post #6: FNAF: the UN-death of an author

I'm still falling, but I can feel my legs again. Right now.


     I will be cannibalizing another incomplete video essay script for this one as I've suddenly been thinking about it again. While I'm not that familiar with One Piece but watching Tirrb's latest video , on anime, and hearing his mention of Oda, reminded me of comments I've heard about the one piece fandom -- that fan's come up with these extensive readings and what not for the text pinning it all to a master narrative authored by Oda when maybe it wasn't intended. While One Piece and FNAF differ in important ways (for time's sake I'll say one major difference is how long each piece has been rattling around for), I feel that they probably have shared traits in their relationships to authorship. However, since I don't know that much about One Piece -- not enough to speak confidently about it -- I will talk about FNAF here.

     In essence, I feel like FNAF emblemizes a new relationship to authorship people and consumers of a work may have. I don't know the history of media and media technologies globally, but I feel it's reasonable enough to make this claim. ... What I mean is that it seems like most authorship discourses seem to revolve around a basis in literature,. Maybe a figure like Tolkien has a relationship to his readership where people are reading intention extensively into every nook and cranny of his texts, but I think that's different too. At least in the sense that, from what I understand Tolkein and LOTR are more separated than Scott Cawthon and FNAF. I often hear people talk about Scott Cawthon or FNAF as if each were the other simultaneously. This happens not only when people narrate the history of the games (e.g., Scott was down on his luck and released FNAF [the first one] as his one final hail mary before bowing out of the games industry) but also when people interpret and narrate the content of the games.

[^^ drawing of the classic Scott png, pictured here with his pal Bonnie ^^]

     FNAF has, in practice, been told over installments since the first game came out in 2014. While not as clearly demarcated as the installments of Bendy and the Ink Machine or Poppy Playtime that would come after it, FNAF's text / story, if there can be said to be one, nevertheless has an indelible relationship to installation storytelling. It's probably the case that FNAF (the first game) became an installment only after further games started to come out. I would be interested to see at what point the series and its author (because so many of these narrations work with the premise of that there is just one author) fully collapsed into one unit. I will turn to Game Theory as shorthand of what I mean (itself a worth being a case study for part and whole / authorship discourse). The first Game Theory video on FNAF, to my knowledge, doesn't mention Scott Cawthon that much, and instead uses the text as a site to orate some random true crime stuff and be vaguely anti-black. Jump forward to today, and it seems like it's all but guaranteed that a Game Theory video on FNAF will use Scott Cawthon as metonymic shorthand for disoursing the series and texts themselves. That is, the editors place a png of Scott on screen which the speaker then targets their questions or rage or other emotions at (whereby Scott is a presumed synecdoche for the writhing many limbs of FNAF). At some point between the first Game Theory video on FNAF and today, it evolved to be an effective and communicative shorthand to edit FNAF theory videos in this way.

     This evolution is important, I think. As authorship is very much temporally defined. I remember in the 2016-2018 era, I heard people talking about JK Rowling in regard to Roland Barthes' essay, "The Death of the Author." At that point, my perception is that the discourse sought to litigate how much Rowling's post hoc authorial interventions should be weighed into consideration when reading the text (what is loosely encapsulated in the Cursed Child or whatever that play is called). In some way or another, Harry Potter and Rowling as text and author have mutated since then. Easiest to narrate is that in the interim Rowling has become more and more vocal of an Anti-Trans (fascist) voice in the media, using her platform as author to push for violence against marginalized communities. Probably some people look past this or are otherwise not as affected by it. What I do know is that some non-zero portion of Harry Potter's readership have moved away from the texts due to Rowling's problematics. Two other changes in the text-author relation have been that Harry Potter as media mix has continued to expand since 2016 (when it already held an enriched spot in the marketplace) and that Rowling has become a more vocal figure as distended from being an author. While Rowling may use her authorship to grant her legitimacy, my perception is that her black mold stuff and what not isn't usually an act of Harry Potter authorship in any kind of explicit way.

     Part of what I find interesting about the collapse of text and author in FNAF's case is that Scott in theory can enter a similar position as to where Rowling stands today. While I won't say that it's only Rowling's hate speech that has led to shifts in audience perception of the text-author relationship, I feel like it would be hard to argue it hasn't played a part. Meanwhile, Scott is still proudly paraded as author of FNAF even when it becomes public knowledge that he proudly supports the American Republican party in explicit, monetary ways. (As with Rowling, the profit he makes from the text translates into oiling a machine of violence and hate). But except for the fuss that was raised when Scott's political contributions first came to light, this is mostly ignored these days. (is my perception). Even though Scott's politics are inarguably inextricable from the text, going back to his work at the Christian animation studio, Hope Animation (this is where the genius of engineering that is globglogabgalab originates) -- [Maybe if he made veggie tales I wouldn't be mentioning the christian animation thing] -- they (Scott's politics) get conveniently left out of the vast majority of FNAF community discourse.

