CW: mentions of violence against sex workers
Long before I was a sex worker and had delved into the world of fetish play, I used to build niche worlds in just about any roleplay game I could find. I’d flesh out custom characters with lore that would make Shakespeare cry (in cringe, not envy), and just about as much debauchery as my family’s shared PC could manage with that dial-up connection. I didn’t really pay attention to sex workers in games back then. It just wasn’t on my radar, but once I set foot into the sex working world, it became something that was prominent to me wherever I looked. Our depiction in news media and on TV is a constant battle between dehumanization (disgust) and fetishization (covetous lust), so you can imagine my surprise when this wasn’t always the case in the games I was later introduced to.
My first introduction to the Like a Dragon series (formerly known as Yakuza) was turning up to a friend’s house after a late camming shift one night. Someone passed me the controller, saying, “this is kinda like your job, can you help?” On the screen was a hostess, and she needed the best outfit to fit the tastes of her client. She had to be cute, but also funny, so we settled on a sparkly pink dress and some bunny ears. I sat there confused for a moment while he went back to playing, choosing the correct responses for her to give the client, deciding when to ask for gifts and when to serve drinks. It felt so strange to me – at the time I was so used to the media villainising or victimising us at every turn – that this game, made in the early 2000’s, was showing a small slice of our industry in such a normal way. The series itself doesn’t focus on sex workers, instead following the generations and political shifts within different criminal clans, but sex workers do appear regularly. When you need information, you can gift them designer items to spill on the things they observe. Need some extra income? Run a hostess club – but be sure to treat the workers nicely. In later games you even have a whip-wielding domme as a playable character on the protagonist’s team.
In the most recent addition to the series, our main protagonist, the ever-awkward Ichiban, was brought up in the Shangri-La soap lands. Soap lands are spaces where people may pay to be “bathed” by providers, and of course anything else that occurs is just part of the service. After his mother abandoned him, he was raised communally by the women working there. Ichiban may not be the most well-adjusted man (who is in this series anyway?), but his childhood is never depicted as something shameful. He was raised to be a man with a strong sense of justice, childlike compassion, and a refusal to cause undue harm.
Long before I was a sex worker and had delved into the world of fetish play, I used to build niche worlds in just about any roleplay game I could find.
His childhood is not depicted as a negative thing, and he holds great sentimentality about the soap lands and the women there. These depictions of sex workers, as we function normally within society, is ever present within this game series – a stark contrast to what we’re used to in western franchises such as Grand Theft Auto, where picking up a “hooker” to murder is part of the course. Now, this could be due to the drastic differences in attitudes towards sex work in different cultures. But when we consider how many clients are gamers, therefore having their attitudes around and towards sex work coloured by this medium, maybe we should pay some it closer attention?
A lot of my own client base are gamers, and it’s not uncommon for them to relate our session back to the content they consume, or slip in actions, phrases and behaviours they’ve learnt from them. Of course, I don’t believe that people will replicate games exactly – this wouldn’t be a fair or realistic assumption to make – but if sex workers are humanised or dehumanised in certain ways, this can lead to those same stigmas being further applied to us in the real world. When we look at games like Grand Theft Auto, where sex workers are dehumanised–murdered, fictionally–for entertainment, it’s fair to consider if this could lead to further subconscious dehumanisation of our community.
Additionally, as is the case of most of my clients, in-game sex workers are experienced by the player as magical wenches to woo, or dressed up hostesses to give gifts to, which normalises us to a degree. I might not have elf ears, but we have the same profession, right? There’s some kind of understanding there, and hey, I can get some elf ears if you like, though it will cost extra.
Being a sex worker and a gamer can be quite conflicting at times – despite the fact that most of us probably do enjoy gaming to some degree – because of how we are depicted. Often, I find myself turning on an exciting open-world game only to discover within an hour that sex workers are victimised and dehumanised to such a degree that it can feel personally, ethically uncomfortable for me to be playing it.
A lot of my own client base are gamers, and it’s not uncommon for them to relate our session back to the content they consume, or slip in actions, phrases and behaviours they’ve learnt from them.
Fallout is a game series very close to my heart, there’s something far too peaceful about traipsing through the nuclear wasteland with my dogmeat companion. But as I replayed through the series as an adult I noticed the depiction of our community peers being made to wear remote triggered explosive slave collars and forced to work in an aptly named brothel called Gomorrah (Sodom and Gomorrah, anyone?) Ironically, if you steal from or murder any of the pimps present, it triggers the honour system as a negative interaction, reinforcing who the game considers to be worthy of protection, in-game. Fallout still lives close to my heart, but it’s clear how attitudes towards sex work differs between locations and time periods. As gaming progresses, so do social attitudes towards sex work. This is evident when we look at the next installment – which has no slave-collared sex workers, but does have multiple strong female protagonists, and a singer-by-day, escort-by-night, who can be romanced in-game. It doesn’t quite have the acceptance and the normalization of games such as Like a Dragon, but it’s a move in the right direction.
I’m noticing in my own work that a lot of clients are more supportive and empathetic to our work now. This is obviously not in all cases, but I’m fortunate that my nerdy gamer clients are all very pleasant. There’s been a definite shift in attitudes from when I first started. Even speaking to people in my civvie life, I’ve noticed more understanding, in part, from their exposure to these semi-normalised depictions of sex worker characters in games. There’s still a long way to go – as with most things sex work related – when it comes to breaking down stigma, but it’s a good start. And when the nukes do eventually drop, you can find me in New Vegas shaking my irradiated ass.
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