the experience I now have mapping this field, as a researcher, I felt like I was able to put myself in a position to filter it all into a game scenario so that one might actually walk away being able to make sense of it without having to spend as much time as I have and potentially develop strategies to respond to it. So this brings me to the game-the-game, which we'll play through together in a moment, at least part of it. After the bang project, followers of other seduction gurus reached out to me to tell me that Roush V's variety of pickup art was much more extreme and much more misogynistic than other types that they argued were more focused on teaching men self-confidence, encouraging them to pursue self-improvement, to help level the dating playing field. I thought that this was a valid point and that something like this should exist. So I decided to take a deeper look into the variety of pickup artists gurus or professional seduction coaches, and the differences between the types of pickup art they're teaching, and then ultimately make a playable experience or video game about them. I'm just going to say that the rest of this talk on there are definitely mentions of practices that look like sexual assault and definitely evidence of non-consensual behavior. So if you're sensitive to or experienced trauma around these things and want to leave at any time, I won't be offended at all and I completely understand. So the project's title, The Game the Game, is a play on the bestselling book by Neil Strauss, The Game, which was the first mainstream primer into this world, which originated as a couple of guys with a Web 1.0 online community forum sharing tips with each other on how to pick up women and ultimately turned into a seduct—sorry, a lucrative seduction coaching lifestyle for some. So I made sort of a playable version of the game, but looking at the entire field and also the field as it's emerged today in more recent internet technology. So not just the pickup artist represented in that book. In developing The Game the Game, I present the different seduction techniques of famous pickup artists and allow those pickup artists to speak for themselves through their work and put players into the situation of interacting with them in the most common location for pickup art—a bar. Players, regardless of personal gender identity, are put into the position of experiencing a common scenario that femme-presenting people experience, having their personal space invaded when it's unwelcome by men who feel entitled to it. The first pickup artist you encounter in The Game the Game is Julian, who is designed primarily from research material from infamous pickup artist Julian Blanc's first major multi-DVD training program, PIMP. This is what the program costs today, now at a drastically reduced price. All of the dialogue by the pickup artist in this game is constructed from their actual word-for-word advice written by these pickup artists in their books, websites, DVD programs, and video conferences, and also situations from their own hidden camera footage that they sell to their devoted followers online. A lot of these coaching materials are prohibitively expensive and not available and full online. I hypothesize that this is not only to make a bunch of money off of them, but also to keep people who aren't looking to learn from them from finding out about them. But I got some grants, so I bought so many of them. So, thanks, University. Anyway, I really mean that. But anyway, I'm going to show an example of an excerpt from one of Julian Blanc's videos, including an infield hidden camera video. I'm just, again, going to give a little bit of a warning about this. It's not graphic. It's not overly sexual or pornographic. It's just disturbing, non-consensual behavior. So, I'm just going to put that out there. So, this is a short excerpt from PIMP. So, when I'm like, you know what, after-party, let's go. I'm even putting the word now. Like, you know what, after-party, now. Both, and I would order and command now. Now. Okay, listen, you don't have to if you don't want to, but let's go now. Okay, we get along, right? After-party, now. Adventure, now. Let's go, now. This second, now. This second, now. Okay, I'm going to hammer that shit in. I'll also do, like, you know what, after-party, because otherwise I have to go. Okay, it has to happen now. Okay, so keep that in mind. Take the responsibility on the girl and create a sense of urgency. Excuse me, why are we here? We're very much under arrest. No, no. But look, but Julian is under arrest. Wait, we have some more questions. I'm sorry. I apologize. What do we have for you, Robin? We're just like, what's your number? You want to see? I'll hide it. I've masked your shoulders. She won't see. Yeah, that's fine. That's what she said. Okay, real fast, real fast. Wake up, I'm awake, hi. A real kiss, not she. She's gone. Okay, we already kissed. It's too late. Give her a real kiss. Redemption. Redemption. It's like a video game. Redemption. Are you going to cheat on a shitty kiss? No. That's a good point. Am I going to cheat on a shitty kiss? You already cheated. You already cheated. You cheated on a fiancé on a shitty kiss. Is that really what you want? Where's your kiss? What are you guys talking about? Can I tell you about your wedding? You can give me a hug, okay? Okay, I'll take a kiss. Two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes. Two minutes. Okay, kiss real fast. No, no, no. No. This is my friend's talk. So this pretty much covers, you know, like aligning the emotional side of her brain with the logical side of her brain. All right. So I showed that video to illustrate that this moment presented in Julian's hidden camera footage is represented in the game. As a player, if you continue to engage with him to the point that you end up outside of the bar and are invited to leave the venue with him, even when you push back, you may be physically moved around and touch sexually without your consent. This is not me inventing what Julian is like in any way, but presenting him and his behaviors in the way that he has presented them himself and has suggested them as a template for his many hundreds of thousands of online fans to follow. It's really important that in the context of this DVD program, this is packaged as a success. This was a good interaction. This is proof that this kind of practice works. So if you can imagine the many hundreds of thousands of people that are following this practice, you know, it's not a great feeling, especially if you've had experiences that resonate with this. This dedication to accurately representing the strategies and language of each pickup artist is also why the game the game took three and a half years to make. Just some images. After each interaction in the game, you're prompted with a series of options. Generally, the options include a tonal range from being enthusiastic, we're going along