post #25: FNAF and Foreclosure; or, why Game Theory was wrong about Gregory and Burntrap (OR; FNAF AMV reprise)
I am somewhat lucid right now. I hope I will be able to write this as I think it can be written. Let's find out.
What is FNAF? If I could, I would refuse to answer that question. Seeing people answer it with certainty rakes me over the coals, is why. While some of that is likely stuff I need to work out on my own, I think there's some other stuff worth discussing too.
I phrased the title as I did not as some hot take but because what I want to talk about is why this came to be. The "this" in question here is that, when Security Breach came out, matpat / game theory (because it has not been a matpat exclusive venture for a while -- e.g. other assisting writers and editors) speculated that Gregory, the player character, was secretly a robot version of the crying child reconstructed by Afton who came back to life from the dead after a cult of followers performed necromancy on his charred corpse in the FFPS building. It is not a hot take to say that Game Theory was wrong about these things. At least in present year. While I can't speak to what the fnaf theory space was like when Security Breach released (I have only engaged with it retroactively; I can only see what remains in this regard), it seems like there were at least a handful of other people buying into, or even extending this narrative about Gegory and Burntrap / the Mimic (i.e., that the new game was a continuation of the old ones in a resurrection type way; trapped in the same story , forever). I mention that other people were buying into this to illustrate that I'm not intending to blame GameTheory for constructing a false narrative. Even though they were the largest party propagating it, it is not that they were doing so all by themselves. Regardless, the narrative has gone on to go nowhere. Some people still cling to it, perhaps ironically, who knows, but I think even GameTheory has moved away from it. That being said, what the theory represents seems to still inform how people perceive FNAF as a series of texts (how people answer the question "what is FNAF?")
My argument for this is as follows: people interpreting the text came in with a set of ideas for what the text was about. These ideas are mostly those which propagated memetically most efficiently. William Afton's apparently iconic "I always come back", the meme of FNAF as a series of texts that never ends -- the third game is supposed to be the end end, the fourth game is supposed to be an end et cetera, the meme that FNAF is convoluted and intentionally opaque. This last point is the one only one of these that I would say you could get some real mileage out of in discussing. FNAF is opaque, and thus it makes sense that people developed strategies to try to make it more translucent -- GameTheory was all about reading the books and having parallels to stuff, and this is this methodology is what led them to Gregory is a robot and Burntrap is literally William Afton. It makes sense that people would use the tools they have to solve the problems they think they have. However, what has always irked me is when people look at the way these old techniques poorly solve the given problems, and say that this is a fault of the text (it could be, I guess, but I think that's not as interesting of a possibility in the case of FNAF). What seems to be a more likely answer (the answer I believe is true) is that these old tools don't work to solve new problems (maybe they never worked... that's a different question for a different day). That FNAF seems especially prone to people using antiquated tools to solve novel problems is in part an artifact of that the series has always been helmed (on the communal/theory side) by GameTheory. GameTheory (and this is not inherently bad) has always been foreclosed by their content structure such that it is always more expedient for the channel to try old techniques for problems perceived as real. GameTheory has never been an enterprise that could afford to get into the machinations of phenomenology, for example, for to solve a question the channel has taken up ( I don't think; I don't really know, tbh).
What frustrates me is how GameTheory's dominance in the space has foreclosed the community's ability to read the texts. In a way that has ended up being, explicitly, toxic. The book debate is an artifact of discourses set in motion by GameTheory. I can't articulate it properly right now (though I feel I have been able to in the past), but the book debate is fundamentally broken and is infinitely foreclosed. It wastes people's time and destroys knowledge. It has emerged as a mechanism of annihilation and death when it never had to be a thing in the first play. The books say one thing, the games maybe say another thing; I don't think it's interesting to say that the books and the games are exactly the same texts. I also don't think it's interesting to say that the books and the games are unrelated. How could they be? Sure, there are Frights stories which are retellings of known events, such as "Coming Home," but these outliers are not the point. They have never been the point. They are old technologies being taken into new questions and texts. The mimic short story and the storyteller do not map onto fnaf Security Breach or Ruin or Help Wanted 2 in the way a piece slots into a puzzle, and they also likely won't map onto the upcoming SOTM game in such a precise manner. The texts are one object and the games are another. FNAF is not about adapting itself into itself, it is about complementing itself. There is a collage here. It is doing something bigger than your questions are giving it credit for. What infuriates me about these old technologies constantly being used is that you are foreclosing the text. It is okay to foreclose a text, to be clear, but it still annoys me that it is happening. FNAF is an incredibly nuanced piece, in my opinion.
One of the series' recent sites of interest is the topic of AI (vaguely, generative AI). Again, GameTheory has led the charge on this topic, and again, they have mucked up the discourse, in my opinion. While the GameTheory reading that AI is just a cycle of trauma could work, maybe, I'm not sure what it's doing for the text. We know about cycles of violence, we've been known. Saying that an AI is violent or prejudiced isn't the full statement (or, is not a fully cognizant one). AI, as with all technologies, comes from somewhere and reflects something. In part, it can be true that "bad data," so to speak (the phraseology GameTheory uses), is what the Mimic is about (the bad data of abuse, the bad data of capitalist greed, the bad data of worker exploitation, et cetera). But then what is the alternative? Abused workers hurt other people? Okay, that's probably true, but when are we being shocked by this story? I don't think it's very interesting to say that FNAF security breach and the Tales from the Pizzaplex books, things which have been in production for at least half a decade now, are just retreading, what are essentially moralistic fables (and ones already known by kids everywhere, at that). Yes, the series has a majority kids demographic, but , come on. .... AIUORAOHIURHIOUAQKHLJD KLAWM:JNH#DFKLJN:ASNJKL:WFEOIUA
We can look, for example, at where the Mimic came from in the beginning. It was a mechanism to help entertain a parent's child. The mechanism became haunted when the child died. This is evocative, no? The haunting is imagination and then that imagination bleeds into broken, violent trauma, abuse, et cetera. A worker who is exploited and forced to work terrible hours, they invent a technology to help keep their kid happy. iPad kids, perhaps. And their kid dies (yes, because they were neglectful, but still they died, and that's tragic regardless) and yet the technology remains. The things we make to help others might outlast them. What do we do with that thing now. How can we ever deal with that? And then this thing (the Mimic) gets legs and it is abused, and this thing endures the increased and ratcheting, ratcheting violences of capitalism and corporate greed et cetera. This is all evocative. Bad data yields bad results is not the end of it. But also, you cannot distill all of this into a 20-minute clickbait YouTube video.
Yeah, yeah, this is my cross to bear, but it still annoys me to see people leave comments on random videos that talk about FNAF saying, 'ugh the series totally jumped the shark, it's just afton afton afton.' et cetera. I've fallen victim to regurgitating these narratives too, don't get me wrong. And I even think that they may still be true in some ways, but just not in all the ways that the words suggest when they are put in the order people so often put them in.
Just fucking explode that shit. Let things fall apart. Let life be painful. Let life be beautiful. You cannot stop it. There is beauty in the world. There is pain and there is beauty and the two are not related yet they both exist. You cannot stop it, there is beauty in the world. You cannot foreclose FNAF, the world is beautiful. Rip it apart and put it together again if you have to. There are other people out there. There are other ways of being out there. You don't know the full story. The world is beautiful.
The world is beautiful.
That's what FNAF is. If I had to say.