 Jump scares. Jump scares are cheap. Anyone making some YouTube video could just suddenly have a jump scare come in in the video at any moment. Just take one of those Five Nights at Freddy's deaths and just pop it right here any time now. Now, see, I wouldn't do that to you because that's cheap. However, Five Nights at Freddy's makes no bones about it. Five Nights at Freddy's tells you from the beginning that it is a jump scare game. You start the game, it gives you a warning, the warning says, oh, guys, jump scares, watch out, jump scare, jump scare, and then it jumps with the audio in the video into the title screen, the ominous creepy-ass title screen. The thing about Five Nights at Freddy's is that it's not like a Resident Evil where you walk into a room and there's a jump scare and it kind of takes you out of nowhere, or, you know, a lot of other horror games that are out there. Five Nights at Freddy's, the jump scares are the end. They're just the death. They're not the gameplay. It's horror in the sense that it punishes you when you lose in a very visceral way. It jumpscares you. Now, jump scares aren't horror, right? People always say, oh, that game wasn't scary. It's just dead things jumping out of, you know, you walk past a weird window and something jumps at you and there's a locker room and something jumps at you. So when things are jumping at you, that's like cheap horror. The jump scares are not there to scare you in the course of the game. They're there to punish you, to make you paranoid, to make all the other parts of the game that in any other context would be a lot less scary, way more scary. This game tells you straight up, this is a jump scare game, we're gonna jump scare you, and then it puts you in it. And you look to the left, look to the right, and then you pull up this monitor and you can see the security cameras and you see that the animatronics are all on the stage. And then you look around, you look back at the animatronics, one of them's gone. The fuck did that rabbit go? Where's that rabbit? Where's that rabbit? And eventually you're sitting there and you start to get really paranoid. I'm not a fazable person. And when I was playing this game, my girlfriend was standing next to me, kind of half-watching. I thought, I'm a big man, I can get through this, though the power went out, I knew that asshole was in the room with me. And I knew there was gonna be a jump scare, I knew this game was gonna punish me. So I'm just waiting for the punishment, and I kind of lean back from the monitor, like alright, I don't want to jump, I don't want to be afraid, and nothing happens, nothing happens, and nothing happens. And I lean in a little bit, and I move the mouse to be like, did the game cry and then it got me. The game scared the ever-living shit out of me, even though I knew it was a jump scare, and it makes my adrenaline pound, and the game teaches you paranoia. So the jump scares themselves are not the horror of this game. In fact, if anything, they're relief. The jump scares are just setting the stage for everything else. That fan is on. That fan is always on, whittling away at your power, that little drone in the distance. You really wish you could turn it off, but you feel powerless. This is a game that has an ominous environment and makes the character powerless. You can look a little bit to the left, you can look a little bit to the right, you can close the doors, you can turn on the lights, you can look at your camera, and you can click on Freddie's nose. Isn't that cute? That's it, and the game teaches you that this is what it's about from the beginning. Think about how this game starts. You're thrown into a room, and all you can do is move your mouse around. There's obvious buttons on either door. Big ol' obvious buttons. Now, even if you're dumb, and you're not necessarily convinced that those are the only things you can click on, the phone starts ringing. And of course, you start clicking around, trying to figure out like, oh, how do I answer the phone? How do I answer the phone? Where even is the phone? And then the phone answers itself. The game is telling you from the beginning, you can't do anything, but what those big buttons there do. The other thing you can do is look at the camera, and there's a little bar at the bottom. If you just move your mouse around, you're gonna move it down there, and you don't have to click. If you just move the mouse down, the camera pops up. And then, it's pretty obvious you can click and see around, and you click on the stage, and you see those three guys, and you click around, there's nothing else anywhere, you click back on the stage, oh shit, one of them's gone. So whereas survival horror games are games of slow empowerment, you get stronger, you get more capable. This is a game where you can't level up, you cannot get better in the context of the game, only you, personally, the human being sitting there playing the game, can get better. The game doesn't give you any power-ups. No aspect of the gameplay changes, except the animatronics get more aggressive as the nights go on. So it's not an empowerment fantasy, it's a disempowerment fantasy, because that is what horror is about. There are things out there, and they're coming to kill you, and there is nothing you can do, but close the