Game Theory: We Need To Talk About FNAF

this is going to be a hard one today we're going to talk about fnaf like we have so many other times before on the channel speaking of how many times have we talked about fnaf on this channel let's see 43. oh geez for some reason i thought it was more weight uh oh that's what it is if you add the game theory videos and all the partner shows we've technically done 49 episodes on fnaf and uh let me just say this is not the big 50th episode that i really anticipated for those of you who don't know fnaf has been in the news a lot lately and not for any good reasons like the release of a new game or then finally deciding to make the obvious call and cast me as phone guy in the upcoming movie uh hello hello consider that my audition real blum house i would also be willing to accept the role of purple guy phone guy matpat scott coffin now the reason it's been trending on twitter and blowing up all over the blogosphere have centered around the creator scott coffin and his recent decision to retire from the series you heard that right friends scott my long time nemesis is stepping down only one will remain standing and that one is me he's actually retiring with plenty of money so who's the real winner here it's not me as he himself said in his final post and i quote i've had a blessed fulfilling it took me a minute to find it i'm sorry i've had a blessed fulfilling and rich career i've tried to make some good games let the debate ensue and i've witnessed the creation of possibly the most creative and talented fan base on the planet but here on the seventh anniversary of the first games trailer i realize i miss a lot of things that i got to focus on before fnaf became such a success i miss making games for my kids i miss doing it just for fun and i miss making rpgs even though i stink at it all this is to say that i'm retiring end quote he then goes on to thank everyone for their kindness say that he's excited to spend time with his family and assure everyone that snap is going to continue under the guidance of someone of his choosing scott consider this channel my application for the roll i'm here for you buddy all kind of joking but also kind of not joking aside this alone would be a huge deal right one of the most successful indie developers of all time stepping down from his still mega popular series after seven years with a book series still being released until the end of the year a new game on the verge of being released and a movie that's still in the works i mean he takes his victory lap around the internet as everyone celebrates his work and he fades away to go spend time with his family doing whatever it is that indie devs do with their piles of cash buy a cereal wall a candy room bacon every day for breakfast i don't know why i think that but i just imagine that bacon is something that rich people have for breakfast every day because it's like the best food ever but that's not the complete picture of what's going on here because it's actually the circumstances around his retirement that caused the hashtags to trend you see in the days leading up to his announcement word had gotten out that scott had contributed sizable amounts of money to various political campaigns in the years between 2016 and 2020. using the website opensecrets.com an independent nonprofit that tracks u.s political donations users learn that scotty contributed around two thousand dollars to various political campaigns now that on its own might not have been all that newsworthy no what made people sit up and take notice was who he had contributed funding to republican candidates like ben carson mitch mcconnell donald trump controversial political figures whose voting histories had been anti-civil rights over the years especially as it relates to the lgbtq communities which you know a large portion of the fnaf fan base is and i've seen a lot of people online responding with a so what's the big deal to all of this news but you have to stop and actually think for a minute about the position of a lot of the lgbtq fans of this franchise this revelation understandably hurt a lot of members of the fnaf fan community considering that scott's franchise has been this welcoming and inclusive space for them one where a lot of people have found the ability to express their unique identities to know that their support of these games and their games creator especially the financial support that comes with that that their dollars had wound up funding campaigns for people who are looking to withhold or remove their rights to to fund the elections of people who would forward legislation that treats them as less than human yeah that's that's gonna feel really horrible it's gonna feel like a betrayal it's gonna feel like you had funded your own worst enemy at first people thought that scott's account must have gotten hacked right there was no way that he could have done this or at the very least that maybe he donated to a blanket republican fund where his dollars had gotten funneled into individual campaigns without his knowledge but no after a few days scott took to reddit and affirmed that these were indeed his choices which then just proceeded to blow the internet up even more a few days later he retired and that was that a confusing and awkward end to the career of someone who had legitimately changed the face of horror and indie gaming forever now a lot of you a lot of you have been asking me for my response to the whole thing does the channel stop covering fnaf do i still support scott how do i feel about all this how should you feel about all this and honestly there is a lot to unpack here a lot one of the reasons it's taken me so long to respond is because i've had to sort it all out in my own head i didn't really know how to feel we've been teaching my son oliver who just turned three recently about how sometimes you can feel multiple emotions at once and how that's confusing and how it's hard sometimes and that lesson at three is still just as hard when you're 33 so i had to take time to do my own soul searching and do my own research quite honestly one of the great things about the internet is that it moves so fast right you need something and boom it is right there available at your fingertips but one of the awful things about the internet is that boom it moves so fast there is no time to think everything requires an immediate response a hot take your knee jerk reaction a headline search trends last for like