Doxy: A Roleplaying Game of Sex and Skulduggery

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Real-Time Functional Magnetic Imaging-Brain-Computer Interface and Virtual Reality Promising Tools for The Treatment of Pedophilia. Throughout this chapter, I use the term ‘furry’ to describe cultural artefacts that are coded in a certain way; I have not conducted any field work and am presenting textual analyses of contents found online, often without much reliable context, as well as my own interpretations of them—these analyses in no way aim to speak for or represent any particular lived experience, nor do they intend to say anything substantial about parts or the entirety of the furry community. Finally, I thank the three editors of this volume for their provocative and thorough comments, which have greatly improved this text. Secondly, I focus on the palimpsestic web that connects the two games to the 1999 film American Pie.

Pastiche, on the other hand, derives “its comic effect [by relying] on its resemblance to its ‘hypotext’ rather than on transformation of content or context” (Tran-Gervat 2014, 555). Since games and pornography scholars are just beginning to pay extensive attention to pornographic video games, there is as yet no agreed-upon lexicon in place for referring to such objects. The furry community is a vast and diverse universe that encompasses a multiplicity of identity expressions as well as understandings of what being furry or taking an interest in certain aspects of furry culture might mean.It is widely acknowledged that sexual fetish forms only a small portion of the furry experience, if it is at all present (in fact, many furries insist that while role-playing is a part of their experience, sexual furry role-play is not). In the present case study, this process is already visible in the similarity between the games’ titles where, by altering only one letter (the replacement of “n” with a second “d”), the original game’s title shifts from one that is merely descriptive to one that is in itself a crass, sexualised joke. In short, I view most sex games as belonging, generally speaking, to the genre of casual games (here, I am thinking of the many erotic dating simulators and short interactive sex games that flood leading indie platforms such as Steam and itch. Without necessarily citing Uddertale as an influence, multiple Reddit threads devote themselves to detailed exegeses of Undertale that seek to elucidate just this point.

In addition, I would like to thank Marion Froger for reading an early version of this chapter and providing thoughtful feedback on it. com (with the exception of commercially designed browser games such as those made by Nutaku, the MindGeek-owned studio, which is a leader in this domain).

It should be added, of course, that comparisons with animals also appear in the names of sex acts, such as the aforementioned ‘doggie style’ position and, in certain cases, in descriptors of male anatomic parts as well (one thinks of the term ‘horse cock’ for instance). In this chapter, I pay attention, firstly, to the parodic and pastiche aspects of Uddertale’s relationship to Undertale. undertale is furry trash”; “I can’t understand… why furries exist tbh: Undertale”; “Undyne is a Furry Character: Convince Me Otherwise”; and “is toby fox a furry?

According to Linda Hutcheon, parody is “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (1985/ 2000, 6). Ultimately, this double case study allows me to highlight an especially troubling aspect of humour in general: its ability to maintain contradictory ethical positions in suspension, with no resolution in sight. For a sense of what is understood by depth within intermedial theory, and rather than looking to tedious classifications that seek to parse the intertextual from the intermedial, I recommend taking a look at the extensive output of the journal Intermédialités, where a flurry of idiosyncratic juxtapositions of media objects from virtually every epoch demonstrates that intermediality is very much an affair of intertwined historical and analytic depth (Cisneros 2003). For discussions of parodic adaptations in and as pornography, see, for instance, Booth 2014, Buscombe 2004, Hines 2012, Jones 2013, Lehman 1996, Penley 1997, Smith 2012.When Spiderman Became Spiderbabe: Pornographic Appropriation and the Political Economy of the “Soft-Core Spoof” Genre.

While such parodic adaptations have long been a mainstay of filmic pornography and have, as such, received a good deal of attention from pornography scholars (in particular Constance Penley), the use of humour in the movement from game to porn game has received less. This contribution focuses on the game Uddertale (2016), developed by the artist Doxy for The Poundry, a young distributor of online sex games. Handy step-by-step guides, put together by dedicated players, detail the succession of actions that must be taken to unlock all of the game’s sex scenes (8 in total) and achieve the best ending, which emulates the language of Undertale endings and reads: “You got the Best End. radical formalism” is a deeply humanist approach to media texts that reads for affective and, increasingly, ethical expressions within the aesthetic, material, and narrative forms of media objects themselves (see Brinkema 2014, 2016, Anger and Jirsa 2019). We Never Took Deconstruction Seriously Enough (On Affects, Formalism, and Film Theory): An Interview with Eugenie Brinkema.Through this analysis, I ask how gamic parodic humour comes to differ from other forms of video game humour, or parodic humour at large, when it becomes part of the greater intermedial agenda of translating, adapting, or transforming an existing game into a playable pornographic object. As its title suggests, Uddertale, is a spoof of the indie hit Undertale (Fox 2015), an adventure role-playing game which received numerous accolades for its originality and humour.