CHAPTER 14
Roz Tuplin
In 2018, Ubisoft published Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, the first of their series of historical role-playing games to be set in Classical Greece, between 431 and 422 BCE. The player controls the Misthios, an assassin of the player’s chosen gender, as they attempt to reunite their estranged family and rescue their wayward sibling from the villainous Cult of Kosmos, who are trying covertly to rule Greece. The game’s vast world and numerous side quests introduce characters from across ancient society, but the main storyline (that which is not optional for player progression) is notable for prominently featuring female sex workers. A lengthy section of the early game follows a community of hetaerae (sex workers – sing. hetaera) in Korinth as they struggle against a powerful local gangster. Meanwhile in Athens, you must ally with Aspasia, the consort of Perikles, presented in line with some classical sources as a hetaera-turned-politician. Female sex worker characters are not unheard of in videogames – indeed, Ubisoft was already using scantily-clad ‘courtesan’ NPCs to provide side quests around 16th century Rome in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (2010). But their appearance in interactive media is usually primarily for titillation, and they are often subject to exploitation and violence. Odyssey presents a more compassionate view of these women that is more reflective of progressive feminist theory around sex work while also being rooted in classical thinking about sex workers and female entrepreneurship. This 2018 reimagining of the female sex worker follows a decade’s growing visibility for women in the games industry that has engendered anxious debate online and in media about gender, sex and power, from the rise of female ‘personality’ streamers to the crisis of ‘gamergate’. In this chapter, I will look at how Ubisoft’s interpretation of classical concepts and archetypes contributes to contemporary discussions – but also how the game capitulates to the irresistible pull of screen tropes around violence and punishment, precluding the possibility of a truly radical statement on women, sex and power.
In mainstream videogames, sex work is sleazy, fun entertainment for the client, but the provider – almost always female – is less than human. Female sex workers including prostitutes, escorts and exotic dancers have appeared in games such as Dragon Age and Fallout to Grand Theft Auto and Duke Nukem, but almost always as NPCs (Non-Playable Characters), functioning decoratively or fulfilling minor speaking roles with minimal influence on the wider game narrative. Some games allow the player to have sex with these characters for voyeuristic titillation: if games transport us to other places, prostitutes are just another fun thing to do when you get there. These depictions echo familiar tropes from cinema and television, where female sex workers are ‘marked women’ without value beyond their bodies: as Russell Campbell observes, ‘she is required to make her body available to men on demand, and then condemned for doing so’.1 Games have notoriously taken the dehumanization of sex workers even further by allowing the player to use their services and then casually enact violence towards them as punishment: in Grand Theft Auto, players are able to purchase the labour of a prostitute, murder her and take back the in-game currency they used to buy her now lifeless body.2 Games provide the most brutal articulation of a wider cultural narrative that prostitutes are vessels for male sexuality with no intrinsic human value themselves.
In this context, the portrayal of hetaerae in Odyssey is unusual. They are not hypersexualized; they are allies to the Misthios, and they must be protected by the player. They also all work and live together as a ‘family’, in contrast with the dysfunctionality of the Misthios’ own broken family unit. This presentation seems more in accordance with pro-sex worker feminist thought; in the past few decades there has been a growing body of theory which counters the ‘anti-sex worker’ tendencies of twentieth-century scholarship, arguing that sex work is valid labour (‘work like any other’)3 and that sex workers are a marginalized group who are entitled to a voice, authentic representation in media and legislation that prioritizes their health and wellbeing. This view is not, of course, new, and has been working its way into the mainstream since the 1960s, but Chi Adanna Mgbako notes accelerations in this process recently, from increased foregrounding of the voices of sex workers in the media to the institutionalization of sex workers’ rights by international human rights bodies.4 Furthermore, pro-sex worker organizations have been critiquing video games for their portrayals of sex workers within this framework for well over a decade – for example, Sex Workers Outreach Project issued a statement condemning Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) as far back as 2006.5
Odyssey’s portrayal of hetaerae also draws on classical sources, carefully selected and interpreted to fulfil a broadly pro-sex worker agenda. This does not require too much manipulation: prostitution was legal and commonplace across ancient Greece and significant attention, sometimes surprisingly positive, is paid to this social group in Classical writing. Some sources are, of course, squeamish about the sex aspect of the work – it does not, for example, fit comfortably with Plato’s ideals – and misogyny is rife, particularly in works of oratory. Alison Glazebrook notes that in judicial proceedings the presence of the ‘bad girl’ hetaera in the defendant’s sex life is often used by the plaintiff as a ‘sign of an opponent’s extravagance or corrupt nature’.6 But in principle the job does not appear to have been held in lower regard than many other types of menial work.7 There was also recognition of the industry’s economic role in major city states such as Athens and Korinth: a possibly apocryphal story links Solon with the founding of a municipal brothel in Athens where slaves were paid by the state to have sex with paying customers.8 Out of this context, entrepreneurial figures emerge in the popular imagination, from Attic comedies to Socratic dialogues, who are educated, quick-witted and financially independent. It is surely notable that one of Socrates’ few recorded conversations with a woman is with the hetaera Theodote in Xenophon’s Memorabilia. Additionally, sex businesses were often owned by women, and ‘free female prostitutes often were self-employed, living and working without male infringement on their compensation or business activity’.9 In this respect, female sex workers become a useful ‘in’ for identification by modern female players who are less likely to recognize their own experiences in those of a dependent Athenian housewife.
