Abstract
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.
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Notes
- 1.
Uddertale can be accessed here: https://doxysdungeon.com/uddertale-doxygames/ (accessed July 4, 2020). It was made with the support of donations from so-called patrons received through the platform Patreon.com (independent creators of pornographic browser games often rely on crowdfunding). 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. Thus, I am here limiting myself to format as a primary mode of categorisation. 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.io). Browser or HTML sex games are a subcategory of casual games that are played online and typically not downloaded by the player, and I use the fuzzier term ‘sex games’ here, as opposed to the adjective ‘pornographic’, because not all of these rudimentary browser games feature the hallmarks typically associated with pornography, such as graphic penetration, and because their graphic quality is often so poor or their symbolism so abstract that they cannot truly qualify as graphic representations of sex, even if, broadly speaking, they fall within the greater scope of pornographic games. They are primarily accessible for free on porn game aggregators such as Porngames.com, HornyGamer.com, and Adult-Sex-Games.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). Amateurs often post walkthroughs of browser sex games onto leading porn aggregators where they are typically filed under the “hentai” or “cartoon” categories, a taxonomic move that effectively transforms them into non-playable animated pornographic contents.
- 2.
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.
- 3.
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.
- 4.
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). 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. Uddertale also contains elements relating to other forms of kink such as, in particular, dominance and submission role-playing as well as age/mommy play; these overlap with certain subgenres within the broad category of furry fetish but are certainly not limited to the universe of furry sex and, indeed, while markers of furry play are present in Uddertale’s final sequence (e.g. through frequent references to Toriel’s fluffiness), others are more ambiguous (such as when Toriel calls the boy her “pet”) and the emphasis on dom/sub sex is generally its most striking feature.
- 5.
- 6.
Returning to what Frederic Jameson (1991, 12) called the “depth models” of psychoanalysis and other modern theories (in opposition to what he argued to be the surface structures of postmodern intertextuality), my emphasis on intertextual strata stays closer to Gérard Genette’s heavily stratified understanding of intertextuality in Palimpsests (1982) but also integrates later postmodern thinking in a way similar to Tibor Žilka’s conceptualisation of intertextuality as co-constitutive of those postmodern texts he defines as adopting a primarily “palimpsestic form” (2000). 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).
- 7.
A keyword search using the term “udder” on the US version of Pornhub.com returned 557 search results, with “Uddertale” appearing second in the list of suggested related searches, right after “monster tits milf” in first place and just before “swinging tits doggie style” in third place (https://www.pornhub.com/video/search?search=udders, accessed June 11, 2020). 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). The latter are typically part of the deeply racist semantic apparatus that works to ‘other’ racialised porn performers and sex workers, in this case Black men.
- 8.
Without necessarily citing Uddertale as an influence, multiple Reddit threads devote themselves to detailed exegeses of Undertale that seek to elucidate just this point. Thread titles include “Why do people say Undertale is a game for furries?”; “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?” The latter, in particular, is in reference to an interview Toby Fox gave in 2015 when, hiding behind the interviewing couch, he held up a cardboard cut-out depicting one of the many dogs that populate the Underworld while speaking in a cartoon voice and even barking (Pixelated Noose 2018).
- 9.
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.
- 10.
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. You rule the roost. You can leave whenever you want but you find no reason to do so”. See https://ulmf.org/threads/uddertale.8748/ (accessed January 17, 2021).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Academy of Finland funded Sexuality and Play in Media Culture research group (2017–2021, PI Susanna Paasonen) and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Turku for, respectively, supporting and hosting my postdoctoral project from January 2019 to April 2020. This chapter is a direct product of the research I was able to conduct during that time. In addition, I would like to thank Marion Froger for reading an early version of this chapter and providing thoughtful feedback on it. Finally, I thank the three editors of this volume for their provocative and thorough comments, which have greatly improved this text.
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Bem, C. (2022). Humour in Pornographic Browser Games: From Undertale to Uddertale, a Case Study. In: Bonello Rutter Giappone, K., Majkowski, T.Z., Švelch, J. (eds) Video Games and Comedy. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88338-6_16
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