Fuck Everything

Fuck Everything: the dating sim that tackles rape culture | Dazed

The digital media artist Lena NW has created a really gross, highly surreal game called ‘Fuck Everything’, a simulation that confronts the aggressive male gaze, sex and nihilism.

Digital media artist Lena NW (or if she’s rapping, Fellatia Geisha), has created a dating simulation called “Fuck Everything”, a game based on Japanese Otaku culture that takes the player through weird and not so wonderful sexual scenarios, each one as stomach-churning as the next. Soundtracked by Lena herself, the game is a dreamlike walkthrough of nightmarishly aggressive social/sexual situations. Your first stop is at a bar, where five entities sit. A dog, a lava monster and a short-limbed sex doll make up three of the barflies – instantly you become accustomed to the strange worlds that you need to navigate through.

The game seeks to confront the misogynistic attitudes displayed towards women online, in hip-hop, in gaming and IRL. Lena explains that it’s “a reaction to pornography becoming normative and incredibly accessible through its online proliferation, its impact on culture, and the gender ideals it transmits.” She also wants to explore sexuality and gender roles in the context of cyber and fantasy subcultures and delve deep into what she says is an apparent fostering of rape culture in America.

Did you create all the art for Fuck Everything?

Lena NW: Yeah i made all the illustrations. “Fuck Everything” was not made by a team, it was just me. But there are gifs, images and photographs collaged and appropriated from different sources; shock sites, mangas, headlines from news sites, a majors mask reference, some furry fan art, pixel art, a mouchette.org reference and so on. All of the music is my own (I write & perform my lyrics, but I collaborate with producers for beats), except for part that has the song FACK by Eminem.

Do human beings want to fuck everything? If so, have we always been this way or are we becoming increasingly driven by sex?

Lena NW: I don’t want to speak for all human beings! I know some people are asexual. Within the game, “Fuck Everything” takes on a few different meanings. First, it is the goal of the game to have intercourse with anything the player can click on and second, it is a figure of speech that is a declaration of apathy and nihilism from a generation that has seen it all. It’s a reference to growing up with weird shit all over the internet and goes back to the game’s outcome – always dying.

Dying is always the ending in life. I think nihilism stems from being aware of this (YOLO!). Maybe there is an increased awareness of sexuality in this generation, from growing up with the internet, this huge digital porn culture, access to such a variation of content, forums and role-playing sites where we can experiment with our identities. I refer to Internet usage as an out-of-body experience, because online persona gives users the ability to be judged by the quality of their soul, rather than their physical body. I believe that this has the potential to contribute to an understanding of gender as a social construction, where the physical body and irrefutable indications of gender (biological build and genitalia) are regarded as irrelevant or even obsolete.

Lena is a Studio Art major at Florida State University who courted controversy in May when she published a painting of the university’s star quarterback receiving a blowjob. We came across her work yesterday on Rhizome and decided to get in touch to ask her about “Fuck Everything” and what she’s trying to say.

Dazed: What were your references for “Fuck Everything?”

Lena NW: Well I was referencing dating simulation games. I know a lot of Japanese dating sims that have hours of gameplay are more creative than this, but in the “Meet ‘n Fuck” dating simulations, you always get to fuck the girl. You can literally say to her in one of the dialogue options; “I’m going to rape you” and then she’ll just say “oh no!” but still stay their with her tits bouncing in your face while you simply select a more appropriate option like “you’re beautiful”. You don’t die or go to jail, and you always end up fucking her. So why not make a game where you always got killed or raped? This is just as extreme.

In my game I allude to this FSU Men Measure Up campaign that’s supposed to be our rape culture and awareness safety club on campus, where they cover up rape culture instead of try to post honest facts about it so people can try and protect themselves/want to make a change – WTF! I allude to hyper-misogynist, over the top rap rape lyrics and artists. I feel it’d be hypocritical to really criticise these acts because of the graphic nature of my work, free speech is so important to me; I feel it is more beneficial to acknowledge rape culture through a creative outlet, rather than cover it up with propaganda posters!

The situations are at times revolting and surreal. I just played a game where my character had sex with a melted face. Did I play wrong?

Lena NW: No you haven’t played wrong at all. In the beginning there is a roulette of gender – you can be a human male, human female, animal male, or animal female; if you were a female in this ending; you would have been shown a severed clitoris being eaten! The game isn’t really like a personality quiz, the options the characters have are too vague; regardless of what gender/species your character is, the dialogue will always be the same.

There are certain pivotal questions or answer selections that change your fate in the game, but a lot of it is filler, and you will have the same fate anyways. It’s riffing on that hyper-masculine attitude “I don’t care what this girl has to say, or who she is, I just want to fuck!” It doesn’t matter who you are; the game already knows what it is going to do to you and has already started to determine your fate. So definitely don’t take it personally!

This is about culture at large. Within “Fuck Everything” there are some alleged tinders between Jameis Winston where he interprets his “fan art” as me wanting to fuck him, and asks if i hate him. I clarify that the work isn’t personal, it is political. I told him not to take it personally, it’s not about you.