Every time I play a video game that includes sex workers as characters, all I can think about is how great it would be to be seen as a person. Usually, sex workers in games are just toys for the player’s entertainment or tools to deepen the protagonist’s story. Either way, they’re only there intermittently, just a sordid element to add to the grittiness of the setting. I can count on one hand the number of games that spend significant time with a sex worker character, let alone games that portray a sex worker positively, let alone games that are specifically about sex workers.

HunieCam Studio is one of a kind, at least in the sense that it does center on sex workers. The premise is this: you’re the manager of a camgirl studio, and you have 21 days to gain a lot of fans and make a lot of money. Given that I have seen so few games starring sex workers, I was excited right away about this game, but I also knew going in that it was probably going to provide awful representation. Indeed, the store page for HunieCam Studio on Steam paints our profession as gross, mentioning “disgusting fans,” calling the operation “sleazy,” claiming that the camgirls have made “poor life choices,” and inviting the player to “abandon your morals and disappoint everybody who cares about you!”

Many gameplay elements in Huniecam feed directly into normalizing abusive management or at least looking down on workers. For example, the player can send their camgirls to do escorting sessions in a so-called “sleazy motel,” and if they send camgirl Lillian there, there’s a chance she’ll say the line “Like I have a choice!” There is also a chance that when her session is over, the player will get a message saying that she contracted AIDS if she did not bring a condom (not HIV—apparently, in this game, getting HIV first is not a thing) and her voice line in this situation is “Please kill me.”