with it, to being snarky, to being polite, to resorting to being aggressive in your rejection. Each option results in a different outcome illustrating how the pickup artist has described ways of handling the different ways that women respond to them. Each pickup artist handles rejection and women's attitudes differently. For example, and this is a bit of a spoiler alert, but if you play through, you'll notice that Julian will persist until you physically push him away. So as we play through together, if you want Julian to go away, as soon as you physically push him away, he will. So as a safety for all of you playing through, that's a way to get him away. And even the slightest hint of attitude or confidence will signal to Luke that you aren't submissive and therefore aren't worth his time and he'll leave you immediately. And Roush V is called Luke in this game because he was caught by talk show hosts in Russia using a pseudonym name of Luke, so I honored that in my game. Structurally, the game-the-game follows the mystery method M3 model, originally designed by Eric von Markovic, a pickup artist also known as mystery. So all the pickup artists in the game-the-game have adopted mysteries M3 model in their own practices and coaching materials, and they've each tweaked it a bit to establish their own brand on it and then sell it. This diagram breaks down the model and I'll talk about it a little bit so you can understand how it guides the game's timeline when we play it. So broken into three stages, attract, comfort, and seduce, this model outlines a pickup art hypothesis of structurally what needs to happen for a successful conquest to take place. So in the game-the-game, the attract phase includes pickup lines and a quickly establishing the pickup artist's quirky general vibe. Also during the attract phase, they do value demonstrations by showing how unimpressed they are by their targets. So this is also known as something you may have heard of called negging. And also providing proof from other people in the room that they're socially valuable, so finding a stereotypically interactive woman in the room and establishing that they know them somehow. The pickup artist then waits for their target, this is their language, or the woman, to show an indicator of interest. In their world, this means touching their hair, making sustained eye contact, starting to initiate conversation rather than just answering the pickup artist's questions, being receptive to being touched by the pickup artist, and ignoring their friends to talk to the pickup artist, things like this. After that, the pickup artist will try to move into the comfort stage by physically isolating their target, so moving them away from their friends to a farther part of the bar, sometimes even physically, convincing them to go to a different location with them, like another bar, a diner, or a made-up after-party that just ends up being their house, and starting to physically connect via a term that they call Kino, which basically just means repetitive touching that becomes more sexual in nature over time. So moving from a shoulder touch to hugging, to hand-holding, to kissing, and so on. After they've isolated their target in a comfort-building location, they attempt to bounce them to the sex location, which could be their place, their target's home, a bathroom, a vehicle, etc., and then the final stages of seduction occur. A very large amount of pickup artist's writing is devoted to overcoming what they call last-minute resistance, which is basically the moment in a sexual exchange when the target says they aren't comfortable with what's happening, a.k.a. a clear no. Each pickup artist has their own strategy for getting past that moment and plowing through to sexual intercourse. So following the structure as a player and as a target of pickup artist's attention, you can make a broad range of decisions in the game-the-game, from opting to hook up with different pickup artists in multiple locations to attempting to get away from them immediately. In constructing the game, I didn't want to make the point necessarily escape, and I hope that players, if they aren't traumatized by it, do experiment with seeing what a successful conquest looks like from the perspective of each of the pickup artists. The game never slut-shames the player by any means and also allows you to turn the tables and pursue the pickup artist yourself. I've tried to depict not only the breadth of the field of pickup art in the game, but also the extent to which each of these gurus copy their moves from each other, highlighting how community-based and internet-driven the men's seduction field is. Each pickup artist has his own online community forum where participants share their experiences using the strategies proposed by these pickup artists. Here you have the old, my TV is working, but we could use the computer in my bedroom routine. Then you have Julian's version, which involves a vampire diaries video you should see. Mystery, or Eric Von Markovic's version, which is I wanted to show you something in Google Earth, which says maybe date this a little bit. As you play through more and more exchanges and interact with more and more pickup artists, it becomes clear that each pickup artist is really building off of the content of another one's materials and tweaking them. The game was made from hundreds of handmade and digitally manipulated cyanotypes. You can see some here. This is what it looks like when they're combined and altered digitally and then put into Python and RENPI. I really wanted the game to have a feel to it that was consistent with the emotional and psychological weight of the experience. I brought back some of my background and more traditional art processes rather than employing the all-digital sprite-based RPG look I originally planned. Also, the band Shushu composed the soundtrack to the game the game. It has this dark and intense musical score, which I think enhances the tense claustrophobic nature of a lot of the interactions and environments, which you'll get to hear in a minute. It's been shown primarily in art exhibition and festival contexts at this point, but the goal has always been widespread online distribution through a platform like Steam, which is still in the works. I also want to say, despite the heavy way I've described the work, it's actually also at times quite funny. For example, Julian is obsessed with Twilight and the Vampire Diaries series, and a great deal of his pickup lines are vampire-oriented. And Roush has this odd story. He tells about living off the land and growing only butter lettuce and organic watermelons. It's important to me that the game doesn't just highlight the danger embedded in these scenarios, which I think it definitely does, but also the absurdity of some of the tactics as well. The game gives you an opportunity to slow down these practices and examine them closely, something one