door and hide behind it. So let's talk about our friend the fan again. It's always there. You're trying to listen for deadly animatronic suits off in the distance, but you can't turn off that drone. You're trying to save power, but you can't make that one bar disappear. You want nothing more than to turn that fucking fan off. Until it's off, then you really wish you could turn it back on. The game acclimated you to a static, comfortable soundscape. Your brain is primed to pick out differences, changes, transient sounds. The fan fades into the background. You almost forget it's there. It becomes a masking sound. But there isn't just the fan. There are actually two core background noises in this game, and they serve two very different purposes. Here's the generic background soundscape for Five Nights at Freddy's. Now, if we isolate out the non-fan noise, see how the phase is moving left and right? This gives us that ominous sense of space. This space outside of our office, the place we can't explore. It reinforces that this is a large open area, that there's nothing between us and those monsters. There is a here, and there is an out there. The sound is diffused, and it moves. Now, if we isolate just the fan, we see something very different. The fan is entirely static. It is unmoving. It is immediately present, and it is directly in front of us. The two sounds together give us a sense of our own place in this larger environment. Think about how heavy that silence feels after the power goes out. The fan grounded us, the player, in this world, and now we're ungrounded. We lost our connection not just to the world, but to our self in the world. And in a suddenly silent environment, your brain adapts. It strains to perceive any sound. This only heightens what you know is coming. Even if the power doesn't go out, sound plays a vital role. In normal play, our soundscape is all over the place. Over and above the background, there are constant transient noises. Some of them are useful. And some of them you learn to dread. But in that moment of death, that jump scare, all of this sound coalesces into a single, non-directional, all-encompassing static. Notice well that it is significantly and sustainably louder than any other sound in the game. It comes from the center, which is effectively the same as coming from all directions at once. What the game has done is actually conditioned you to fear this sound. You literally never hear it in any context other than your own death. Until the fourth night. Hearing that sound, yet still being actually in the game, heightens your sense of fear in paranoia for that fourth night, an implicit rule of the game was broken. Your off guard, likely your heart is beating a little bit faster at the end of that phone call, and it's only night four. There's a further implied question here. What happens tomorrow? Some of the sounds in Five Nights at Freddy's are crucial to surviving. Others exist only to a nerve scare or condition you. Combined, they immerse you. Sounds are especially important due to how limited your access is to the environment. You have a very simple map. It nominally gives you the full layout of Freddy Fazbear's, but it's really just a wireframe. The cameras are placed at odd angles. They move uncontrollably. They don't overlap. The lighting is bad. They're grainy. The end result is a disjointed, fractured view of the world around you. This prevents any sense of mastery over your environment. Your brain has a difficult time synthesizing these separate views into a cohesive whole. Consider the kitchen. The mere fact that you can't see into the kitchen makes you really wonder what's in there. In a sense, it's Scooby-Doo. It's different. When the animatronics start making noises in there, you start to worry what they're up to. None of this is actually relevant to the gameplay, but you don't know that yet. It puts you into a state of mind. The missing pieces all add up to a diffuse sense that you're missing something. And as this game has taught you, if you're missing something, you're one step away from a jump scare. Five Nights at Freddy's gives you some dangers. There are these animatronic suits out there and they're coming to get you. Now concerning your safety, the only real risk to you in the Night Watchmen here, if any, is the fact that these characters, if they happen to see you after hours, probably won't recognize you as a person. But it also gives you a bunch of rules, some of which it tells you straight up and some of which you sort of imply as you play. But hey, first station in Breeze, I'm shouting to you tomorrow. Check those cameras and remember to close the doors only if absolutely necessary that you serve power. Alright, good night. So, this makes it pretty straightforward. You start the game, you're ready to go, and you look on the stage and all three guys are there and you feel good. In fact, you feel 100% good because if you look at those posters, if you look around the game, it's telling you there are three animatronic suits. So, you know, there are three. You look on the stage, there are three. You look at the camera and all three guys are on the stage. You look around the other cameras and everything's just kind of empty. Maybe you're reading those posters on the wall. You're feeling pretty confident, but