Sex and power in the games industry
Ubisoft’s 2018 portrayal of sex work can be traced back to debates that began brewing at the beginning of the decade. A distinct cultural anxiety developed from the early 2010s as internet fan culture, YouTube and streaming offered new ways for women to engage with games while presenting a sexualized image. These include but are not limited to: dressing up in sexualized ‘cosplay’, making videos or livestreaming gaming activity in revealing clothing, and undertaking more directly monetized sex work in game spaces, such as the long-running phenomenon of prostitution in Second Life or, more recently, sex workers moving online to work in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing during the Coronavirus pandemic.10 These developments coincide with a general increase in the number of women visibly making and consuming games: The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) reported 40 per cent of players in the USA were female in 2008 rising to 46 per cent in 2018,11 while Interactive Software Federation Europe (ISFE) reported that less than 30 per cent of European players were female in 2008, rising to 46 per cent by 2018.12 Meanwhile, streaming platform Twitch had an over 80 per cent male user base in 2017 which dropped to 65 per cent by 2019 as more female players entered the space.13
Increasingly, women are gaining power and influence using their female identities in a traditionally male-dominated culture. Cosplay, centred as it is on the body, is a particular source of anxiety because of how it dominates the online visual culture and games conventions such as Comic Con: Nina B. Huntemann observes that ‘this form of participatory fan culture is not only on display for others to see but also constitutes a lot of convention attendees’ conversations, photographs, interactions, and memories.’ This sense of invasion extends to a general anxiety that women are responding to games culture in a uniquely femme way and, worst of all, exploiting heterosexual male weakness with their sexuality: Twitch streamers who show their bodies on camera are often derided as ‘titty streamers’ stealing audiences from male content creators (Twitch itself carefully polices the lines of acceptable expression with its detailed nudity rules).14 Over all of this hangs the spectre of the ‘fake gamer girl’, an early-2010s meme that suggests games culture is being infiltrated by women who appear to superficially engage with games but are actually performing a gamer identity for male attention.15
In 2014, these anxieties came to a head with gamergate, a vast online and offline dramatic tragedy where prominent female game developers and journalists were targeted by mostly anonymous internet users on charges of ruining games culture. Incidents including online harassment campaigns, ‘review-bombing’ of games by female developers, and stalking/doxxing took the conversation beyond fan spaces and into mainstream media. Gamergate is usually spoken of as a general culture war about the role of women in games, but it contains an inescapable sexual dimension – one of the targets, developer Zoe Quinn, was even accused of having relations with a games journalist to gain good reviews. Initially, the industry response was apprehensive: in October 2014, the ESA, which represents major developers and publishers including Ubisoft, as well as EA, Activision, Sony et al., issued a statement that, ‘Threats of violence and harassment are wrong,’16 but individual companies only made statements of their own when prompted in interview (EA’s Peter Moore to Forbes,17 Sony’s Shawn Layden to Venture Beat)18 with the exception of Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime, who alluded to the controversy without naming it in his Blizzcon opening keynote of 2014.19 Nevertheless, there was growing pressure from the media for publishers to address the controversy.