definitely cannot do when they're experiencing them in an actual bar. I frame the field in this heavy way for my talk because sometimes this field seems easy to dismiss as not real. And when I talk about the field and the work, I wanted to share with you some of the gravity of it by seeing it in practice. I'm interested in exploring the complexity of these spaces and not flattening them or oversimplifying them in the way that mainstream media does, and instead mapping them out and making their complexities more accessible. By making these pickup art practices an embodied experience and putting players into the position of making decisions and walking through interactions, I think there are insights to be gained that wouldn't be gained by, for example, writing a novel about the field. The game comes in at 97,000 words, and if you played through every possible scenario, it's the length of a 400-page book. So maybe that was an option. But for me, there's something important about being put into the position of experiencing these practices rather than reading about them from a distance. This is how I'm thinking about tactical embodiment, which was also the title of this talk. A strategy of positioning players into an embodied experience that may give them knowledge about this male seduction field by moving through them in a way through which it will sink in differently than reading about it in the abstract. I think that understanding these practices and why they're so appealing and perceived as a necessary antidote for so many men is instrumental in trying to dismantle them. There's a lucrative industry devoted to providing men with answers on how to get women to interact with them. Unfortunately, many of these pickup artists have a monopoly on providing these answers as they strategically market their products on online bodybuilding forums and men's self-improvement sites, knowing where to find these desperate clients who they then bleed dry while promising quick results. These pickup artists' practices fundamentally disregard consent and women's agency and also rely on very outdated ideas around biological determinism, making assumptions about what women are naturally like that undermine the wide spectrum of ways that people present, live, and perform. Okay, so now I'm done with the talking part. We're going to play through it together, and I'm going to walk you through, I think I have hopefully 15 minutes to walk through this. Oh yeah, nice. You just held up a 15. Okay. So I'm just going to set my timer for 15 minutes, and then I'm going to load up the game-the-game for us. And again, we won't really get to play through any of the truly sexually explicit scenarios. And I already gave you some hints on how to avoid Julian Blanc. So there's that. Okay, timer. Okay. Actually, let me get a little shorter. We'll do like 13 minutes. Okay. Gonna open it up. One second. I have to duplicate my display. Okay. Don't look at my desktop. Okay, cool. Here we go. It's going to happen. All right. I'm just going to check the preferences really quick. So this is the Shushu soundtrack that you're hearing already setting up. I'm going to turn it down a little so I can talk over it. Okay. It's dramatic. Okay. Okay. So the game right away opens with a little bit of a some context to help you understand what you're about to get into. I never want somebody to play this without some idea of what they're going into. Okay. So how we're going to play this together. When we get to a sort of branching narrative point like this, I'm going to say one, two or three. And then all over you are going to yell out. Thank you for deciding to continue this experience. That would have been really anticlimactic if we didn't. Okay. So and just yell out if I'm going clicking through a little too fast. One or two. Oh, no. Oh, steam. Oh, that's embarrassing. How many embarrassing things can happen to me in a talk tonight? Okay. One or two. Thank you. One, two, three or four. I heard some very enthusiastic threes. It's that kind of night. And this section is really to help you understand the interface and how to play in a certain way. Okay. One, two, three or four. I heard a lot of four. One, two or three. One, two, three or four. One, two, three or four. Three. One, two, three or four. One, two, three or four. Two. Okay. One, two, three or four. One, two or three. All right. Three. One or two. Okay. One, two, three, four or five. That was pretty unanimous. One, two or three. I heard a lot of threes. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three or four. Two. Okay. One, two, three or four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four or five. One, okay. One, two, three or four. One, two, three, four or five. One, two, three, four or five. One, two, three, four. One, two, three or four. One, two, three or four. Time's up. That's not really working. I thought it would. No, okay. Thanks for playing. See you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Paul. Thank you for this great talk. Unfortunately, we don't have time for the Q&A, but you will be here, I guess. Yeah, all right. Okay, let's give another warm round of applause for our speaker, Angela Washfield.
 Our next speaker is Angela Washkel.  She's an artist, writer and facilitator based in D.U.S.  where she currently is a visiting assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University.  Angela's work revolves around mobilizing communities and creating new forums for discussions of feminism  at places where they do not exist or which are frequently hostile, especially toward women.  Her interventions, performances, written words and video games about which Angela will talk today  in a few minutes, have been widely received and are critically acclaimed.  Angela's work has been presented in numerous venues such as the LA Museum of Contemporary Art,  the Museum of the Moving Image or the Rotterdam International Film Festival.  This year she received the IMPACT Award at Indicate.  Her work has been covered by, for instance, Art in America, The Guardian, The New York Times, Time Magazine and many, many more.  To sum it up, we are very happy to finally have Angela here at Congress talking about strategies for activism  and performance in hostile online environments.  Give a warm round of applause for our next speaker.  Angela Washburn.  Okay, can you hear me alright? Is this working?  My Britney Spears headset, I'm very excited about it.  Maybe you can't see it because it's invisible.  Okay, so thanks so much to everyone on the arts and culture,  Curatorial Committee, that's a lot of Cs for inviting me tonight.  I'm Angela Washcoe and I'm a research-based artist and activist making video games, written works, performances and interventions,  often within video game and multi-user online environments.  I'm also, as you heard, upgraded from visiting professor to assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University,  so I now fully live in Pittsburgh.  