you're waiting for it. You don't want to get jump scared. You don't want to go like all those stupid live stream let's play people do on YouTube because you're a grown adult. You know better. This game's not scary. You're just gonna sit there and be calm about it and nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens. And the longer nothing happens, the more you start to be worried that you're missing something and that something's about to happen. The game has taught us some rules at this point. Rule number one, I can close the doors. Rule number two, I can see where they are on the cameras. I see them on the cameras and I can close the doors. I feel confident and they don't come after me so I don't know what I'm missing. I feel paranoid that I'm missing something. So finally that rabbit moves. You see the rabbit's gone and the camera broke for a second. That's already breaking a rule. So now the camera doesn't work and then suddenly it works again. You don't really understand why. And you look around and eventually you do find the rabbit and you're still feeling pretty confident because finally something's happening. Something has grabbed your attention before the ominous, endless possibilities of all the different things that could be going on were almost more terrifying than the things just coming straight at you. Finally, something's happened. You can just focus on that bunny and you're actually less scared. You're feeling more capable. But then the bunny starts getting close to your little base. Now you're feeling good because you can still look at the camera as you can see where that dude is, but then he disappears. And you notice that flashlight button and you click the flashlight and he's there. And it plays that sound, the ominous sound and the unexpected jarring image that's suddenly there of that thing looking in the doorway. Stares you a little bit, but you've got it. You close the door and you're fine. You check the camera and you don't see him out there. But you check the door and he is there. Then in day two in the phone call, the guy tells you, oh yeah, by the way, there's blind spots. You got to use those lights to like make sure no one's hanging out right in the hallway. I also want to emphasize the importance of using your door lights. There are blind spots in your camera views. And those blind spots happen to be right outside your doors. So if you can't find something or someone on your cameras, be sure to check the door light. You might only want a few seconds to react. What this game does on a fundamental level is teach you a rule that will keep you safe, a rule about the world you're playing in. And then just when you're starting to feel comfortable, it will break that rule and you have to learn a different rule. And every time it breaks that rule, it punishes you with a jump scare. Remember, the game never actually told you how they get you. It never told you all the different ways you could die. You really don't know. You learn them by bumping into them. So when those animatronics get close to the door, you get worried. You close the door prematurely for too long. You waste your power. You're afraid of them and you're afraid of the power running out. You're between a rock and a horrible animatronic death. Then you learn the rule that the animatronics progress room to room, but they have one extra stop in the doorway before they get to you. You go from being disempowered to being empowered. Check the hall. If you can't find them, check the lights. Filled with your newfound confidence you go about your business and then this happens. That empowerment that came with your newfound understanding of the world of Freddy Fazbear's gone. You're in uncharted territory again. You don't realize it yet, but you are already dead. So if Bonnie or Chica get into the room with you, note that it doesn't kill you right away. It doesn't even tell you what happened. It's just everything's fine. They only get you if you look at your camera and then you pull the camera down again and they get you at that moment. The moment you just took an action. In this game, when you take an action, you did something to make yourself safe. You looked at something, you checked on someone, you closed the door, you shined a flashlight. So in this case, pulling the camera down feels like a safe act, but here you pull the camera down and that rabbit is right there in your face and it gets you because you were probably feeling relieved at that moment. You were just taking an action. The game punished you for taking an action. The game hides your true situation from you. Bonnie's already in the room. The broken door was the signal but you didn't learn that rule yet. You're already dead and you have no way to know how it happened or why it happened. The whole game you've been expecting the suits to come through that door. You expect the jump scare to come as a result of some specific failure of yours. But the game cleverly disconnects punishment from action. The action that caused you to die does not immediately and directly by any causal chain that you can follow lead to your death. Bonnie's in the room with you and in fact, you pay attention, you start to hear noises. If the game had punished you immediately, back when you actually lost, when you didn't notice