a day or two at best new game releases are like old by the end of the week new video well gotta be the first to like and comment without actually watching what it's about there's there's no time for thoughts for research for introspection if you're gonna be part of a conversation or no time to look back and actually analyze the data i mean heck by the time that you bothered to finish reading scott's response to all this drama he had already posted his retirement so since this is going to be a long and tricky episode to say the least let me start off by making it crystal clear that i am pro lgbtq rights and you don't have to take my word for that i was in theater for years before i started doing youtube and uh it is difficult to be a narrow-minded bigot in that industry if you know you know i'm a member of the la lgbt center and i attend their events because i support their mission and most importantly i've done the best i can to keep a sensitive ear open to lgbt audience members and also to my team members when they tell me that something isn't okay or no longer okay or they explain an lgbt perspective that i don't know or understand because i don't live that i don't have that experience in my life so i'll never be able to know everything or be able to truly speak on behalf of people in that community but the best i can do is to try and remain an ally who's always ready to be supportive and as sensitive as i can be anyway i don't say all this to make excuses or try to defend myself by wrapping up in a rainbow flag actually coming off of pride month it actually bothers me how so many companies just use identity politics to be trendier try to sell more merch it feels more like clout chasing to me rather than you know actual stances on things now i believe that if you want real change it's not changing your logo to a rainbow for 30 days but rather it's giving people of all types opportunities 365 days of the year regardless of how they identify or who they love and i'm proud to say that the team consists of people all across the spectrum and i'm proud that they're here because they're talented and they deserve the chance to show off their unique creativity which is why before i get to addressing the actual hardest subject of all this scott himself i think it's important to say this right up front or i guess as upfront as i can in this long of a video i will still be covering and supporting fnaf as a franchise just like game theory has become so much more than just me sitting in my closet nerding out every week and is now a collaboration of creative people coming from all different walks of life the five nights at freddy's is much more than just a single guy living in texas i know it's easy to point at his little animdude avatar and assign everything in the franchise to him heck i've made a running gag out of our little rivalry over the years but in reality scott's just a figurehead a visual shorthand to represent everyone who is now instrumental to the running of this franchise all the authors and illustrators of the books other game developers merch companies the fazbear spin-off universe of fan games each employing dozens of people who use the franchise as their launch pad for their livelihoods or as their own personal creative outlets by not supporting the franchise as a whole i'm not supporting those creators and even more importantly it's also that i wouldn't be supporting the community itself the people who still do find this franchise as a safe haven a source of entertainment a source for their unique creative expression scott said it in his retirement announcement i read it earlier i've witnessed the creation of possibly the most creative and talented fan base on the planet and he's not kidding there are so few fandoms like the fnaf fandom i mean what other franchise has so many darn fan games dedicated to it and to me these fans are the lifeblood of the community now of this entire franchise now not just scott himself and let me make it clear just because i choose to support the series doesn't mean that i think anyone is wrong to not support it's that's definitely not the case wherever you choose to draw the line on this issue is completely valid i'm just taking you through my thought process and all the variables that i went through as i came to terms with this whole issue but aren't i by supporting the series contributing to scott's income and thereby what he chooses to do with that you might ask and yeah you probably are sadly and that's just a choice that everyone's going to have to make based on their own personal criteria to me the good of supporting the community around the franchise and the jobs that it creates is worth whatever minor impact that scott may be able to enact in the political sphere which is an issue we'll be getting to in a second because here's the thing friends this sort of dilemma applies to pretty much any major company that you talk about there are good people and bad people pretty much everywhere and not even that extreme they're just people that you agree with and people that you disagree with everywhere for one example that i think we could all relate to just look at walt disney there's great evidence to show that walt was probably prejudiced against other races women other religions as one biographer states quote disney willingly even enthusiastically embraced anti-semites and cast his fate with them so do you stop watching disney movies as a result of that money going directly into his pockets or i guess at this point the cryogenic pod that the walt popsicle waits in waiting to be reincarnated one day or a more recent and much more extreme example billionaire jk rowling creator of the harry potter universe who has just all sorts of problematic viewpoints that she chooses to share on twitter do you stop supporting the harry potter franchise to prevent adding to her immense wealth you can and it is absolutely a valid option hitting people in their pocketbook is always the best place to get them to notice but where things get complicated is when you start looking to their influence outside of just their ip jk rowling for instance is rumored to earn a cut of every ticket sold to universal studios does that mean you then boycott that entire place even if that isn't true it's still a licensing deal that she profits from and by going you contribute to her ongoing success it is like this impossible dilemma i think the tv show the good place actually summed this issue up best