So today in my talk, I'm going to focus on my projects investigating niche languages formed in specific online communities  and my activism-driven feminist interventions into the socio-cultural byproducts of our digital environments.  I'll mostly talk about the game the game, a video game I recently finished based on online pickup artists' communities and seduction forums.  And we'll also have an audience participatory play-through of the game at the end of my talk as well.  So participation.  I'm laughing a lot, but there's actually some very difficult content in this presentation,  and I'll try to give adequate warnings to some of that difficult content when we get to it.  But to start, okay, I'm going to start with this particular project to give a sense of what kinds of processes and politics  we're informing the work that I'll show after it.  I started playing the massively multiplayer role-playing video game World of Warcraft in 2006,  a version of the game that veteran WoW players here might know as vanilla. Anybody?  No, okay.  Or silently just keeping it to themselves. That's fine.  After years of playing in competitive guilds and feeling frustrated with how my social experience differed from men I regularly played with,  in 2012 I decided to do something about it.  I'd become tired of being told to get back in the kitchen and make male player sandwiches.  I'd become incredibly uncomfortable with the number of male players aggressively soliciting me for sexual interactions as soon as they realized I was a woman.  After years of working in public performance, grassroots activism, and collective organizing,  I thought I could use this background that I had and apply it to this virtual public space  and directly talk to players about why the community had become so homophobic, misogynistic, and racist in its public communication channels,  at least on the U.S. servers that I've been playing on.  So from 2012 to 2016, I created performative interventions inside World of Warcraft.  So instead of killing enemies and getting bad-ass equipment like I had for six years prior to its founding,  as the Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft,  I started traveling to highly populated virtual towns in the game to discuss the ways in which women were treated in the game space with other players.  Again, WoW has had a player base that, at the time, and I would say still, is notorious for being quite hostile toward women,  members of the queer community, and people of color, and this was, again, especially true on the servers that I primarily played on.  In sessions with the Council, players came together in these public spaces to discuss inclusivity, entitlement,  who gets to ask questions about the community's actions and language, harassment,  why certain marginalized players were treated so poorly in the space, the feminism,  why the politics of everyday life ended up so embedded in exchanges in this otherwise fantasy landscape where you can play as orcs, trolls, and cows, and so much more.  The project shifted an intention from initially wanting to completely change the communal language in the space to fit something that was more affirming to me,  but ultimately I realized that this was also a colonial impulse and started shifting toward trying to create a presence and public visibility for the issues of exclusivity  that players faced in the space by meeting and talking about it regularly.  So we started just kind of literally taking up space and altering the game experience with these underrepresented perspectives that were otherwise silenced within the community.  The project over time gained a large in-game following, and an intentional inclusive guild was created as a part of these discussions on the primary server I operated on.  My biggest goal from the start was that this project could create a prototype or set of tactical guidelines for productive, performative actions of protest by others in WAU and also other multi-user virtual environments.  Oh, and if it wasn't clear, this is some video documentation from one of the meetings of the council.  This is sort of a fast description of the project. There's a whole lot of nuance and a lot of self-criticality missing.  If you are interested in some of those elements and some of the background and politics and process from the project, I wrote an essay called,  Why Talk Feminism in World of Warcraft, which also has a lot of video documentation from the project as well, and it's available widely online.  Writing is a big part of my practice, so every project I do usually has some kind of written component along with it.  So in the midst of that long-term project, I started another one, which was also focused on facilitating dialogue within niche internet communities that are not inclusive to women  and together very disparate perspectives. So starting in 2014, I became interested in a figure named Roush V.  His writing and his ideologies started coming up during conversations with WAU players who identified themselves to me as men's rights activists or members of the manosphere.  In case you're not familiar, Roush V is a professional pickup artist, or now he's sort of reframed himself as a professional seduction coach,  but he's been called the most infamous misogynist on the internet, and he has a lot of competition for that title, as you might know.  Thanks.  Roush V spends his time traveling around the world teaching men how to perform in particular ways in order of sex with as many women as possible across geographic, language, and cultural barriers as quickly as possible.  He writes a series of seduction-centric travel guides called Bang, Daybang, Bang Iceland, Bang Poland, and so on.  One of his community fans made this image, not me.  After reading so much of his writing for his devoted community of followers, one thing really stuck out to me.  In Roush's accounts of his sexual exploits, the perspectives of the women he's explicitly talking about in great detail in his books and blogs are never represented.  So I decided that I wanted to create a web and book project through which I'd hope to give the potentially hundreds of women Roush V's had sexual exchanges with  using the extremely aggressive strategies outlined in his books and blogs, an opportunity to anonymously report their experiences.  After pursuing mainstream media distribution of my call for these women, it occurred to me that Roush knew about my project as he wrote about it on his Twitter account.  His awareness of the project changed it for me. He became less of this sort of abstract villain that I was free to run a sphere campaign on and more of a complex person and more of a subject.  