Bonnie in the doorway and left the door open too long, your brain could associate the two events. It could form a logical chain of causation and convert all of that adrenaline into newfound determination and understanding. But no, instead it punishes you multiple steps removed from the fatal act. It punishes you for taking a perfectly routine action suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere. As the nights go on, more and more rules get broken. You need to learn more of these rules in order to survive. Take Foxy as an example. And Night 1, you don't even know he exists. There's no pictures of him. And then on the second night when the guy calls you he says, oh by the way, check on Pirates Cove every now and then there's another one in there and you're like, what? Pirates Cove, where the fuck is Pirates Cove? You start clicking around, you find Pirates Cove and it was that empty place you were looking at before. And you can't see anything. More importantly, a room that once seemed innocuous now contains a direct and known danger. You can't even peek behind the curtain, but the phone guy just told you there's something back there. Makes you start to wonder about that kitchen again. So we've got this rule here. We never see them move. Ever. In fact, any time they do move, if we're looking at one, the cameras wig out and we can't see it and when the cameras come back, they're somewhere different. But what about Foxy? Foxy slowly and creepily starts activating, but when Foxy activates, this is a brilliant piece of design in the game. It only works on you once. But notice what happened. You look at Pirates Cove because the guy told you to check on it kind of often or else he might activate. So you keep checking on it periodically and he's slowly moving and then one time you click there and he's gone. Now you're used to the game up to this point. Up to this point, he's probably just somewhere else. You expect that now he's like Bonnie or Chica and he's hanging out somewhere. So what's your instinct to do? Your instinct is to click on the hallway right after Pirates Cove to see if he's coming toward you. If you click that, you see him running at you and you panic and you have to actually be able to keep your brain together enough to pull back, pull the camera down, click on that door close. Most likely he's going to get you. And even if he doesn't, you hear that terrible pounding on the door. You're not sure if he's gone or not. Foxy broke two rules. He moved on camera and he jumped through the doorway. Up until this point, you didn't know either one of those things could happen. Your brain now implicitly starts to question a whole bunch of other assumptions you've been making up to this point. Questioning leads to paranoia. Now interestingly, the game is called Five Nights at Freddy's yet Freddy is almost never the one to kill you. Except of course when the power goes out, but you're expecting that. It's not part of the normal game, it's just an ending, a cutscene. Freddy, if he's even moved at all, only leaves the stage after everyone else is gone and rarely if ever actually comes near your office, at least until the final nights. Freddy almost never even moves. Freddy is almost more terrifying because Freddy doesn't even follow the same rules as the rest of them. Freddy is the eponymous villain of this game and yet hitherto you've never really seen him actually do anything. So when he finally begins to move, you expect him to be dangerous. You expect him to be different. He's the boss character. He has to do something special. His behavior only reinforces that fear. One could argue that the rest of the suits are simply malfunctioning. But Freddy? Freddy displays intent. While all of the other animatronics stand openly, sometimes durpally, in the middle of the rooms and halls, Freddy is actively hiding from you. He's hiding in the shadows and he's always staring directly at the camera. He knows you're there. Once he's close enough to actually be a threat, he doesn't even hide from you anymore. He stands openly looking right at the camera that mouth agape menacing you. When Freddy moves, he makes a different sound. He laughs. It's not just incidental footsteps. He is telling you that he's coming. He is moving slowly and deliberately toward your office and he never backtracks. When Freddy's in the kitchen, he plays that Torayadora song, which up until this point you've only ever heard in the context of the power going out. Once again, something that before served solely as window dressing on the failure state, a sound you've been conditioned to associate with a jump scare, now appears outside of that context. Freddy's behavior escalates rapidly and only in the final nights. Meanwhile, the other animatronics in these final nights also appear increasingly erratic. Their behavior isn't actually much at all different, but they feel different. Together with Freddy, their escalating behavior serves to push your paranoia into overdrive. These differences in behavior make you, rightly, expect that Freddy is different and that he'll act differently, that the game is going to do something different. You start to expect that the game actually has some sort of final trick up its sleeve, some final epic jump scare. You're not really sure what form this is going to