these days just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides exploiting lab contributing to global warming humans think that they're making one choice but they're actually making dozens of choices they don't even know they're making in my mind it ultimately amounts to a personal choice where you have to weigh the good of a decision against the bad as youtube video essayist lindsey ella said in her examination of whether you can support harry potter without supporting jk rowling because of her wealth and influence she's going to be believed more than the lived experience of trans people and while you can absolutely control the way you read or engage with a text you cannot control the way an author uses their money and influence and if lgbt rights are something very important to you and you think scott is dangerous to those then him stepping down from the franchise and removing himself from social media dismantles a lot of the things that could make him dangerous moving forward so you can always weigh that into your consideration of how you're gonna view the overall franchise again where you choose to draw that line is absolutely your choice and your choice alone i'm just taking you through my week of soul searching and all the factors so that's why i'm choosing to support the franchise moving forward but it leads perhaps to the biggest question of them all which is scott himself how to feel about him you know again because the internet moves so fast and because everyone just hates to read i never really saw people looking at what he actually said in his response to all this drama instead just jumped to the conclusion of well he admitted that he donated to these people so he needs to be cancelled now and hey to some people that's enough just supporting some of these individuals is an outright deal breaker and again that is totally your right to make that call but to me i wanted to know more right because i had a feeling that maybe this is tied to the state of american politics and this is stepping way outside of my comfort zone here on game theory but personally i just hate american politics it's always been a frustrating process to me because it forces you into one of two buckets are you red or are you blue are you elephant or are you donkey are you republican or a democrat it is a binary choice between two parties two people that are for these really important jobs and that's about it there are no other options or there are other options in the form of independent candidates and third parties but because the system is set up the way it is they don't really stand that much of a chance and so everyone is always telling you that if you vote for them you're throwing away your votes so long story short most elections just wind up being a compromise you have to pick and choose whatever your most important issues are for that election cycle and because no one candidate truly embodies them all you have to vote for the lesser of two evils in a sense there is never this one perfect candidate that truly represents me as the voter and i hate that and i wouldn't be surprised if maybe scott felt like he was in a similar position so i wanted to look closer at his response and admittedly it's a long one but i think it's important to not overly edit scott's words in this case but don't worry we'll break it down as we go through it i've debated greatly how best to address this including not addressing it at all but with so many people from the lgbt community in the fanbase that i love that's not an option i'd like to think that the last seven years would have given me the benefit of the doubt in regards to how i try to treat people but there i was trending on twitter for being a homophobe getting doxxed with people threatening to come to my house all this because i exercised my right and my duty as an american citizen to vote for and support the candidates who i felt could best run the country for everyone and that's something that i won't apologize for okay let's break there for a minute first as someone who has received very vivid death threats and have had to go into hiding out of fear of my family's life just because i do a dumb show online where i call sonic slow personal attacks and threats are not okay never period end of story agree or disagree with him for who he chooses to support fine pull your support of him of his franchise of his games absolutely but harassing and threatening someone's life and his family simply because they supported someone you disagree with makes you know better than the people that you're fighting that's just the way i feel and when it comes to giving scott the benefit of the doubt like he asks for in this response honestly he has that from me it's easy to overlook but scott over the years has donated over 1.2 million dollars of his own money to charities including 50 000 to the trevor project an organization that is focused on helping lgbtq youth does that necessarily negate the 42 000 dollars that he made in political donations again that is a personal choice for you to make the call on but i think it at least merits hearing the guy out anyway the quote continues for those of you who took the time to look you saw that the candidates i supported included men women white people black people republicans and democrats i supported kimberly classic in baltimore because i believed that she really cared for the african-american community there and wanted to pull them out of poverty i believe she could have really made a difference in a time when so many black communities were struggling she lost unfortunately i supported tulsi gabbard a democrat even though i disagreed with her on several issues because i felt she would have been a good and fair president and yes i supported president trump because i felt he was the best man to fuel a strong economy and stand up to america's enemies abroad of which there are many even if there were candidates who had better things to say to the lgbt community directly and bigger promises to make i believe that their stances on other issues would have ended up doing much greater harm to those communities than good all of this explanation i fear is wasted as people don't want to discuss with one another anymore they want endless apologies and submission people who are expecting those from me will get neither end quote okay so now this gets to the heart of the problem that people had with scott who he chose to support through his donation dollars and the list