Gamergate also forced these companies to consider the messaging in the games themselves. Many commentators made a direct link between the uniquely volatile online games culture and the violently misogynistic content of the games: Kate Edwards of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) commented that, ‘Gaming culture has been pretty misogynistic for a long time now … It became so egregious that now companies are starting to wake up and say, “We need to stop this. This has got to change.” ’20 While it has always been difficult to confirm a direct link between discriminatory/violent behaviours in the real world and the consumption of violent messaging from screen media, successive moral crises cycle regularly around games,21 and sexual content is a particular locus for concern: Gina Lepore and Jill Denner observe that ‘at the heart of the approach to game design that includes sexual content is the belief that certain depictions of sexuality are inherently motivating’.22 Whether consciously or not, a course correction is clearly taking place in major games companies to tell stories about women and sex more responsibly. Of course, a leading publisher choosing to present enlightened visions of sex work is not just a matter of corporate social responsibility but a financial consideration too. Front page news stories about problematic fan culture in 2014 inevitably drew public attention to the more notorious content of games already on the market, and in December 2014 Target removed Grand Theft Auto V from its Australian stores following customer complaints about sexual violence.23 The possibility of further incidents like this will not have been lost on publishers, but there is also a clear incentive for making progressive content to appeal to the increasingly visible market of women gamers: as Adrienne Shaw observes, ‘Marginalized groups become reified by industrial logics that wish to shape texts to target niche markets.’24 A wider player base is up for grabs if publishers can produce more diverse stories, and while there are qualifying factors in the oft-quoted statement that ‘most gamers are female’ (the statistic does not necessarily hold up for the PC or console-based long form RPG player) there are simply many more women consuming games visibly in 2018 than ten years before. Publishers are responding not just to a new wave of critique but also in the interests of retaining female players and appearing as female-friendly brands; more responsible design is also a fast way to atone for past problematic content.25
It is striking that a game set two and a half millennia ago should be doing this, but historical games, like any historical fiction, are well equipped to address modern anxieties. With their different political systems and strange mores, ancient worlds offer the freedom to explore alternative modes of society: that is part of their appeal. David Serrano Lozano dubs the past ‘a conceptual place between the familiar and the alien’.26 Its similarities and differences make space for utopian thinking and didactic parallels with our own times. Salvati and Bullinger term this picking out aspects of ancient culture and shoehorning in contemporary values ‘selective authenticity’ – a ‘narrative license in which an interactive experience of the past blends historical representation with generic conventions and audience expectations’.27 We see this selective authenticity at work throughout Odyssey as it folds complex and instable Classical archetypes into an essentially modern story about gender, sex and power.
Hetaerae and whores: Introducing the binary
In male-dominated games culture, ‘whore’ is a common insult, and an accusation you can expect if you play online while identifiably female.28 This pejorative term for sex worker is used to condemn acts and behaviours in game spaces that give women any form of power. The ‘fake gamer girl’ is an ‘attention whore’ and her apparent game knowledge is just currency for attention.29 During gamergate, female game designers and journalists were accused of using sex for industry relevance. Whether the woman in question gets paid is irrelevant to users of the ‘whore’ pejorative: where femme identity and bodies generate any kind of advantage or gain, financial or otherwise, this is the work of the whore. ‘Whoredom’ in Odyssey is similarly more than one thing: for the hetaerae, it is sex exchanged for money and a full-time job. Aspasia, meanwhile, has gone from hetaera to consort of Perikles, using sexual exchange and underworld contacts to rise to a position of great political influence. Odyssey is quick to intercept player prejudice towards its ‘whores’ by setting out clearly and from the very first encounter their value: however, the way it confers value is dependent on their ‘respectable’ appearance and the implied quasi-sacredness of their work.
In Greek the term hetaera is often understood to refer to ‘higher end’ prostitution – as distinct from the common pornae (sing. pornē). A similar aesthetic and moral stratification of sex work can be seen in the wide range of modern English terms (escorts, call girls, street-walkers). Although, in practice, the terms hetaera and pornē are not rigid and may be used interchangeably or to cover a number of different behaviours,30 by calling Anthousa’s community hetaerae, the game is playing into this binary, classing their work as more ‘high end’ than ‘commonplace’ prostitutes of the street. As the plaintiff of Apollodoros’ Against Neaera delineates, ‘Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households.’31 In this analogy, hetaerae are closest to the mistresses – they serve the more cerebral, holistic purpose of ‘pleasure’ than the sexual unloading that is the business of mere pornae.
To further emphasize the eminence of these women, the player does not encounter them straight away but hears about them from a street prostitute in Korinth’s red-light district, who explains at length their special status while soliciting the Misthios to purchase her own more affordable services. This character is not referred to as pornē and is only named ‘Civilian’, but the distinction she makes between her work and the work of the hetaerae (plus dialect flourishes such as dropping the th- from ‘them’ to refer to ‘’em’) indicates her lower social status. The Civilian explains, ‘For them, it’s not just about the flesh. They’re merchants of a sort … can talk as nice as they look.’ Looking and sounding ‘nice’ (i.e. educated) creates a comforting ambiguity around their work which is not present in the street solicitations of the Civilian.