take. The game has broken all these rules up to this point and now it's telling you that it's gonna break another rule. And the worst part is, it really doesn't. So just like before, when you're straining to hear meaningful sounds in a dead silence, you're starting to strain to find meaning in new behaviors that don't actually mean that much to the game itself. In terms of stopping Freddy, you just have to keep the door closed at the right time. It's actually pretty simple, but the game hides a lot of information from you. You expect that Bonnie and Chica show up in the door when you turn on the lights. You expect that Freddy, as a result, will do the same. It turns out that Freddy doesn't appear. He moves from that hall directly into your office. Once he's in that hall, he never leaves that hall unless he's moving directly into your office. Once he kills you, once he's in the room and you're already dead, he doesn't actually jump scare you until some semi-random amount of time has passed. In fact, it appears that he's more likely to trigger that random final jump scare if you have both doors closed. So think about that. You close both doors because you think that that's going to make you safe. You're panicking, something's going on, and then when you've closed both doors and you don't realize he's in the room with you, he suddenly kills you. You start to wonder if maybe he can get in even when the doors are closed. For a jump scare game to work, it has to keep the player engaged. I mean, you know the jump scares are coming. The clock only tells you what hour you've gotten to, and 6 a.m. is when you make it out. When the power goes out, the clock disappears. Since it never gave you a precise time in the first place, you don't really know how long it actually is until 6 a.m. Sometimes Freddy plays a long song. Sometimes Freddy plays a short song. Sometimes Freddy gets you right away. Sometimes Freddy waits a while. Sometimes you make it until 6 a.m. anyway. So the game is also giving you this sliver of hope. You might make it. You don't want to just quit. Sure, the jump scare is probably going to get you, but you might make it to night five. You're starting to think back and trying to remember just how long you had until 6 a.m. Even if you lean back, the game uses several tricks to get you to lean forward again just in time for that jump scare. If you do make it to 6 a.m., you're greeted with the most wonderful sound in the world. Finally take a breather, except... The game drops you right back into the mix. It doesn't even give you a choice. The only ways to stop playing this game are to quit or to die. You can't even pause. If you panic and hit escape, the game just instantly crashes. This is subtle. By simply crashing to the desktop, the game denies you a landing place in the context of itself. A menu, and are you sure you want to quit, prompt, something to frame the context of the game's environment and separate it from your real life environment. It's like waking up from a nightmare and having to remember that you're actually in your bed. The game gives you no way to dial down the pressure. All you can do is keep playing until you die or crash the game. You can't see both doors at the same time. You have to move your point of view with the mouse left or right. It's like it's summer camp, turning your back on an open cabin door while someone's telling a ghost story. You dread that and kids generally won't sit with their back to that door. Now, Five Nights at Freddy's One doesn't actually take advantage of this aspect. It's there, and it can make you feel dread, but the game doesn't actually ever jump scare you with it. Until you realize that it's not going to jump scare you with it, however, it does add to that atmosphere of paranoia. But if you want to see how that could have been used, look at Five Nights at Freddy's Three. Um, this is just a reminder of company policy concerning... Beyond just moving left and right, you also have to click on the correct button often quickly. This physical combo of moving and clicking requires some level of concentration. The game makes you click. You'll fumble it sometimes. Now normally, that level is well below your human baseline. It's negligible. But in a panic situation, recall the doors in Amnesia. Easy, almost annoying to open and close when you're just walking around. But when you're panicking, you find yourself desperately clawing at the mouse, utterly dumbfounded by the complex and manifold mysteries of doorknobs. It gives you that feeling that you feel when you're watching a horror movie and the main character has their keys, and they're fumbling to try to get into the door, but they can't quite, then they drop the keys, and they pick them up again, and they're dragged again. It's the same thing. As the rules are broken and become increasingly complex, you are forced to pay more and more attention to the game. You lean a little bit closer to the monitor. You concentrate a little bit harder on those distant sounds. You manage a mental map of everyone's locations. How long has it been since I last checked on Foxy? Is Freddy's still on the stage? How much power can I spare? What time is it? You've got to lean in. You've got to concentrate. You've got to pay attention. And the more you lean in, and the more you