Doxy: A Roleplaying Game of Sex and Skulduggery

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Ruberg, Bonnie. 2018. Straightwashing Undertale: Video Games and the Limits of LGBTQ Representation. Transformative Works and Cultures 28. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2018.1516.

Hutcheon, Linda. 2000 [1985]. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Paasonen, Susanna. 2019. Monstrous Resonance: Affect and Animated Pornography. In How to Do Things with Affects: Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, ed. Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa, 143–162. Amsterdam: Brill. Tran-Gervat, Yen-Mai. 2014. Pastiche. In Encyclopedia of Humor, ed. Salvatore Attardo, 554–556. Los Angeles, London, et al.: Sage Publications. 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. 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.Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Rose, Margaret A. 1993. Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-Modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Booth, Paul. 2014. Slash and Porn: Media Subversion, Hyper-articulation, and Parody. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28 (3): 396–409. Violence and the Diagram; Or, The Human Centipede. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 24 (2): 75–108.

According to Linda Hutcheon, parody is “repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity” (1985/ 2000, 6). 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). 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. Hines, Claire. 2012. Playmates of the Caribbean: Taking Hollywood, Making Hard-core. In Hard to Swallow: Hard-core Pornography on Screen, ed. Claire Hines and Darren Kerr, 126–144. London: Wallflower Press. This contribution focuses on the game Uddertale (2016), developed by the artist Doxy for The Poundry, a young distributor of online sex games. 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. In this chapter, I pay attention, firstly, to the parodic and pastiche aspects of Uddertale’s relationship to Undertale. Secondly, I focus on the palimpsestic web that connects the two games to the 1999 film American Pie. 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. 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. Keywords 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).Jones, Bethan. 2013. Slow Evolution: “First Time Fics” and the X-Files Porn Parody. Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 6 (3): 369–385. Lehman, Peter. 1996. Twin Cheeks, Twin Peeks, and Twin Freaks: Porn’s Transgressive Remake Humor. In Authority and Transgression in Literature and Film, ed. Bonnie Braendlin and Hans Braendlin, 45–54. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Freud, Sigmund. 1960 [1905]. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Language and Art. New York: Columbia University Press.