The Civilian is essentially a signpost, providing directions to the player’s real goal: Anthousa, leader of the hetaerae. The Civilian remarks that, ‘Their sort are too high-and-mighty to be down here in the dirt with us … You’ll find ’em up on the hill – the Akrokorinth. By the Temple, keeping Aphrodite’s worshippers satisfied.’ By positioning them adjacent to a place of worship, the hetaerae are associated with the very top of the hierarchy – the gods themselves (this may be an allusion to the concept of sacred prostitution, another supposed ancient practice that has excited historians but which is likely to be a literary construct). They’re also hard to access; your character must make an (in game terms) long and difficult climb up the hill, around three minutes of play to reach the peak of the Akrokorinth travelling directly, which indicates their greater narrative significance compared to the street-level pornē. They are a time-investment – in the language of games, a more difficult mission to complete. The Civilian is commonplace and widely available, the hetaera exclusive; as Leslie Kurke observes, the hetaerae/pornae binary is rooted in ‘aristocratic loathing for the commonality or universal availability of resources in the public sphere.’32
Both pro- and anti-sex work scholarship often centers on the issue of whether sex work can be considered ‘work’ and ‘skilled labour’. Ronald Weitzer notes that anti-sex work scholars reject that it is work, referring to ‘prostituted women’ rather than ‘prostitutes’ as a ‘wholesale denial of women’s agency in sexual commerce’.33 In the hetaerae/pornae binary, one of the key distinctions that give hetaerae more value than the pornae is that their work is a craft: elevated, skilled, requiring expertise. They may also develop long-term engagements with some clients. In Odyssey, the Civilian alludes to ‘study’ the hetaerae have undertaken over many years – she cannot become one herself because by the time she finishes she’ll be ‘serving clients on [her] death bed’. The concept of the learned hetaerae is an authentically classical construct: Kapparis identifies an interest in the education of the hetaera in ancient writings such as a passage in the Isostasion of Alexis using the word ‘technē’, ‘[portraying] prostitution as a craft like medicine, sculpture or rhetoric, with a specific set of skills that need to be carefully learned’.34 This allusion to study also recalls Socrates’ encounter with the hetaera Theodote in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, a striking passage in which Socrates not only discusses the unique skillset required of a sex worker but actually instructs her in the delicate art of seduction. Kapparis observes, ‘In a sense Socrates and Theodote are alike: both rely on the affection and benefactions of their friends, and both possess a sought-after commodity, which they are willing to share.’35 This unlikely sympatico between philosopher and hetaera – two equals sparring with one another from high standing in their parallel professions – is of course intended to be a little transgressive. But modern pro-sex worker scholarship employs the same rhetoric: that it is entirely equivalent to other professions which have been arbitrarily assigned a nobler reputation.
It is also striking that the sex workers of Odyssey are not used to affirm a heterosexual male gaze for the player, and are lacking the hypersexualized presentation typical of mainstream game design – a presentation typified by Ubisoft’s own 2010 portrayal of courtesans in Brotherhood. In Odyssey, sex workers’ profession is not signposted by their clothes except for jewellery that perhaps indicates (someone’s) wealth: they are otherwise indistinguishable from other female NPCs. In this respect the game accurately reflects ancient practices: there doesn’t seem to have been a consistent set of markers that would signal a sex worker to Classical Greeks.36 There is some suggestion that a hetaera’s clothes might be expensive or paired with gifts of jewellery (Theodote and her girls are ‘expensively got up’; Olympiodorus’ mistress in Demosthenes’ Against Olympiodorus is ‘decked out with masses of jewels, going abroad in splendid state’)37 and that clothing might be plainer for pornae (Menander’s ex-prostitute Chrysis in Samia is said to have been in plain dress when her husband Demeas first meets her).38 But it is almost unheard of for a mainstream video game to miss an opportunity for hypersexualized outfits on characters who literally deal in sex, particularly when many games overtly sexualize female characters whose line of work is not at all sexual in nature.39 Indeed, the only function of sex workers in some games is to show skin: Anita Sarkeesian finds numerous examples of games that require the player to pass through a brothel or strip club where sex workers are ‘background decoration’, including Yakuza 4, Just Cause 2, Hitman: Absolution and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.40 The trope is also present in historical games, as Sian Beavers notes of RYSE: Son of Rome, in which a bordello scene provides visible nudity and heavily implied sex acts.41 Where RYSE is presenting sex workers in a historical context for prurience in 2013, Odyssey deliberately misses the opportunity in 2018.
In this respect, Odyssey is highly unusual – a mainstream game featuring a lengthy appearance from sex workers you cannot have sex with and who, with the audio muted, you might not identify as sex workers at all. But it is part of the fantasy of ‘elevated’ sex worker that they seduce through coquettishness and code. A similar coyness is identified by Kurke in the texts that form the basis for the hetaera construct: Anaxilas’ observation that her work is ‘a favour’; Anakreon’s Thracian whore who Kurke notes is more persuaded than simply bought.42 In her conversation with Socrates, Theodote describes her working arrangement as a hazy exchange: ‘If anyone gets friendly with me and wants to be generous, that’s how I get my living,’ to which Socrates playfully responds, ‘It’s a splendid asset to have lots of friends.’43 Their euphemistic jousting is part of the hetaera’s work; her product desirable precisely because of the vagueness that clouds it. Because it is not reduced to the basest and baldest specifics but spoken of as an enigmatic contract, her employment is elevated enough to match Socrates’ own – they are now, as Simon Goldhill puts it, ‘two different practitioners of the wiles of desire’.44 But Socrates also hints that dishonesty and deception is at the heart of Theodote’s profession, and compares her to a spider in a web catching flies. Odyssey’s hetaerae have value because of the tidy presentation and high cost that shrouds their work in a cloak of decency – the pornae, who don’t have these tools to hand, are still down at street level, their fate unexplored.