concentrate the closer you are to that screen, the more powerful the jump scare will be. When you know the jump scare is coming, you lean back. You're like, I got this. I'm just going to let the jump scare happen. In a sense, Five Nights at Freddy's is really just a complex atmospheric version of this game. To progress, you have to concentrate harder and harder. The game waits until it knows it has your undivided attention in that last little hard to traverse bit, and then it jump scares you. It's a simple dumb game, but the jump scare is highly effective. So even if you've mastered the game and you've learned all these tricks, you've gotten all these scares out of the way, there's one more thing, and this is the brilliant part of Five Nights at Freddy's. Golden Freddy. You may not be a fan of creepypasta or urban legends or those sorts of things, but when I was a kid, when I was playing NES games, NES games, creepy things would happen. Usually glitches, things like that. And you couldn't show anyone. You couldn't ever reproduce it. There was no internet. You couldn't go look up what happened. So you'd be in Castlevania 2, Simon's Quest, and you get into this creepy area because the game glitched out, and it's kind of scary because it's out of place. It's a thing out of place. Golden Freddy is that for the modern internet era, because forget the internet, for then you haven't looked around online. You're playing this game, and occasionally creepy things happen. Like sometimes when you go to Pirate's Cove, it says out of order, and sometimes it says, it's me. Sometimes Freddy is just looking at the camera. Sometimes Chica's in the corner being all weird, instead of just being normal. Creepy weird things happen in the background. Posters change, but there's that one poster where sometimes, if you look at it, it's a creepy golden Freddy Fazbear instead, which you wouldn't think much of because creepy weird atmospheric stuff is happening all the time. But then, when you pull out of the camera, something weird is happening. Something is out of place, something that has never been seen anywhere else. There's that creepy weird deflated golden Freddy costume just fucking sitting there right in front of you. And you don't even know what to do. If you've never encountered it before, you're like, what? What? What? And it gives you just enough time to do that double take in your brain, and then it gets you, and it doesn't get you like the other things get you. Instead, what it does is it just puts this glitchy looking like Freddy Fazbear face suddenly right in front of you, it doesn't even move, it just appears there, and then the game crashes. You're left wondering if that was even supposed to happen. Your adult brain, for a moment, has that little child brain playing the NES saying, hey, was that supposed to happen? And then you start the game again, you click on Steam, and you restart the game, and it doesn't happen again. And you're not sure how to make it happen. Even better, so fine. You look online, you figure out what it is. Oh, that's clever. They did this kind of creepy pasta thing in the game. That was cool, and it really scared me. And then you start to wonder what the deal is with that, because the game has a pretty creepy lore about kids who might have been murdered and shoved inside the other costumes, and maybe someone stole a suit and lured some kids away. It fits into the lore. Then you poke around, you look at the cameras you see on the posters, the newspaper clippings, you can start to pick out the things in the lore, but to pick those things out, you've got to ignore all these things coming to kill you and concentrate on the cameras and risk death. Five Nights at Freddy's is not a game that you should play to be good at. It's not a game that you should watch other people play, let's plays on YouTube. It's a game that you should sit down and just play. Five Nights at Freddy's is designed to give you, despite being a discerning, reasonable, rational adult, that feeling that you used to get when you went to haunted houses when you were eight. It is amazing how stressful it is to play this game. I'm a pretty unflaffable person, and yet I can feel my heart starting to beat faster. I can feel that adrenaline rush. I really don't want the jump scare to come out of nowhere. If I'm ready for it, I can deal with it, but a lot of times I'm not ready for it because the game is distracting me. It's pulling my attention in all these ways. I've got to keep leaning in, got to keep leaning in, got to keep concentrating, and it gets me. But it won't get me forever. You play the game a lot and it becomes less scary. That's the point. It's a short game. It's an experience. Play Five Nights at Freddy's. Make it through Five Nights. It will scare you in a bunch of different ways. And then you can enjoy it by watching other people who are perhaps more startlable play it. The overall theme of this is simply that losing is fun, losing is interesting, and losing is possibly an integral part of gaming. So let's talk about a history of losing. In the old days, for most of video game history at least, there was no such thing as winning. You couldn't win Dig Dug. You could get a high score. You could beat your opponent in a high score contest. You could beat some arbitrary goal...