Doxy: A Roleplaying Game of Sex and Skulduggery

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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. Violence and the Diagram; Or, The Human Centipede. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 24 (2): 75–108.

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. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge: Harvard University 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 Pixelated Noose. 2018. Toby Fox Camp Fangamer Interview July 2015 (Part 1). YouTube Video, 10:00, March 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwampY_jIdg. Genette, Gérard. 1982. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press.Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Language and Art. New York: Columbia University Press. 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. Tran-Gervat, Yen-Mai. 2014. Pastiche. In Encyclopedia of Humor, ed. Salvatore Attardo, 554–556. Los Angeles, London, et al.: Sage Publications. Anger, Jiří, and Tomáš Jirsa. 2019. We Never Took Deconstruction Seriously Enough (On Affects, Formalism, and Film Theory): An Interview with Eugenie Brinkema. Illuminace 31 (1): 65–85.

Renaud, Patrice, et al. 2011. Real-Time Functional Magnetic Imaging-Brain-Computer Interface and Virtual Reality Promising Tools for The Treatment of Pedophilia. Progress in Brain Research 192: 263–272. Berlant, Lauren. 2007. On the Case. Critical Inquiry 33 (4): 663–672. https://doi.org/10.1086/521564. Buscombe, Edward. 2004. Generic Overspill: A Dirty Western. In More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power, ed. Pamela Church Gibson, 27–30. London: BFI Publishing. Booth, Paul. 2014. Slash and Porn: Media Subversion, Hyper-articulation, and Parody. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28 (3): 396–409.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.

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. Milner, Ryan, and Whitney Phillips. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Cambridge: Polity Press. 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). Toriel’s butterscotch-cinnamon pie is one of many direct importations from Undertale, so is the entirety of Toriel’s house, the layout of rooms, and much of the dialogue, including the general tonality of exchanges as well as the game’s overarching narrative: Toriel has rescued the fallen child who is searching for a way to escape her care.Jameson, Frederic. 1991. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2000 [1985]. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1960 [1905]. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.