I decided that I should stop mimicking the shock media tactics that his own community would use for definitely different ideological purposes, but still,  I moved toward investigating further into actually trying to understand the tactics within his community, his personal motivations, and the appeal that he and his practice held for his growing community of followers,  and ideally come up with systems to respond to it. And many of this community of followers later became what's politically called the alt-right or part of it.  So I pursued getting Roush V to do an interview with me via Skype. This took months of email negotiating. The video interview ended up being unintentionally two hours long and was very exhausting.  I'm going to play two short clips from the interview to give you a sense of what it was like. I will say there is some sexually explicit talk in this clip.  So if you're uncomfortable with hearing Roush V talk about female orgasms, now would be the time to leave because he will. Okay.  Can you just, for the audience that may not be familiar with the books that you've written, can you just describe a little bit about bang, daybang, and Iceland's opening landmark and so on?  I loved the landmark.  Each book is basically trying to help men learn how to meet women and initiate sexual relationships. I'm going to start a conversation with men, how to build a traction with women, how to get out into bed.  If you don't mind, I do want to read a section from bang that maybe you could sort of respond to because I think based on what you're saying, some of the things that in bang are maybe a more extreme version of what you're practicing now.  You may want to try and play this kind of complex type of game, or you could close it.  No, that's alright. I don't want to tell you this. I'll let you respond to it because I don't want you to get a separation.  This is just called, if you don't feel like you're free, you're not pushing hard enough.  She's not going to invite you upstairs like in the movies. She's not going to tell you she wants to have sex with you. She's not going to graduate taking a foot in. You must always be making the first move and always be pushing.  If you're scared or think that you're the creep that means you're on the right path, remember that girls who like you are required to be honest with them, so moving quickly is an indirect way of showing interest that can be helpful for new relationships.  Get her to your place, our heart is the same night you need her. Get her into the bedroom, take off her clothes and keep going.  As she resists, take a break and start over again. Break her down in bang hard and then take her out in bang hard again.  And then on page 90 something.  How long have you liked the jackhammer until she gets tired and gives in? This is when an elegant approach but it works. Any human resistance can be broken down with no pressure. I was feeling just a little bit more extreme than what you were explaining earlier on.  How did I not ruin the no-go of times? Let's imagine that I do somehow find 20 women that have slept with you. What do you think these women might say about the seduction process and your sexual performance?  I would say that they would be able to say that I approached them with good energy, I didn't scare them, I made them feel comfortable, I didn't become really strong.  At the same time I didn't become as much of an energy that they were interested in.  I am really good at keeping the conversation going even if it was not giving me a lot of energy. I make everything feel natural. I touch and kiss.  I mean it's rarely a question about how I grow up. I just don't know how to say it and I get touched because I can read and I know but based on how they act, how they talk, how they move when they want me to do the next step.  And after sex I get lazy because now I already got most of what I wanted. So I just want to go to have the lowest possible expectations.  I don't want to try. So it's actually a blessing and a curse to be good at bed. But I'm not.  You mentioned your orgasm is of primary importance and that you don't go down on women.  That's true.  Can I ask why?  Because nature has deemed the male orgasm to be more important. If right now a magic cloud of gas surrounds the earth and infected girls and prevented them from ever having a female orgasm again, the human species would go on still.  But if this cloud of gas only affected men and prevented the male orgasm, what would happen?  The human species is done. It is freaking done. Therefore nature, not me, nature has declared that the male orgasm is essential to life.  But the female orgasm is like a cherry on top. If she gets it, hey, that's great.  But if not, it doesn't matter. So I believe in what nature has said about it.  Oh, the things that have been said in defensive nature.  What is it? Does you know if I'm in a manifesto, if nature is unjust, change nature?  Okay. And aside. The text in this video is from one of the many emails that I got nearly daily over the course of this project from Roush's community members.  The project ended up taking a lot of unusual turns and a lot of unusual forms.  Roush was initially enthusiastic about my search on the project in general, likely because of the media attention it gave him, something which I started to feel quite uncomfortable about.  However, he and his community became increasingly frustrated over time that the media still had an overall negative view of Roush, despite me posting an unedited two hour long interview with him in mainstream media.  His community began to harass me and additionally sent me rape and death threats over email, social media, comment sections of mainstream news sites, and a massive and still ongoing comment thread on the Roush V community forum.  And additionally wrote threatening statements to collaborators, employers, friends, peers, and colleagues in an attempt to discredit what I was doing.  I'm not talking about this issue to play up a victim narrative as I recognize myself as an artist with agency who started this whole thing,  but as a performer who had seen real impact on the space in World of Warcraft as a result of my actions as the council, I naively applied some of the same logic and strategies to this project without realizing the primary difference in my position in these two spaces.  In World of Warcraft, I was recognizable as a long term high level member of the community with high level gear only obtained through years of commitment to the game, clearly a participant and not an outsider.  By virtue of just being myself on the baseline of a woman with a job, I was always going to be an outsider in the manosphere that I was going into.  Here we'll let this play out for a second.  If you're not familiar with the acronym WNB, that's would not bang.  Thanks, M.  Normally I say more about this, but if you do end up trying to follow me on Twitter, you might find that my account is now private.  This is all related to this, and now you know.  But I'm sure that all of you will make it through my betting process, so follow.  