Content warning: online harassment, violence against children

Editorial note: The Five Nights at Freddy’s series is a dark horror game property with a lore heavily involving violence against children, including death. Please be safe when engaging with the lore. 

Update: MatPat and the Game Theory channel released a video calling for people to stop contacting real world locations in search for clues, condemning any harassment of real world people for the game.

Game Theory is part of a series of channels run by MatPat, a popular media critic with a focus on uncovering hidden lore in media. Like many indie gaming YouTube channels, MatPat’s popularity soared with the decision to cover the then brand-new game Five Nights at Freddy’s. 

This popular horror series is built around jump scares, animatronics, and a complex backstory that is quite entertaining to learn about. It all boils down to this. Somehow, the animatronics in a family pizza restaurant have developed a taste for murder. Every night, they are free to leave their stages and roam around the pizzeria. You typically play as a security guard tasked with keeping an eye on the figures that seem determined to murder you any way they can. Survive five night shifts and you earn your first pay check. 

The lore expands from there, dealing with missing and murdered children, cursed families, possession, mayhem, and conspiracies hidden in source code, glitches, social media postings, trailers, and even spinoff books, graphic novels, and board games. 

Last week, MatPat released a video hypothesizing a cancelled ARG—alternate reality game—based on the FNAF series. The twelfth and final Fazbear’s Frights short story collection is comprised of three previous stories that didn’t land a spot in the original planned series of 11 books. One story deals with a book hiding secrets to a real world crime scene in plain sight. Another deals with a person finding a specific restaurant to prove the existence of a shark animatronic he remembers from his childhood. 

MatPat pieced together references to real world locations and the theme of secrets hiding in plain sight to theorize about the possibility of an abandoned ARG. The FNAF series has notoriously hidden major secrets in various ways, including data on websites, changes to game codes, and hidden images or sound effects in trailers. Part of how the community discovered so much of the actual plot of FNAF, confirmed by the series creator Scott Cawthon, is by following these trails of breadcrumbs to identify victims, family relations, timelines, and more. 

In the Game Theory video, MatPat asked for help from the community. He couldn’t open up the code to the mobile port of Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 himself, which is the game and platform referenced in the new short story collection. He also asked for people local to the setting of the same story to confirm if there was actually a nearby town with the specific landmarks mentioned in the story. I am choosing to be vague here to not add more fuel to the fire at this point.

What he did not do was ask his viewers to stalk, harass, or otherwise bother the people living in and around potential game locations for information. He asked if people local to the area could confirm certain facts about the story, nothing more.

Do you see where this is going?

Do you remember when Pokemon GO became the “it” game? Do you remember stories of people breaking into private property to claim gyms or capture exclusive Pokemon? 

Now apply that same reaction to a series that built its reputation on a fandom’s insatiable thirst for knowledge and secrets. I will not speculate on what people have or have not done already, but I know that MatPat and Game Theory were trending on Twitter for negative reasons. MatPat is the face of the channel and is facing the brunt of criticism for the fandom’s reaction to his video. 

The Game Theory channels are no stranger to controversy at this point. MatPat actually released a debunking/reaction video about a month ago on the Food Theory channel because the video about milk was controversial for its application of nutritional data and research. He always specifies that the videos are theories, but the reaction to less popular opinions or readings can be quite contentious. This includes some of his previous theories on FNAF.

I’ve hear the phrase “Twitter is where nuance goes to die” for over a decade now. I would extend that to all social media. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned a video, post, photo, etc. is; if people run with the wrong message, it can poison the whole concept.

The various theory channels—media, philosophy, political, etc.—tend to get hit with this a lot. Lindsay Ellis, Natalie Wynn, and Anita Sarkeesian have all hit the “disappear from the Internet” level of discourse that is far too common for researched discussions of theory. I’ve even hit a few minor groundswells in my time over my deeper readings of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy. Long time readers will remember the dustup over my queer theory reading of Insidious 2, which is why I will not cover those films anymore on this site. 

People latch onto specific parts of the argument and spin their own theories of how x, y, or z reading is potentially harmful or dangerous. Or, people act against the wishes of a creator who specifically says “do not do this” and leave the creator as the one to take the heat.

Theory is theoretical in this kind of researched thought exercise. The idea of clues to an abandoned game still remaining in never-before-released bonus content is an interesting idea to explore. Asking an audience to look up some source code or double check a coloring book for clues is a great way to gain views and interaction on a video. Taking that and actually traveling to a real world location to ask local workers about a killer bear animatronic is just a poor choice.

We can’t anticipate everything our readers or followers will do, especially with a fanbase as large as Five Nights at Freddy’s. We just need to be cautious about implied directives or challenges, even when specifically saying not to act on those ideas. I imagine there was a way to explore this theory without triangulating people to explore small cities in a specific area. That is, frankly, always a risk that starts with the original creator naming real world locations at all. Saying a story is set in New York City is a lot more ambiguous than setting a story in a real world small town and giving estimated driving times to the fictionalized locations in your manuscript.

This is not the first time FNAF has caused fans to break reality and chase after the real location of a fictional chain restaurant. We can only hope it will be the last.