Doxy: A Roleplaying Game of Sex and Skulduggery

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Hutcheon, Linda. 2000 [1985]. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois 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 Berlant, Lauren. 2007. On the Case. Critical Inquiry 33 (4): 663–672. https://doi.org/10.1086/521564. 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.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. 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. 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. 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.

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). Milner, Ryan, and Whitney Phillips. 2017. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Cambridge: Polity Press. 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.