“I'm really committed to social justice in digital spaces, though it's not always easy to be the spokesperson for that kind of thinking, especially amidst so much harassment online,” Ruberg told me in an email. In each of these games, sex workers were interactive, non-playable characters, and the interaction options often rewarded the player for abusing the worker, or getting discounted services.īefore entering academia, Ruberg was a tech and games journalist-now, their research focuses on gender and sexuality in digital media and cultures. Ruberg’s research examined big budget video games, focusing on three in particular: Fallout: New Vegas, Sleeping Dogs, and Grand Theft Auto V. The paper is titled “Representing sex workers in video games: feminisms, fantasies of exceptionalism, and the value of erotic labor,” published in the journal Feminist Media Studies. And the representation of sex workers across several mainstream games each send similar messages: The player is always too good, too attractive, or too skilled to pay full-price.īonnie Ruberg, an assistant professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, undertook a study on how sex workers are portrayed in video games. Considering GTA V sold almost 100 million copies, that’s worth examining.
The presence of a thriving sex work industry in GTA V, and the way the player interacts with providers, says a lot about how developers view those in the sex trade. The game never requires the player to behave this way, but the systems at play here imply a certain set of values: sex work has worth, is beneficial to the client, and exploiting sex workers, while risky, is always an option.
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