[^^ drawing of the globglogabgalab, from an animated film scott worked on before making FNAF ^^]

     Continuing, Scott's authorial role supersedes his attempts even at his own (authorial) life. Despite the fact that Scott apparently stepped down from being the sole author of FNAF and handed the reins largely over to the studio Steel Wool to continue the series since Help Wanted-- despite this fact, Scott is still paraded out as, usually, the sole and genius author of FNAF. When FNAF sucks, it's actually explicitly stated (within the community) to be because Scott didn't author the text *enough.* Security Breach and Burntrap get paraded as the prime examples of this. As Scott narrates in his second Dawko interview, during the development cycle of the game, he had poor communication with the team at Steel Wool, which then led to miscommunication(s). According to Scott, as he intended it, Burntrap wasn't supposed to move at all, but he does in the released version(s) of the game. Hence, the failure of Security Breach becomes the success of Scott's authorship. While Scott still doesn't play an active role in Steel Wool's development process (in terms of making the game, that is), the team at Steel Wool have effectively relinquished any kind of explicit authorial role to Scott. The same goes for the books. The failures of the Frights or Pizzaplex short story collections is because Scott worked with co-authors, where he sent them an outline of the story and they then punched it up to short story length. When the books contain discrepancies, it's because Scott wasn't enough of an author. (This is putting aside that even Scott's self-authored texts contain discrepancies). In short, Scott Cawthon is currently viewed as such a singular author of FNAF that he alone is the arbiter of truth and goodness in anything that passes through the series. To qualify as officially being FNAF, a text must move through Scott Cawthon.

     Part of why I think this is odd is that authorship seems like it might be not the most perfect fit for describing video game production. With books, it's easy enough to imagine an author as a single individual. J.K. Rowling writes a draft, maybe an editor takes a look, but then more or less, (maybe also throw in some publishers) the version of Harry Potter that ends up on bookshelves around America can be traced back to things of her creative invention. Why video games don't match up to single person authorship, I'm not entirely sure. I don't think it's necessarily a quirk of the medium (e.g., it's probably not a: b/c books are a single person experience, so it’s easier to render this as a one-to-one communication). There are developers like Concerned Ape with Stardew Valley or Local Thunk with Balatro where the dev team is pretty much one person. I don't know in these cases how many people might be involved contributing other labor such as playtesting or other assets such as music or sprite work. I'm also not 100% in the know on what has gone into FNAF, but I do know some things. For example, while Scott certainly did the largest share of the leg work with FNAF (the first game), as early as FNAF World, he was already working in extensive collaboration with Leon Riskin who has continued to contribute music to the series. Another common collaborator is PinkyPills, an artist who he's worked with for a number of the FNAF shitpost games, resulting in... questionable visuals. Not as visibly influencing the games have been his two children who he's had help him playtest his games since I think at least FNAF 2. And then there's the voice actors. The most immediately evocative example I can think of is the voice actor for Balora-- she was apparently either asked or allowed to write the lyrics Balora sings in Sister Location. Because of this, people have BOTH read Balora's song as important textual element of FNAF and mined it for meaning (this is to help litigate that maybe the animatronic houses Afton's dead wife in some kind of way) AND dismissed the song as unimportant since Scott didn't author it himself.

[^^ drawing of william afton, in the style of the FNAF/VHS analog horror series ; not directly related to the essay, but also yes it is related ^^]

     I'm not sure where this leaves things, but I am curious to see how Scott's relation to the community and to FNAF evolves over the next couple of years. Because that's the thing, it's not just about the author and the text. There also has to be someone ascribing authorship to the author over the text. That someone can be the author, but I don't think that gets us very far. No, with FNAF, it's crucial that the community is involved in this process -- they give Scott the power over the series by believing that he has it. I wonder if Scott knows this-- if his efforts to monetarily support fan games have in anyway been efforts to maintain singular control of FNAF's authorship. What I've not been talking about that much is that I think there's likely some kind of greater utility in all of this -- both for the community in imagining that such a singular author as Scott exists and for Scott to allow this image to remain undisturbed. Certainly, such things as invisibilizing labor (as Capital loves to do -- something relevant as the FNAF empire continues to accrue capital) and internet streamlining technologies (the apparatuses through which FNAF communities currently organize, by which narrating authorship as singular is currently more efficient and thus more encouraged, by way of the technology's design) probably play a role, but I'm hesitant to say that they are the sole, main parts of this all. Something to think about. An author that doesn't die.

*What's also strange is how often Scott's position as author is used as an empty signifier for reading the text. Whereas in Film Studies, the field I studied in undergrad, someone might research the background of an actor or director and use that information to read into a text connected to such a figure (authored in some way by such a figure), I don't see this happen in any notable way in FNAF-related discourses. The closest things usually get is saying, Oh, well Scott is Christian, so X, Y, or Z (Character name, or vague theme) probably applies to the text or is suitable to be read into it. Like, I guess this logic holds up on its own, but it seems like it doesn't get very far -- just a simple syllogism: If [person] is Christian, then [person] uses Biblical name for character. Scott is Christian, therefore, Scott uses Biblical names for character.