is quite long if you look at opensecrets.com 16 candidates specifically singled out for donation dollars with one democrat tulsi gabbard from hawaii like he called out in a statement who in his response he not only chooses to support but actually calls out as his first choice of candidate for president i think this actually merits looking into it's it's a bit weird i'm about to roll into kind of like a mini game theory on political donations which i don't really love but hey if we're doing it let's do it right so here we go so looking at the timeline of his 2019 and 2020 donations tulsi is in fact the first to receive any money from scott followed by his donation to trump two months later now this timing also happens to coincide with tulsi starting to lag in the polls what this tells me implicitly is that when his first choice tulsi was no longer a viable presidential candidate he instead pivoted and donated to the candidate that he most believed in who also had the best shot of winning donald trump but what was the policy that scott appears to have cared about the most well if you look into all of the candidates that he chooses to support there's one and only one commonality across all of them tough foreign policy keeping the military strong keeping trade strong and standing against foreign powers like north korea this also coincides with his statements about defending against enemies abroad recovering the economy and how other issues would do more harm to the country than good apparently to scott nothing worse can happen to your civil rights than getting dunked on by an overseas nuke now i've seen people say that everyone on scott's donation list also had a history of opposing same-sex and transgender rights i chose to look into this and across the board that's largely true except for tulsi who well she was inconsistent about it at best it's true she had a history of being anti-lgbt but since joining congress in 2013 she supported efforts to promote lgbt equality including co-sponsoring pro-lgbt legislation like the equality act which if you don't know is a bill to amend the 1964 civil rights act to promote and protect lgbt individuals and then again at the top of 2019 she went on twitter to defend trans americans in the military so big ups to her on all of that however things get more complicated because in 2020 her reputation was again put into question when she introduced a bill that many saw as anti-transgender something that was leveled hard against scott's choice to support her but it's worth noting that this was after scott chose to donate to her campaign the tl dr of all of that voting nonsense is this when scott chose to support her campaign publicly facing she was pro-trans rights that's it that's the best i can put it outside of that the only commonality that i could see across pretty much every candidate that scott chose to support was keeping the military strong now to be sure not everyone places the same emphasis on that issue or considers america at high risk people on the other side of this issue may believe that the bigger threat is personal rights of people who are already in the country again i am not here to decide that issue or pass judgment on anyone's priorities god forbid i do not want to do that but it is my theory my political theory that scott like so many other americans may have found himself caught in a situation where no one candidate truly reflected the complete slate of policies that he supported and when his first choice of candidate bowed out of the race one who was publicly pro-lgbtq rights at the time he moved on to the next best option in his mind considering the issue that he thought was most important in this case foreign policy therefore him supporting trump and let me be clear i'm not trying to explain away his actions or anything like that not at all am i surprised that he donated to these people yeah but is it enough for me to throw away all the good will that i've seen him put into this franchise in his community over the years no it's not like i said a donation is a donation and to many that is more than enough to condemn him but i just thought it was interesting in my research and deserve to be called out when talking about this really complicated topic i think the challenge here is that life isn't black and white red or blue and that the internet a lot of times struggles with nuance struggles with those gray areas i gotta be honest i'm sad that this is how everything wound up seeing scottgames.com go dark after years of me checking it for updates or digging into the source code for hidden clues it was it was a sobering moment it was a sad moment knowing that it was dead now as a fan of this franchise and as someone who respects all the work that scott's done but i think the solace that i have and what i would encourage anyone out there who is struggling with this to look at is the net good that this series has provided regardless of scott's political affiliation his true beliefs whatever they may be this series has been a source of security and identity for so many people over the last seven years and it will continue to be that moving forward for even more life just isn't a game of absolutes life is all about trying to do the greatest good with the hand that you've been dealt and the good that is spawned out of freddy and his friends for creators for fans for gaming as a whole it's incalculable my last few theories have had this recurring theme of it's a new era of naf the old story is dead we're on to the next iteration of this franchise blah blah blah and i gotta be honest now that rings true more than ever but i assure you i'll be here with you for the ride but hey that's not a theory honestly that's a fact i am going to be here with you for the ride but this is a game theory thank you for watching and thank you for staying open-minded i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 5,959,632

Keywords: fnaf, five nights at freddy's, fazbear frights, fnaf books, fnaf movie, fnaf theory, five nights at freddy's theory, fnaf security breach, fnaf trailer, new fnaf, security breach, fnaf security breach trailer, scott cawthon, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory fnaf, fnaf game theory, matpat fnaf, scott cawthon retires, scott cawthon response, scott cawthon retired, fnaf scott cawthon, fnaf retrospective, matpat scott cawthon, matpat scott cawthon retirement

Id: PmrtnEzxEzM

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2021