You know what I love? Slaves: gorgeous men and women stripped of their dignity, forced to their knees, and made to serve without question. I love worshipfully obedient slaves, who crawl to their Master's feet with swaying hips and downcast eyes, desperate to beg for even a moment of their beloved owner's attention. I love unwilling, defeated slaves: those poor souls whose pain and humiliation is betrayed by the tears streaming down their cheek as they sacrifice what little shame they have left to entertain the lust of their tormentor. I especially love slaves who, regardless of their beauty or talent or desires or former lives, understand that their fate is to serve at their Master's feet, to live their life in chains, to be no more than meat in the markets of pleasure, for the rest of their days.

But you know what I love most? Video games.

Now, I'm not the first person who's wanted to combine these two interests, but if you screen out the many, many visual-porn-novel-type works, the amount of slave games you'll find is actually really small, and they don't sufficiently scratch my slave itch or my game itch.

For example, Sex Slave Auction House, a web-based slave trading game. It does scratch the basic levels for the fetish, in that you can purchase and sexually use game characters, and it does scratch the basic game itch, in that you can level up your slaves, buy them low, and sell them high. But these mechanics are one dimensional: there's no dynamic behavior relating to the slaves or how they work or how they respond to you, and the lack of player leaves the player-driven aspects of the economy dead. It's a fun game for gathering slaves like Pokemon cards or trying to manipulate the market into owning every bunnygirl, but such challenges are meta-work, they don't really exist within the ludic scope of the game.

On the other hand, Free Cities, which I feel has enough artistic merit to potentially step out of the porngame category and into being just a normal video game, still doesn't quite hit the mark. At first, the player is very hands on with their slaves: clothing them, training them, beating them, whoring them, and so on. Each day gives the player a detailed status report of each, and they're all available to please at the drop of the hat, reacting to the player based on their fear and devotion, but never able to escape their Master's touch. But, as the game and its economy expands, and as the player better begins to understand the Rules Manager system, it takes a more macro perspective of the world. The player is no longer managing individual slaves, but rather the processes of a trade economy and all of its delicate balances, as the game interacts with the slaves for you. I feel this macro shift is a big part of the artistic (or, at least, narrative) value of the game, and I wouldn't change it, but as fun as transforming scores of women into numbers on a spreadsheet sounds, the game stops being as fun when you manage a fragile tower of competing numbers, rather than lording over an empire of sex slaves.

So, where's the middle ground? Where's the ideal? What kind of systems need to be built into a slave game to fulfill the fantasy of owning a personal harem of pleasure toys while still being a game that can be played, rather than a spreadsheet, or a novel? I have some ideas, but I'm unsure how to piece them together, or even where to start! A slave needs to be controlled, so would this game involve building, growing them into what a player wants them to be? But they're tools too, right? So what are they working for, when pure sexual pleasure can't be communicated through a game screen?

That's really the crux of this prompt: How would you design a sex slave harem game, from the perspective of the Master? Let me know, I'd love to discuss your ideas, or preferences, or recommendations, or whatever else! And, if you're on the s side of the M/s, what might you want out of this sort of game, or a game focused on playing the slaves?

And, yes, I know there are porn game subreddits out there I could post this on, but I'm looking for quality discussion first, so I'm gonna start here.