So toward the end of this bang project, my individual pursuit of this somewhat Sisyphusian exchange with Roushvi and the online manosphere community felt riddled with the symptoms of the artist as hero slash savior complex.  Perhaps internalized from formative years spent working for male tactical media artists, who I admire, like the yes men.  I became more and more critical of my own processes, and instead of ignoring the blind spots, I decided to fold them into the project, acknowledging them in a variety of project manifestations, including multimedia storytelling performances, art installations, videos,  an interactive dungeon crawler video game, and quite a lot of writing.  And the shift in politics and self-criticality led directly into the research and form for the game the game.  Toward the end of the bang project, something I felt was getting in the way of the work was my own performance role.  The project became very much about my personal experience operating in the field.  Despite my somewhat bad experience, I haven't abandoned this field as you'll see in this project. I'm just putting myself out of the spotlight and making the project less about my personal mediation of an intervention into this space,  and more about creating an embodied way for people to digest experiences from and ideologies of these manosphere seduction communities.  There's so much information, so many micro communities, and a lot of inaccessible lingo in this field, and a lot of the tactical information is very painful to process, especially if you're a woman.  And so with all of the experience I now have mapping this field, as a researcher, I felt like I was able to put myself in a position to filter it all into a game scenario so that one might actually walk away being able to make sense of it  without having to spend as much time as I have and potentially develop strategies to respond to it.  So this brings me to the game-the-game, which we'll play through together in a moment, at least part of it.  After the bang project, followers of other seduction gurus reached out to me to tell me that Roush V's variety of pickup art was much more extreme and much more misogynistic than other types that they argued were more focused on teaching men self-confidence,  encouraging them to pursue self-improvement, to help level the dating playing field.  I thought that this was a valid point and that something like this should exist.  So I decided to take a deeper look into the variety of pickup artists gurus or professional seduction coaches, and the differences between the types of pickup art they're teaching, and then ultimately make a playable experience or video game about them.  I'm just going to say that the rest of this talk on there are definitely mentions of practices that look like sexual assault and definitely evidence of non-consensual behavior.  So if you're sensitive to or experienced trauma around these things and want to leave at any time, I won't be offended at all and I completely understand.  So the project's title, The Game the Game, is a play on the bestselling book by Neil Strauss, The Game, which was the first mainstream primer into this world, which originated as a couple of guys with a Web 1.0 online community forum sharing tips with each other on how to pick up women  and ultimately turned into a seduct—sorry, a lucrative seduction coaching lifestyle for some.  So I made sort of a playable version of the game, but looking at the entire field and also the field as it's emerged today in more recent internet technology.  So not just the pickup artist represented in that book.  In developing The Game the Game, I present the different seduction techniques of famous pickup artists and allow those pickup artists to speak for themselves through their work and put players into the situation of interacting with them in the most common location for pickup art—a bar.  Players, regardless of personal gender identity, are put into the position of experiencing a common scenario that femme-presenting people experience, having their personal space invaded when it's unwelcome by men who feel entitled to it.  The first pickup artist you encounter in The Game the Game is Julian, who is designed primarily from research material from infamous pickup artist Julian Blanc's first major multi-DVD training program, PIMP.  This is what the program costs today, now at a drastically reduced price.  All of the dialogue by the pickup artist in this game is constructed from their actual word-for-word advice written by these pickup artists in their books, websites, DVD programs, and video conferences,  and also situations from their own hidden camera footage that they sell to their devoted followers online.  A lot of these coaching materials are prohibitively expensive and not available and full online. I hypothesize that this is not only to make a bunch of money off of them, but also to keep people who aren't looking to learn from them from finding out about them.  But I got some grants, so I bought so many of them.  So, thanks, University. Anyway, I really mean that. But anyway, I'm going to show an example of an excerpt from one of Julian Blanc's videos, including an infield hidden camera video.  I'm just, again, going to give a little bit of a warning about this. It's not graphic. It's not overly sexual or pornographic. It's just disturbing, non-consensual behavior.  So, I'm just going to put that out there. So, this is a short excerpt from PIMP.  So, when I'm like, you know what, after-party, let's go. I'm even putting the word now.  Like, you know what, after-party, now. Both, and I would order and command now. Now.  Okay, listen, you don't have to if you don't want to, but let's go now.  Okay, we get along, right? After-party, now. Adventure, now. Let's go, now. This second, now. This second, now.  Okay, I'm going to hammer that shit in. I'll also do, like, you know what, after-party, because otherwise I have to go. Okay, it has to happen now.  Okay, so keep that in mind. Take the responsibility on the girl and create a sense of urgency.  Excuse me, why are we here? We're very much under arrest.  No, no.  But look, but Julian is under arrest.  Wait, we have some more questions.  I'm sorry.  I apologize.  What do we have for you, Robin?  We're just like, what's your number? You want to see? I'll hide it. I've masked your shoulders. She won't see.  Yeah, that's fine.  That's what she said. Okay, real fast, real fast.  Wake up, I'm awake, hi.  A real kiss, not she. She's gone. Okay, we already kissed. It's too late. Give her a real kiss. Redemption. Redemption.  It's like a video game. Redemption.  Are you going to cheat on a shitty kiss?  No.  That's a good point.  Am I going to cheat on a shitty kiss?  You already cheated. You already cheated. You cheated on a fiancé on a shitty kiss. Is that really what you want?  Where's your kiss? What are you guys talking about?  Can I tell you about your wedding?  You can give me a hug, okay?  Okay, I'll take a kiss.  