Long before I became an adult sex worker and immersed myself in the world of fetish gaming, I was building a niche world with just about every professional roleplay I could find. I created custom characters with backstories that would make Shakespeare weep (in shock, not envy) and as much evil as my family’s shared dial-up PC would allow. I didn’t pay much attention to adult sex workers in games at the time; it just wasn’t on my radar, but once I entered the adult sex worker world, I started noticing it everywhere I looked. Our portrayal in the news media and on TV is a constant battle between dehumanization (disgust) and porngirly pornographic fetishization (lustful desire), so you can imagine my surprise when that wasn’t necessarily the case in the games I would later come to know. My first exposure to the Like a Dragon series (formerly known as Yakuza) was when I showed up at a friend’s house one night after finishing a late shift as a porngirly cam girl. Someone handed me a controller and said, “This is a porngirly kind of job. It’s like your job. Can you help me?” On the net was a hostess, and she required the most suitable outfit to check her customers’ preferences. It had to be cute and fun, so I matched it with a sparkly pink dress and bunny ears. I sat there confused for a while while he continued to play, choosing the correct answers for her to give to the customer, deciding when to ask for a gift and when to serve a drink. It seemed very odd to me that this game, created in the early 2000s, shows a small part of our industry in such an ordinary way. Adult Sex workers make regular appearances, though the series itself doesn’t focus on adult sex workers, instead following generations and political changes within various crime clans. If you want information, you can give them designer items to reveal what they’re observing. Need extra income? Run a cabaret club, but treat your employees well. Later games also feature a whip-wielding dominatrix as a playable character on the protagonist’s Team.
In the most delinquent installment in the series, the protagonist, the perpetually clumsy Ichiban, grew up in Shangri-La Soapland. Soaplands are places where people pay a fee to be “bathed” by providers, and of course, everything else that goes on there is just part of porngirly service. He was raised communally by the women who worked there after his mother left. Personally, Ichiban may not be the most well-adjusted guy (is there one in this series who is?), but his childhood is never portrayed as shameful. He was raised to be a man with a strong sense of justice, childlike compassion, and a refusal to cause undeserved harm.
Long before I became an adult sex worker and immersed myself in the world of fetish games, I was building a niche world in almost every professional role-playing game I could find.
His childhood is not portrayed unfavorably negatively, and he is very sentimental about soap operas and the women who appear in them. This portrayal of adult sex workers, the way we usually function in society, is ubiquitous in this game series. This is in stark contrast to what we are used to in Western series like Grand Theft Auto, where catching and killing “prostitutes” is the norm. Of course. Well, this may be because different cultures have very different attitudes towards adult sex work. But considering how many of my clients are gamers and, therefore, how this media shapes their attitudes towards adult sex work, perhaps we should be a little more careful about this. Many of my clients are gamers, and it is not uncommon for them to relate our sessions to the content they consume or to incorporate actions, phrases, and behaviors they have learned from gamers. Of course, I don’t expect people to recreate the game exactly; it’s not a fair and realistic assumption, but humanizing or dehumanizing adult sex workers in a certain way can lead to the same stigma being placed on us in the real world. When we see games like Grand Theft Auto, where adult sex workers are dehumanized and fictionally murdered for entertainment, it’s natural to consider whether this could lead to further unconscious dehumanization of our community.
Furthermore, like most of my clients, adult sex workers in games are experienced by players as magical girls who woo them or disguised hostesses who give them gifts, which normalizes us to some extent. You may not have elf ears, but the job is probably the same, right? There is a particular understanding there, and I’ll give you elf ears if you like, but it’s extra. Being an adult sex worker and being a gamer can sometimes be very contradictory, even though most of us probably enjoy gaming to some degree due to the way we are portrayed. I often boot up an exciting open-world game. Within an hour, I realized that adult sex workers are victimized and dehumanized to such an extent that it feels personally and ethically uncomfortable to play.
Many of my clients are gamers, and it is not uncommon for them to relate our sessions to the content they consume or to incorporate actions, phrases, and behaviors they have learned from gamers. Fallout is a game series that is very dear to my heart, and roaming the nuclear wasteland with my porn-girl buddies feels too peaceful.