Team hetaerae: families and allies
Now that value has been assigned to the hetaerae, the game further clarifies its position, introducing a villain who embodies male anxiety towards the sexually liberated female. On arriving at the Akrokorinth, the Misthios finds hetaerae being attacked by thugs working for a local gangster known as The Monger. Your first task is to dispatch the assailants: this action positions the player as defender of the hetaerae, and you will continue to defend them for the next few game missions. Rescuing/protecting damsels in distress is of course established territory for games, but it takes on a new symbolism in the context of coordinated attacks on women post-gamergate, as does The Monger’s motivations: we are told he is targeting these women precisely because they have money and influence. An unnamed NPC observes: ‘[He craves] power … since the hetaerae bring in so much drachmae, he wants everything they control.’ Because the women have earned power through sexuality, they invoke male rage – mirroring the anxieties over how female gamers and streamers gain real-world influence. The game turns didactic: the player must now operate in defense of their sexuality and in doing so consent to an ideological position that their business is valid.
There is no sexual reward for this defensive action. Again, in striking contrast to titles like Grand Theft Auto or The Witcher, the only transaction with sex workers is the ‘deal’ you strike with Anthousa to rid them of the Monger for a fair price. In this way Odyssey avoids the ‘Nice Guy Syndrome’ that Nicholas Ware identifies in games such as Dragon Age and Persona 4, where the performance of certain positive actions within the game ‘earns’ the player sex as a reward. It also avoids the ‘fantasy of exceptionalism’ Bonnie Ruberg catalogues in her 2019 study whereby some games allow the player to bypass paying for a sex worker’s services with in-game currency by doing a good deed, because ‘being a “real man” and a “good guy” means not compensating sex workers for their labour’.45 It is also possible that your Misthios may not be male at all – you can choose to play as a female avatar – removing the ‘protective male’ optics altogether and making your actions a sort of female solidarity.
As well as enjoying the player’s protection, Anthousa’s hetaerae operate in a tight-knit quasi-family with clear and supportive leadership. This contrasts sharply with the fractious and messy dynamic of the Misthios’ own family: as the player tackles the main game objective of bringing their relatives back together, the hetaerae provide an alternative model of family, one that is perhaps stronger because of its female leadership and femme-coded, mutually supportive principles:46 the Civilian in Korinth asserts that ‘[they] all work as one – on equal footing’ adding that ‘Anthousa’s special. She talks – they listen’.47 The brothel as alternative family has some basis in real mother-and-daughter businesses in the Classical world, as well as the general association between the female owners of sex businesses and motherliness in Greek culture – Cohen identifies the use of words like mêtêr for women who run such businesses, as well as the occurrence of matronymic names for female sex workers where ‘regular’ women would take the names of fathers and husbands. Cohen concludes that, ‘for Athenians the stereotypical merchant of sex at Athens was female and maternal’.48 In Korinth, Anthousa displays this same maternal instinct, and is keenly aware of tensions among her girls – she commissions the Misthios to help one hetaera, Damalis, even though Damalis herself hasn’t intimated that anything is wrong – ‘I know these girls as well as I know myself. Something’s not right.’ This intuitiveness and sisterhood has curious echoes with some of the ways in which female players and streamers connect and support one another online. Streamers in particular earn their living under the gaze of a community that desires their labour but also sexualizes them, and in some cases threatens, stalks and harasses them. A Guardian article on Twitch gamers in 2017 notes that ‘women streamers have started banding together to help each other navigate the volatile space of online gaming’:
‘It’s really important to me to try to help [other streamers] out,’ Chelsea says. ‘Because I know it’s super hard when you first start and it’s really overwhelming.’
‘We call it a stream team,’ Mia says. ‘And basically it’s four girls from all over the world and if we need advice or something weird is happening, which occasionally it does … we’re just there for each other.’49
The implications of ‘something weird’ are clear to any woman who has entered streaming spaces: sexual harassment, inappropriate parasocial relationships and stalking are all realities for women operating visibly online. The same coping mechanisms – discussing experiences, sharing advice and generally looking out for one another – are seen in Odyssey’s sex worker community.
However, this ‘happy family’ presentation has the same sanitizing effect on the complex realities of the hetaerae’s lives as euphemistic dialogue – it further ‘makes decent’ their work, much as allusions to being a ‘family business’ sanitized sex work for ancient clients. Kapparis notes that in Against Neaera, which outlines the training of young hetaerae under brothel-owner Nikarete, ‘An aura of domesticity, brought about by the pretense that the girls had been brought up in a “family”, apparently enhanced their appeal.’50 This same coy veneer is at play in the presentation of mother Anthousa and her girls.
