During 2018 Tavrox, Beardroid, Van and I tried to team up to challenge ourselves into making an erotic game. Because it matched our tastes, we wanted to make it a management game, inspired by licenses such as Dungeon Keeper.

We threw ourselves into brainstorms and concepts, pretty aware we probably would throw it in the bin as soon as we would be able to criticise our work.

We had fun

Merging our different centers of interests, we created a fanciful fantasy universe around humanoid fishes in which were represented many genders, sexualities, fetishes, all in a brothel... Of course we knew we had to design a proper game loop before anything else. I, as the writer, had the time to develop an abusively complex lore (FR) which would be completely useless eventually. But there was a hidden problem.

When we pushed as far as we could the thinking about the lore and game design, we found out that our main problem was that we wanted to undertake the political aspect of the game. Martha Fijak, lead game designer at 11bit Studio, admitted it was too hard to develop further prositution in Frost Punk, for the topic to be too difficult to handle correctly, during a conference at Indiecade 2018.

I wrote a short story setting in the universe we created (FR), and as soon as it was done, we realised it was wrong all along. It was an amoral fantasy - probably even immoral. It relied on twists and suspense and used only transgression to convey emotions. Just like a Rockstar game, we were playing with codes without adding anything in the debate. It was the worst case possible for our ambition.

Dang it's harder than we thought

So we weren't even sure of what we thought about sex work. That's what stood out in our discussions.

So we read several books on the topic and learned to make a difference between the different ways of thinking - legalist, abolitionist, prohibitionist, liberal - and the actors here in France - Le Nid, the catholics, Grisélidis, the social workers, the STRASS, the union - and we also realised our contribution couldn't be from a dominant point of view like a Brothel Keeper, even ironically.

We needed to speak about the problems in sex work but we also wanted to leave the possibility to the player to make a good run, where the character could be happy. The whole genre choice for our game was in question. We partly owe this conclusion to Adrien Larouzée and some other publishers who had a great interest for our concept but found problematic to tell a story about sex workers from a pimp point of view. Indeed, we couldn't find anywhere any word in defense of pimps, either in books or among sex workers consultants. We tried to save our game design, but in vain. It had to be left aside.

Since we had to deliver something intimate, which was our only skill in that matter since video games are about telling the story of the player, we had to rely entirely on the testimony of an independant sex worker, who was also an activist. She was the only one who accepted to help us at that time.

We held the microphone

It was a great chance. Sex workers are very often asked to speak about their work but are rarely listened to with goodwill, so most are really secretive about it.

One of the most extraordinary virtues of this request though was that people that were secretly sex workers began to talk about it around them. We thus discovered that some people we knew were or had been sex workers. Some never talked about it to anyone before. The simple fact that we began to ask around impacted the life of some of them. Our venture, even before we had anything to show, brought changes.

It was impossible to find client consultants though. Through discussions with the Toulouse Game Dev, some joked about getting a budget for us to try out ourselves. So without telling anyone, I decided to go online making up a sex worker profile. Questionable, for sure. But we wanted to talk for people that were actually doing it for real, so we had to do it. And I found in those chats more insight than in any other researches. The operation was encouraged by our consultant. And I learned about VPN stuff.

Everything changed when we finally met our consultant during Indiecade 2018. She told us about her life around a breakfast, and after saying goodbye, we all realized: "We need to make a game about her experience."

Death of the ego

We were almost only men, almost only heterosexual, none of us were sex workers, so we never felt like we had the legitimity to speak about something else than fantasies and fetishes, producing this weird erotic-fantasy world sending contradictory signals. We based our games on gameplay wishes and aethetic tastes but for such a topic, we should have begun to understand the facts beforehand.

Red Bordello became Escort Life and the game design became widely different. We made a chat bot simulation and a virtual agenda to create an imitation of escort website that gave the possibility to produce a procedural story reacting with both player's choices and random data. It tied with the need to tell a lot of things to the player and the need of capturing their attention. The system was giving a good representation of our consultant's experience. But was it fun? We never knew...

We were satisfied with our game design, but we still had to make it happen. And we needed a lot of anecdotes to fill it with something else than our twisted imagination. Alas, our consultant refused to become part of the development team, which would have been ideal for us. She could only answer our questions from time to time.

Finally, one year after the first idea, the project ended. We had lost our office, we had a lot of work to do, and we couldn't get to meet again. All those problems added to the fact that one entire year was necessary to understand our own project discouraged us. And reading this article, some teammates added that they still didn't agree on the discourse that our game had on the topic.

The neverending struggle

If we had to learn a lesson about this experience, it would be that when you need to make a game about a complicated topic, such as sex, work, or even worse, sex work, the difficulty is not at all about other people's gaze (that's what we feared in the first place). Society wants to be more self-aware really. Censorship is not a problem we had at all, though we didn't address people that we thought would try to fight us.

However, you need to be clear with yourself. If you don't know what is it that you have in mind, do some research and learn. We tend to underestimate our ignorance and at the same time, our capacity to learn.

Take a look at your local library. Internet is okay but its answers are buried under a pile of bullshit and with no transparency at all, while the library is all about classifying and sourcing. Wikipedia is only the first step. The library is the second one. But eventually you'll need for that kind of topic to do some investigation yourself, on the field. Meet people and try to get the information. It's not easy at all, many refused, most didn't answer. So, know that you don't know, it's the best way to not hurt feelings.

Then, try to agree on it as a team, or at least try to be clear about a consensus. Sensibilities are exacerbated on those topics and someone could stay apart with their opinions or insecurities.

Of course, when the political issue is perceived, when the arguments are tested, take part of the debate. Then, you can focus on experiences, testimonials, intimacy, opinions, life. Wear away in order to convey and broadcast a story told by a society and people of this society. We are not scientists or journalists, but artists. We don't tell facts.

Finally, the difference between writing about oneself and writing about others is that you need to look for the information. I doubted most of the time about my legitimity and capacity to do so, but after this active attempt to understand, I evolved personally as to my views on the topic and I am happy I participated in this project for that. I now know empathy is a real skill and that it is indeed possible to take a step back to lend my talent to someone else's message to some extent. If Escort Life was a thing, we could have said it was "inspired by reality" and that would have been our greatest pride about it.

In many cases the story can be made during the development or even in the end and link elements between each other. But here, for such a complex and sensitive topic, it only can be the very basis of it.

For the anecdote, Tavrox is developing a management game with Jimu and Selages : https://twitter.com/HorizonGameStud.

And if you're interested, every document about Red Bordello/Escort Life is available here (FR).

Proofreaded by Jasper Marcus