Non-Playable Casualty
By now it comes to no surprise that video games are saturated with images of violence, gore, and sexuality. Using video games as an influence for misbehavior and aggressive tendencies in teenagers results to be less credible than it was twenty to thirty years ago, and the boom of the gaming community helps present a positive light on the entertainment worth of this technologic pastime. However, the loss of shock value should not entail stopping the critique and conversations of the consequences of such violent depictions, particularly with those affecting sex workers in these games.
Role-playing games impress me without fail, especially those with creative story-lines and beautifully designed open worlds. But for their imaginative, varying timelines, settings, and plot lines, many share a common theme of inflicting violence on the non-playable sex workers scattered throughout the game. For example, in video games like Grand Theft Auto V and Saints Row, players can kill prostitutes in order to steal their cash that falls out when their bodies hit the ground. In Hitman, a stealth game where players control a genetically enhanced assassin, one can conveniently move a dead body of a stripper in a strategic place for cops to find, so their distraction can help the player leave the scene of the crime unnoticed. The Western-themed game Red Dead Redemption presents their version of assault against sex workers in a presumed creative and humorous way, where players can lasso a prostitute and throw her onto the back of their horse. As they ride away, she continues to say the loop of sexually inviting phrases, despite being bound and kidnapped. If the player chooses, they can place her on the tracks, and if the train hits her, the player successfully unlocks the achievement, “Dastardly: Place a hogtied woman on the train tracks, and witness her death by train.” While the awful portrayal of casual cruelty towards sex workers remains present in numerous forms of media, the use of it in video games is especially unnerving, as they encourage players to actively interact in the harming, especially with the incentives of achievements, rewards, and the feeling of instant gratification.
Even when the player does not actively participate in the brutality, playing through timelines without viewing gendered abuse against sex workers is almost impossible. Unengaged violence is still violence, whether it’s seeing dead prostitutes’ bodies in sexualized attire and positions as gritty, mature background decoration to create a frightening setting in Bioshock 2 and Dead Island, or having to passively watch a pimp beat his prostitute in Far Cry 3. Some games like Assassin’s Creed II give the impression that the player acts as a savior to these victimized women, where in the mentioned game one can chase after a murderer who stabs every courtesan in his path. The sooner the player can catch him, the less women have to be spared. Even if the victims are non-playable characters, their feasible interchangeability and disposal should be highly alarming.
Some games simultaneously exotify women of color while depicting assault against sex workers. In Max Payne 3 and Shellshock: Nam 67, the gameplay heavily features the subservient Asian prostitute trope. These non-playable women are placed throughout the villages, as they try to seduce the player with looped, sexual dialogue in broken English, catering to the straight white male’s fetishizing of Asian women. In Red Dead Redemption, the white main character watches as a Mexican man beats a Mexican prostitute. Whether the player chooses to save her by purchasing her from the abuser, she is killed by her attacker regardless. This awful, violent scene not only epitomizes the exotification of women of color, but it also problematically feeds into the trope of the white savior versus the savage Mexican man.
In defense of the gameplay, one may argue that these gruesome depictions contribute to the antagonizing qualities of the villain, thus moving the plot forward and providing a mission for the main player to be the hero. The constant fighting, shooting, and lack of mercy is all in the name of justice. Friedrich Nietzsche challenges the concept of justice and the morality of violence by comparing the relationship of the punisher and the punished to that of the creditor and debtor. Punishing the wrongdoer through violence supposedly compensates for the pain, or debt, they have inflicted, therefore bringing peace back in order. Nietzsche questions our ability to put an accurate price on someone else’s suffering, let alone atoning that suffering. So when a game’s protagonist finally kills the villain, did he really serve justice to the numerous prostitutes killed along the way? At the expense of a prostitute’s easy disposal, the player feels the pleasure of self-appointed moral superiority while feeding into the human-made fiction of justice.
Even if they are just video games, these frightful, graphic depictions of abuse on sex workers happen so frequently that they can desensitize players to the point of losing human empathy. This repeating archetype of men as the sexual subjects harming women as the sexual objects only sells more into the fantasy of toxic male power.
