How 'VA-11 Hall-A' Portrays Sex Work in a New Light

Sex work is one of the few topics that writers and critics alike tend to avoid when talking about women in media. It's understandable, to some extent.

The 1970s and 1980s brought an all-out war on sex workers from many feminist critics, effectively making any discussion on the appearance or representation of sex work to be a quagmire in media criticism.

Video games have a difficult time representing women in general, let alone women sex workers. Barely any games are interested in discussing the trade's workers; be they escorts, adult models, webcam girls, or dancers. Much more often, sex workers in games are mere caricatures, made to elicit sympathy or lust from the player.

We see this in  Red Dead Redemption when players are given the choice to save the day by rescuing a prostitute from her would-be killer. Or in Duke Nukem 3D, where you can watch pixelized dancers perform digital erotic moves for your "enjoyment." Either way, it's pretty rare that sex workers are given the opportunity to be anything more than background noise in a game's setting.

Elizabeth Smith works as a webcam model over the Internet, and she thinks games can do better. She entered the trade a few years ago, performing webcam shows for interested viewers on Chaturbate. Today, she can be found on MyFreeCams and ManyVids. She also provides services like a NSFW Snapchat, custom video requests, and an "Honest Dick Rating" evaluation of her customers' privates. As she warns on her page, she doesn't spare her feelings. It's a "raw, honest rating."

"Usually when people hear me say that I'm a sex worker they assume I mean full service, such as escorting," Smith told me. "I am not a full service sex worker, I'm a webcam model that creates pornography. I provide an outlet for sexual fantasies for whoever (man or woman) seeks them, though I do have limitations on what types of fantasies I will fulfill."

Traditional depictions of sex workers in media tend to relegate the industry to two services: hooking and erotic dancing. When I asked Smith about mainstream media representation of sex workers, she immediately told me that the public has a lopsided view of sex work.

"Not every sex worker is a survival sex worker. Some do it because they enjoy the flexibility with their schedules, they enjoy making their dreams come true/not having to work under someone else, the income is better than their old jobs," she told me.

"This also works with empowerment. Not all sex workers are doing this because they want to feel empowered. Yes, some do and that's great! But not everyone in this industry cares about empowerment. To some of us it's just a job, it's a means of income that works for us."

Traditionally, Smith has turned to Twitter to chat about the ways women are represented and treated in popular culture. She's also an avid video game player; in fact, for the right amount of tokens on MyFreeCams, you can add her on Steam. For her, video games rely on the stereotype that sex workers are dependent victims. This, she feels, is hardly realistic.

"I feel most video games don't properly represent sex work/sex workers for what they actually are," she said. "They take the superficial look that's fueled by stigmas created against us through media, like movies, and implement them into the video games. To me, it seems a majority only portray the violence against us."

There are a few games that get it right, though. One title that stuck out to her for its realism is HunieCam Studio. Despite criticizing the game's marketing teasers as largely unrealistic, she felt the game successfully represented the different kinds of women in webcam modeling.

"It shows women not being paid enough so they turned to sex work in attempts to make better money, it shows women using sex work as a means to fuel addictions, women using sex work to keep themselves out of debt for college, porn 'stars' who branch into other forms of sex work," she explained. "That's where it really made a connection in my mind. It showed both the good and the bad."

HunieCam Studio isn't the most nuanced look at sex work. But the game does acknowledge and respect the fact that women enter sex work for various reasons. It operates on the novel idea that sex workers are people with their own personalities and complexities. That shoehorning them into two limiting stereotypes is absurd.

Sukeban Games' VA-11 Hall-A is interested in the kinds of characters that most video games ignore. Set in Glitch City's cyberpunk dystopia, the player meets and serves drinks to a variety of women characters at a dive called VA-11 Hall-A (pronounced "Valhalla"). It sounds simple, but the game shines thanks to its nuanced, complex portrayals of women from all walks of life.

The upper-class catgirl Stella, for example, is a highly intelligent and empathetic woman who regularly visits the bar in order to escape the superficiality of the city's uptown shopping centers.

International idol sensation *Kira* Miki is a smart, down-to-earth lady who stops by Valhalla to chat without worrying about the fame and glamor that comes with the outside world. Oh, and the game's protagonist, Jill, is a queer woman recovering from the end of a life-changing relationship with her girlfriend Lenore.

The complexity doesn't end there. One of the main regulars at VA-11 Hall-A is Dorothy. At first, Dorothy comes off as a bubbly teenage girl with a love for sugary drinks. In actuality, she is a 24-year old Lilim: an advanced AI being. In order to make a living in Glitch City, Dorothy works the streets, specializing in everything from orgies to ageplay to cuddling.