The whore behind the throne
If Anthousa represents the savvy professional hetaera, Aspasia is the meretricious female at the highest position in society: the hetaera-queen. In various classical sources, both contemporary and Roman, Aspasia has been portrayed as the ultimate hetaera – a woman of clouded origin who came to Athens, infiltrated public life at the highest level, and played host to prominent writers and thinkers, as well as (supposedly) keeping her own brothel. In Lives, Plutarch draws together five centuries of such sources and concludes that ‘[her business] was anything but honest or even reputable’.51 Of course, the truth of these claims is not important here, only what they tell us about Classical attitudes to powerful women: as Cohen notes, they ‘illustrate the connection, in popular imagination, between meretricious commerce and female entrepreneurship’. In Aspasia, the figure of the woman who uses her body to gain power and whose intellectual brilliance is inextricably linked with her mastery of the business of fornication becomes a useful avatar for the game’s narrative agenda regarding sex and power.
As well as Classical sources, Odyssey is drawing on the trope of the girl who fucks her way to the top – interestingly, so does Ubisoft’s portrayal of Cleopatra in 2017’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is explored by Jane Draycott in chapter eleven of this volume – and is again indebted to concepts from film and television. ‘Aspasia’ is what Campbell terms the ‘Business Woman’ of screen media: ‘The prostitute who capitalizes on her assets … If she is ambitious she rises in the social scale along with the prosperity of her clientele – without ever being able fully to shake the stigma of the whore.’52 Like the regular hetaera, Aspasia’s operations are hinted at through knowing euphemism – as she remarks to the Misthios when they first meet, ‘We do what we must to survive, and there’s no shame in that. It’s how you got here – how I got here.’ Aspasia is drawing a connection between herself and the Misthios like Socrates to Theodote: killing for hire, like fornicating for hire, is work like any other. She further references her disreputable past when candidly admitting sympathy for the Misthios’ discomfort with fine clothes: ‘You never really get used to them.’ Aspasia may be very powerful, but she doesn’t truly fit in this space – you can take the girl out of the brothel, but whoredom is ingrained.
Despite her past, Aspasia is immensely powerful. When she first appears at a symposium for Perikles, she observes the room of intellectuals with a satisfied half smile of dominance, prompting the assembled men to bow towards her. She gives the player tasks to complete that are compulsory for game progression – to meet with Anthousa in Korinth then connect with another shady character, Xenia the female pirate, who Aspasia says she called on ‘in a former life’ whenever she ‘needed something done, or someone found’. These two dubious connections give a glimpse of the vast network Aspasia operates across multiple cities: a web connecting Anthousa’s hetaerae to the elite halls of power. Aspasia’s spymaster role is coded as distinctly feminine – a system of woman-to-woman whisperings and ‘dear friends’. Aspasia is brilliant because she’s a hetaera: she can pull strings and manipulate powerful men, but also summon networks of women for help. Her lover Perikles, the leader of Athens, is a gentler figure – in his first appearance, he is pelted with fruit while giving a speech in front of a mob. He seems weary and somewhat uxorious: when he invites the Misthios and his companion Herodotus to a symposium, Herodotus remarks, ‘I’m sure he’ll still ask Aspasia if it’s OK.’ Later, when the player visits Perikles at his sick-bed during the Plague of Athens, he is clearly finding Aspasia’s care overbearing (‘tell my Aspasia I was a good boy and took my drugs’, he says). He does not speak at all in his final appearance, as Deimos, the Misthios’ miscreant sibling, slits his throat. Odyssey makes it clear that Aspasia is the real leader, and that her power and influence comes from her talent for feminine duplicity and underworld connections – qualities that only a hetaera could have.
No place for a child
The harmony of the hetaerae community is further compromised, and ultimately shattered, by the introduction of a child into the adult space. Phoibe is a girl on the cusp of adolescence who follows the Misthios on their adventures, becoming an assistant and emissary for Aspasia. It’s an odd role for a child, but although the Misthios mildly expresses misgivings, the other adults around her – almost all women – happily make use of her labour. Although Phoibe is to some extent worldly (when she is briefly kidnapped, she glibly remarks, ‘It wasn’t so bad. Last time, they put a cloth in my mouth so I’d stop biting’) we are repeatedly reminded of her child status. We see her on the door admitting guests to Perikles’ symposium or sneaking into the home of one of Damalis’ clients to steal weapons, but we also see her playing with Chara, a child’s toy bird given to her by her deceased mother. Toys indicate more sharply the childhood of their owner in an ancient Greek context: there was a custom of giving them away as votives to deities as a transitional ritual, with boys giving them up at puberty and girls when marrying.