Two minutes.  Two minutes.  Two minutes.  Two minutes.  Okay, kiss real fast.  No, no, no.  No.  This is my friend's talk.  So this pretty much covers, you know, like aligning the emotional side of her brain with the logical side of her brain.  All right.  So I showed that video to illustrate that this moment presented in Julian's hidden camera footage is represented in the game.  As a player, if you continue to engage with him to the point that you end up outside of the bar and are invited to leave the venue with him,  even when you push back, you may be physically moved around and touch sexually without your consent.  This is not me inventing what Julian is like in any way, but presenting him and his behaviors in the way that he has presented them himself  and has suggested them as a template for his many hundreds of thousands of online fans to follow.  It's really important that in the context of this DVD program, this is packaged as a success.  This was a good interaction.  This is proof that this kind of practice works.  So if you can imagine the many hundreds of thousands of people that are following this practice, you know, it's not a great feeling,  especially if you've had experiences that resonate with this.  This dedication to accurately representing the strategies and language of each pickup artist is also why the game the game took three and a half years to make.  Just some images.  After each interaction in the game, you're prompted with a series of options.  Generally, the options include a tonal range from being enthusiastic, we're going along with it, to being snarky, to being polite,  to resorting to being aggressive in your rejection.  Each option results in a different outcome illustrating how the pickup artist has described ways of handling the different ways that women respond to them.  Each pickup artist handles rejection and women's attitudes differently.  For example, and this is a bit of a spoiler alert,  but if you play through, you'll notice that Julian will persist until you physically push him away.  So as we play through together, if you want Julian to go away, as soon as you physically push him away, he will.  So as a safety for all of you playing through, that's a way to get him away.  And even the slightest hint of attitude or confidence will signal to Luke that you aren't submissive and therefore aren't worth his time and he'll leave you immediately.  And Roush V is called Luke in this game because he was caught by talk show hosts in Russia using a pseudonym name of Luke, so I honored that in my game.  Structurally, the game-the-game follows the mystery method M3 model, originally designed by Eric von Markovic, a pickup artist also known as mystery.  So all the pickup artists in the game-the-game have adopted mysteries M3 model in their own practices and coaching materials,  and they've each tweaked it a bit to establish their own brand on it and then sell it.  This diagram breaks down the model and I'll talk about it a little bit so you can understand how it guides the game's timeline when we play it.  So broken into three stages, attract, comfort, and seduce, this model outlines a pickup art hypothesis of structurally what needs to happen for a successful conquest to take place.  So in the game-the-game, the attract phase includes pickup lines and a quickly establishing the pickup artist's quirky general vibe.  Also during the attract phase, they do value demonstrations by showing how unimpressed they are by their targets.  So this is also known as something you may have heard of called negging.  And also providing proof from other people in the room that they're socially valuable, so finding a stereotypically interactive woman in the room and establishing that they know them somehow.  The pickup artist then waits for their target, this is their language, or the woman, to show an indicator of interest.  In their world, this means touching their hair, making sustained eye contact, starting to initiate conversation rather than just answering the pickup artist's questions,  being receptive to being touched by the pickup artist, and ignoring their friends to talk to the pickup artist, things like this.  After that, the pickup artist will try to move into the comfort stage by physically isolating their target, so moving them away from their friends to a farther part of the bar, sometimes even physically,  convincing them to go to a different location with them, like another bar, a diner, or a made-up after-party that just ends up being their house,  and starting to physically connect via a term that they call Kino, which basically just means repetitive touching that becomes more sexual in nature over time.  So moving from a shoulder touch to hugging, to hand-holding, to kissing, and so on.  After they've isolated their target in a comfort-building location, they attempt to bounce them to the sex location,  which could be their place, their target's home, a bathroom, a vehicle, etc., and then the final stages of seduction occur.  A very large amount of pickup artist's writing is devoted to overcoming what they call last-minute resistance,  which is basically the moment in a sexual exchange when the target says they aren't comfortable with what's happening, a.k.a. a clear no.  Each pickup artist has their own strategy for getting past that moment and plowing through to sexual intercourse.  So following the structure as a player and as a target of pickup artist's attention, you can make a broad range of decisions in the game-the-game,  from opting to hook up with different pickup artists in multiple locations to attempting to get away from them immediately.  In constructing the game, I didn't want to make the point necessarily escape, and I hope that players, if they aren't traumatized by it,  do experiment with seeing what a successful conquest looks like from the perspective of each of the pickup artists.  The game never slut-shames the player by any means and also allows you to turn the tables and pursue the pickup artist yourself.  I've tried to depict not only the breadth of the field of pickup art in the game, but also the extent to which each of these gurus copy their moves from each other,  highlighting how community-based and internet-driven the men's seduction field is.  Each pickup artist has his own online community forum where participants share their experiences using the strategies proposed by these pickup artists.  Here you have the old, my TV is working, but we could use the computer in my bedroom routine.  Then you have Julian's version, which involves a vampire diaries video you should see.  Mystery, or Eric Von Markovic's version, which is I wanted to show you something in Google Earth, which says maybe date this a little bit.  As you play through more and more exchanges and interact with more and more pickup artists, it becomes clear that each pickup artist is really building off of the content of another one's materials and tweaking them.  