Dorothy is pretty open about her work. She's also upfront about the risks that come with it. When another character points out that Dorothy has illegal pistol modifications installed in her fingers, Dorothy explains why. "A girl's gotta take care of herself, you know?" she tells her. "I wanna be able to deal with things if they get ugly. And this is the most discreet mod I had."

Dorothy knows Glitch City is a dangerous place for a sex worker, and she's more concerned with her own safety than whatever the law says. For a medium traditionally obsessed with ogling women sex workers, that's a mature conversation for Sukeban to offer.

But VA-11 Hall-A's Dorothy doesn't simply give the player a nuanced look at sex work. It interweaves her professional and personal lives as she becomes closer to Jill. Towards the second half of the game, Dorothy suffers from an existential crisis, wondering whether reality is palpable or simulated (ironically enough).

In turn, Jill gives her the tools necessary to escape her rut, opening up about her own experiences. It's safe to say that VA-11 Hall-A passes the Bechdel Test was flying colors.

Importantly, Sukeban goes out of its way to show us that Dorothy is open and loved. She's not simply a walking and talking representation of sex work. She's a person with hopes, fears, desires, and friends.

This past summer, I interviewed the team at Sukeban about their approach to character development in VA-11 Hall-A. When I spoke with them, they were particularly passionate about writing Dorothy.

"The first thing we wanted to avoid was falling into the same tired archetypes that sex workers in fiction fall into when they get any characterization at all. We wanted to avoid making her a bitter person, we didn't want to make her a victim in any way either," they said.

At first, VA-11 Hall-A writer Fernando Damas was unsure whether he should create a sex worker that fell into the Japanese imouto character trope. After all, Dorothy's model makes her look like a young girl. But after dealing with his initial doubts, Damas pushed forward, realizing how valuable Dorothy's characterization would be in the game's world.

"It was the first time I felt a sort of… 'writing wall,' a proverbial line I felt like I shouldn't cross instinctively," he said. "But I wanted to cross it, because I know (and I've seen) how crossing any lines has helped both authors and mediums grow. And this is something that fueled at least 60% of the writing, tearing down any proverbial walls I felt whenever a subject or idea came up."

When it came to writing the full version of VA-11 Hall-A, the team at Sukeban knew they had to give Dorothy a full-fledged character arc. To do so, they expanded on her identity as a sentient AI and wrote her a complicated relationship with her guardian figure. From there, they also fleshed out her characterization, making sure her personality felt realistic, three-dimensional, and unique. This helped them explore the various facets of her character without hyperfocusing on her work.

"The first thing we always tried to keep in mind was making sure Dorothy felt the same no matter her job," Damas said. "Like, if she was a nurse instead of a sex worker, she'd be the same, but she'd talk about needing to pull things off people's butts instead of talking how she got them in. And so we tried to make her a passionate worker (which would bring her constant talk about her clientele more naturally) and take the 'playful' part of 'playful sex worker' to her as a whole.

"Beyond that, we tried to make her a loving person, the kind that easily becomes huggy with the people she comes to care about."

Most of all, though, Dorothy enjoys her job. While Glitch City may be a corrupt and dangerous place, Dorothy doesn't necessarily see her field as stifling. Echoing Elizabeth Smith's point of view, Dorothy's sex work is simply another way to pay the bills. This is a bright example for other developers, showing how games can portray sex workers without dehumanizing, objectifying, or otherwise disrespecting the trade's women.

"Every field of work has a stereotype associated with it, from the effeminate hair stylist to the no-nonsense scientist," Damas explained. "'Sex worker' is no different from any of these stereotypes, but stereotypes are fought and defied the more you explore an idea or the more you put it in a position where it NEEDS to be addressed. The [down-trodden] sex worker archetype can be easily fought when you create characters that are the focus of the plot, that need to be developed because their position asks for that."

VA-11 Hall-A gives Dorothy a major role in the game's story because the developers took her seriously. They treated her like a person, not an object for sympathy or sexual attraction. As a result, they created one of the most popular characters in the entire game.

When I interviewed Smith, she told me that one of the most popular misconceptions about sex work is that sex workers sell their bodies. That they give away their rights to another person. Smith was eager to explain why that idea is so patently false.

"Our bodies are still ours," Smith told me. "We reserve our rights to consent the same as everyone else. Ultimately ["you sell your body"] is just a saying people use to attempt to shame sex workers. They take that they'd be uncomfortable or are uncomfortable with the fact that someone uses their sexuality for monetary gain and project it onto sex workers."

In the same way,  characters who happen to be sex workers should be written with the same autonomy, respect, and fair treatment as any other character. Anything less than that spreads half-truths and lies about what it means to do sex work.

And as VA-11 Hall-A shows, writing a nuanced, positive character—that happens to be a sex worker—can be done if a team takes sex work seriously. But not if they relegate women like Smith to hapless victims or sex objects, like so many other games.