Phoibe is given tasks that specifically draw her to the fringes of adult business: while delivering Aspasia’s messages to Anthousa, she is swept up in the shocking ‘To Help a Girl’ quest, where she follows the Misthios to a strange house. The player finds chains, oil and a lock of hair on the floor – as well as marks of blood. It becomes apparent that the house is a sex andron where non-consenting women are abused by The Monger. Although acts of abuse are not shown, and it is clear from later dialogue that Phoibe does not see inside the house, this storyline nevertheless puts a minor in extraordinary proximity to sexual violence.
The inevitability of harm around sex workers is a well-established trope in screen culture, as Campbell identifies: ‘Again and again … films go through the ritual of targeting for death the woman who creates trouble for the patriarchal order … She is to be put to death because of the disturbance she causes.’53 This trope has transferred unquestioningly to games like Grand Theft Auto, but Odyssey complicates the pattern – you are able to protect Damalis from a brush with death, but the horrible way she would have died is still made shockingly explicit. The game makes it clear that death stalks women who sell sex, and inevitably, death comes to Phoibe: she is murdered by the Cult in the Odeon of Perikles, having been sent into the rioting crowds of plague-ridden Athens on an errand. The violence that has been brewing around the hetaerae finally bursts forth, claiming an innocent victim as penance for the activities of adult women – they accept the risk to their own lives, but Phoibe is too young to truly consent, and becomes an innocent sacrifice. Her death is an inevitable outcome of her close contact with the death-tainted hetaerae. Phoibe’s dual existence, half adult, half child, and the uncomfortable ambiguity it creates, is brought to an end in a theatrical space: a venue that would be accessible to a hetaera, but not to most women. The Misthios crouches over her dead body and places her toy bird in her hands: the scene ends on a close up of the bird, now a votive symbolizing the death of innocence. Tainted by association with sex workers, there can be no viable safe adulthood for Phoibe: she must die.
The hetaera punished
Because Aspasia’s power rests on whorish deception, it is inevitable that it should be corrupt. The revelation that Aspasia is the leader of the villainous Cult of Kosmos comes as little surprise: we have already seen from Socrates’ instructions to Theodote that deception was thought to be essential to the hetaera’s success. In Hyperides, Against Athenogenes, Epicrates condemns the prostitute consort Antigone’s duplicity as somehow intrinsic to her nature. Like Aspasia, she appears entirely plausible: the plaintiff admits that he trusted Antigone because ‘she took the most solemn oaths.’54 Epicrates appeals to the misogyny of his fellow men of the jury, pleading that he fell for age-old feminine tricks:
‘Perhaps there is nothing very surprising, gentlemen of the jury, in my having been taken in like this by Antigone, a woman who was, I am told, the most gifted courtesan of her time…’55
Aspasia, too, has been hiding at the very front of the narrative: she is sexually promiscuous, clever and powerful: isn’t it obvious? She has gone beyond the bounds of acceptable female behaviour: more transgressive still, her motivation for joining the Cult is specifically to combat old patriarchies with her feminine new order: ‘the powers that be in the Greek world weren’t doing things the right way. The cult just wanted a clean slate.’ Aspasia’s crime is attempting to sweep out old (male) power structures on the principle that mother knows best. ‘It’s not crazy, it’s enlightened. Once people in Athens get wind of this they’ll come to know they’ve wanted it all along.’ Her approach to the sickly Perikles is the same overbearing approach she has taken to her wider domain: the whole of Greece, which she is similarly force-feeding its medicine.
By pinning corruption to Aspasia, Odyssey justifies her defeat, giving the player an excuse for violence. After a climactic battle, the player must choose to spare her, kiss her (and spare her), or kill her. The choice has little bearing on the remaining narrative, but conveniently hands the moral judgement to the player. Online community discussions on Steam reveal overwhelming player bloodlust: on a post asking users to share their ‘Cult leader choices’, user Ficelle admits, ‘I killed this snake without hesitation … Pretty, but totally evil, very manipulative and not to be trusted.’56 Players’ reactions reveal common instincts for blackly comic Grand Theft Auto-style violence (ffernandesandre: ‘I removed my weapon and punched her for like 5 [minutes]’), abuse (user The Father swerves community rules on slurs with the comment ‘killed the B…’) and longing to perform the mate-and-kill routine (‘Killed her without a second thought … wish there was an option to kiss her and then kill her … heheh.’) The language used by Darkdisciple1313, meanwhile, is tellingly phallic: ‘All Cult members taste the point of the spear.’ Of course, the ‘real’ Aspasia – the one constructed by classical sources – died somewhere around the start of the fourth century BCE, at least another twenty years after the events of Odyssey. On this point, the game entirely drops its attempts to be historically accurate in favour of a much stronger narrative imperative: the violent expulsion of the anxiety caused by the hetaera-queen.