The game was made from hundreds of handmade and digitally manipulated cyanotypes.  You can see some here.  This is what it looks like when they're combined and altered digitally and then put into Python and RENPI.  I really wanted the game to have a feel to it that was consistent with the emotional and psychological weight of the experience.  I brought back some of my background and more traditional art processes rather than employing the all-digital sprite-based RPG look I originally planned.  Also, the band Shushu composed the soundtrack to the game the game.  It has this dark and intense musical score, which I think enhances the tense claustrophobic nature of a lot of the interactions and environments, which you'll get to hear in a minute.  It's been shown primarily in art exhibition and festival contexts at this point, but the goal has always been widespread online distribution through a platform like Steam, which is still in the works.  I also want to say, despite the heavy way I've described the work, it's actually also at times quite funny.  For example, Julian is obsessed with Twilight and the Vampire Diaries series, and a great deal of his pickup lines are vampire-oriented.  And Roush has this odd story. He tells about living off the land and growing only butter lettuce and organic watermelons.  It's important to me that the game doesn't just highlight the danger embedded in these scenarios, which I think it definitely does, but also the absurdity of some of the tactics as well.  The game gives you an opportunity to slow down these practices and examine them closely, something one definitely cannot do when they're experiencing them in an actual bar.  I frame the field in this heavy way for my talk because sometimes this field seems easy to dismiss as not real.  And when I talk about the field and the work, I wanted to share with you some of the gravity of it by seeing it in practice.  I'm interested in exploring the complexity of these spaces and not flattening them or oversimplifying them in the way that mainstream media does,  and instead mapping them out and making their complexities more accessible.  By making these pickup art practices an embodied experience and putting players into the position of making decisions and walking through interactions,  I think there are insights to be gained that wouldn't be gained by, for example, writing a novel about the field.  The game comes in at 97,000 words, and if you played through every possible scenario, it's the length of a 400-page book.  So maybe that was an option. But for me, there's something important about being put into the position of experiencing these practices rather than reading about them from a distance.  This is how I'm thinking about tactical embodiment, which was also the title of this talk.  A strategy of positioning players into an embodied experience that may give them knowledge about this male seduction field by moving through them in a way through which it will sink in differently than reading about it in the abstract.  I think that understanding these practices and why they're so appealing and perceived as a necessary antidote for so many men is instrumental in trying to dismantle them.  There's a lucrative industry devoted to providing men with answers on how to get women to interact with them.  Unfortunately, many of these pickup artists have a monopoly on providing these answers as they strategically market their products on online bodybuilding forums and men's self-improvement sites,  knowing where to find these desperate clients who they then bleed dry while promising quick results.  These pickup artists' practices fundamentally disregard consent and women's agency and also rely on very outdated ideas around biological determinism,  making assumptions about what women are naturally like that undermine the wide spectrum of ways that people present, live, and perform.  Okay, so now I'm done with the talking part. We're going to play through it together, and I'm going to walk you through, I think I have hopefully 15 minutes to walk through this.  Oh yeah, nice. You just held up a 15. Okay. So I'm just going to set my timer for 15 minutes, and then I'm going to load up the game-the-game for us.  And again, we won't really get to play through any of the truly sexually explicit scenarios.  And I already gave you some hints on how to avoid Julian Blanc. So there's that.  Okay, timer. Okay. Actually, let me get a little shorter. We'll do like 13 minutes. Okay.  Gonna open it up. One second. I have to duplicate my display. Okay.  Don't look at my desktop. Okay, cool.  Here we go.  It's going to happen. All right.  I'm just going to check the preferences really quick. So this is the Shushu soundtrack that you're hearing already setting up.  I'm going to turn it down a little so I can talk over it.  Okay. It's dramatic. Okay.  Okay. So the game right away opens with a little bit of a some context to help you understand what you're about to get into.  I never want somebody to play this without some idea of what they're going into.  Okay.  So how we're going to play this together. When we get to a sort of branching narrative point like this, I'm going to say one, two or three.  And then all over you are going to yell out. Thank you for deciding to continue this experience.  That would have been really anticlimactic if we didn't. Okay.  So and just yell out if I'm going clicking through a little too fast.  One or two. Oh, no. Oh, steam. Oh, that's embarrassing. How many embarrassing things can happen to me in a talk tonight? Okay.  One or two. Thank you.  One, two, three or four.  I heard some very enthusiastic threes. It's that kind of night.  And this section is really to help you understand the interface and how to play in a certain way.  Okay.  One, two, three or four.  I heard a lot of four.  One, two or three.  One, two, three or four.  One, two, three or four.  Three.  One, two, three or four.  One, two, three or four.  Two. Okay.  One, two, three or four.  One, two or three.  All right. Three.  One or two. Okay.  One, two, three, four or five.  That was pretty unanimous.  One, two or three.  I heard a lot of threes.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three or four.  Two. Okay.  One, two, three or four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three, four or five.  One, okay.  One, two, three or four.  One, two, three, four or five.  One, two, three, four or five.  One, two, three, four.  One, two, three or four.  One, two, three or four.  Time's up.  That's not really working. I thought it would.  No, okay.  Thanks for playing.  See you.  Thank you.  Thank you very much, Paul.  Thank you for this great talk.  Unfortunately, we don't have time for the Q&A,  but you will be here, I guess.  Yeah, all right.  Okay, let's give another warm round of applause for our speaker,  Angela Washfield.
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