Conclusion
Sex workers have been present in games from the earliest console days, from Mystique’s unlicensed adult games of the 1980s to the most critically acclaimed RPG adventures of the 2010s like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher: Wild Hunt. Across decades and genres, questionable tropes have taken hold, many of them contracted from other screen media like cinema and TV. But, after a slew of bestselling games took these tropes to extremes as an expression of detached irony and ‘post-PC’, there are now signs of a path forward for honest, unsensational and humane representation. Odyssey is undoubtedly part of this progress – even if the cogs are often visible in its attempts to be didactic, it is somewhat able to reimagine sex work beyond the most damaging movie clichés. It is also only fair to acknowledge that the game’s wider discussions of sex, including the many optional ‘romance’ subplots, are often inclusive, healthy and most importantly fun – an aspect of sexuality that mainstream games have often neglected. Odyssey’s failure is in finishing this work. Under the pressure of triple A game production, falling back on age-old narratives of female sexuality punished with violence certainly ties off loose ends quickly, but it may leave many players disappointed.
There is much talk of ‘empathetic design’ in games, but even more informed design could radically push forward the medium in its storytelling: (fairly compensated) conversations with sex workers themselves are surely the bare minimum. Developers should reject stereotypes about sex workers that are ripped from other screen media: games as a whole would benefit from using the unique storytelling opportunities of the medium to make its own standards for how it deals with sensitive and complex topics. Last, more research is required into how new narratives might impact sex workers positively. What does it look like for a sex worker to be treated as just another character, for example? What if sex work is incidental to their characterization, rather than a positive or a negative?
Notes
1.Campbell (2006: 3).
2.Hart (2015).
3.Ronald Weitzer terms this ‘the empowerment paradigm’ which holds ‘that there is nothing inherent in sex work that would prevent it from being organised for mutual gain to all parties – just as in other economic transactions’ (2012): 7).
4.Mgbako (2020). Amnesty’s declaration that ‘Sex Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights’ in 2015 has become a commonly used hashtag in feminist activism on social media.
5.Gamesindustry International (2006).
6.Glazebrook (2006: 126).
7.Cohen (2015).
8.Philemon Adelphoi – this section of the work does not survive but is referred to by later writers. It demonstrates that there is a logical theoretical connection between successful democracy and the availability of purchased sex – i.e. if Solon himself considered it necessary to a democracy then it must be so.
9.Cohen (2015: 138).
10.Schofield (2020).
11.Entertainment Software Association (2019).
12.ISFE (2019).
13.Kavanagh (2019).
14.Ruberg (2020).
15.In Chapter 4 of this volume, Goad discusses how fantasy games both pre- and post-gamergate frequently present female sexuality as the predatory siren-lure of the monstrous-feminine, echoing gamers’ fears about sex work within ‘their’ community.
16.Tsukayama (2014).
17.Gaudiosi (2015).
18.Takahashi (2014).
19.Brightman (2014).
20.Kelleher (2015).
21.Mills (2015: 96–7).
22.Lepore and Denner (2016: 286).
23.BBC Technology (2014).
24.Shaw (2015: 18).
25.It is also worth stating that a publisher producing broadly ‘feminist’ content does not override their track record as employers of women – see Draycott in Chapter 11.
26.Lozano (2020: 172).
27.Salvati and Bullinger (2013: 154).
28.Ruberg (2020).
29.Huntemann observes that ‘Knowledge of comics (or games) is the currency required for entrance into geekdom.’ With this currency, or the appearance of it in ‘fake gamer girl’ performance, women are thought to access power, cultural visibility, influence in the community and career opportunities (ibid., 2017).
30.Kapparis (2017: 2).
31.Demosthenes 59.122.
32.Kurke (1997: 127).
33.Weitzer (2012: 12).
34.Kapparis (2017: 51).
35.Ibid., 49.
36.Cohen (2015: 23).
37.Demosthenes 48.55.
38.Menander Samia 378.
39.Downs and Smith (2010).
40.Sarkeesian (2014).
41.Beavers (2020a: 268).
42.Kurke (1997: 112).
43.Xen. Mem. 3.11.4–6.
44.Goldhill (1998: 120).
45.Ruberg (2019: 315).
46.In the next chapter of this volume, Kate Cook identifies a similar portrayal of sex-worker communities as supportive spaces where women can gain agency in the 2018 game Choices: A Courtesan of Rome.
47.Contrast this with 2010’s Brotherhood, in which the courtesan community is bristling with suspicion: their former proprietor Madame Solari had been double-dealing with the Borgias, and the new Mother confides in the player that ‘several of those who work with us sleep with the enemy still’.
48.Cohen (2015: 140).
49.Convery (2017).
50.Kapparis (2017: 50).
51.Plut. Per. 24.3.
52.Campbell (2006: 207).
53.Ibid., 361.
54.Hyperides 3.2.
55.Ibid., 3.3.
56.All posts referenced found at: https://steamcommunity.com/app/812140/discussions/0/1748980761805977828/ (accessed June 2020).