Game Theory - Are Theories KILLING Video Games?

Episode Date: September 18, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he discusses the effect that theories have on games and game developers. Credits: Writers: Matthew Patrick, William Ryan Sheehan "El Fodder", and Tom Robinson Editors: Tyler Mascola, Forrest Lee, Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Jerika (NekoOnigiri), and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: Caitie Turner (Caiterpillart) Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Let me tell you a story, a true story. A story about an email I received from a game developer that, for privacy reasons, has to go nameless. But let me assure you that it's someone who works on a game franchise that you're quite familiar with. Anyway, we'd done a theory or two trying to predict the plot line and some early twists for their upcoming game. Out of the blue, I received this email from the CEO of the company asking me if I had a mole on the inside feeding me information. No, obviously it was a joke, but also, not quite a joke. Anyway, I was just ecstatic that we were on the right track. And then the game came out, and it was nothing like our theory had predicted.

It also seemed rushed and a bit unpolished, like a lot had been changed in the game last minute. It got me wondering whether our theories had prompted them to change the game in order to move the storyline away from what I'd predicted. But no, that couldn't be right, right? Are developers actually changing their games in response to fan theories? Well, friends, that's exactly what I aim to find out today. Oh, internet, welcome to game theory, the show that 60% of the time gets it right every time. Lately, and maybe it's just me, I've been seeing a lot of discussion around my role, this channel's role in the wider games industry.

Obviously, I got that email that I mentioned in the cold open, but I also had this random conversation the other week with someone who said that getting a theory video made for your series is like landing a white whale. Let's just make sure that there are fewer harpoons there, Ahab. There's also been videos from creators like DAGs and SACs and Samp. and Hawks that explore the evolution of indie horror and our specific role in that. If you're lucky enough, you make it the blessing of the gods that is a game theory video on your story. In this era of post-F-FNAF indie horror, it can be really easy to want to chase that trend, filling your game with secret lore.

But if it doesn't fit your concept, don't do it. Don't chase that game theory video. There's also meme material like this. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't bring all this up to be self-aggrandizing. Like, oh, look at how important we are to the games industry. I bring all this up to question the assumption, is this actually true? Is there evidence to suggest that games are changing themselves in response to theorists? Have we, and other online theorists, shaped the way that games are made and marketed? And has this sometimes resulted in worse games? Well, first and foremost, we know that we have a very strong impact on search results. Last May, during our video on the

game Onlycans, I made a quick offhand joke about the 19-year-old meme Lemon Party. That new flavor's name, Lemon Party. By the way, do not Google that. Super random right but wouldn't you know it off of that very brief mention suddenly searches for the term lemon party hit their highest point in five years and this is after we told you to not google it but that's just a search term what about an actual game well we dug around using google trends which if you're not familiar tracks the volume of search traffic over time data that can then be filtered by geographic region and search platform so we started to look at games that the channel had covered in the past starting with one from four years ago the VR game

Duck Season. If you don't remember this one, it had a cute animal mascot, a horrible family, dead kids, a 1980s aesthetic, and none of this is really helping narrow it down, isn't? It was our mission in that first video to reveal the identity of the murderous dog mascot behind it all. Just another normal day over here, our game theory. That video is one of our best performing videos of all time with over 19 million views, so we stuck the term duck season into Google Trends, and wouldn't you know it, the timing of our video's release corresponded to the highest peak in search traffic ever for both YouTube and on the web in general. Other spikes and trends certainly seem to exist immediately after the game's release when Jack Septu Kori Ex-Kention and others played the game,

but in December of 2017, web search had dropped to 47% of the high. Then in January, immediately after our theory, 100%, all-time high of search traffic. If we get even more granular, you can see that the highest point from 12-1-2017 to 131-2018 is December 31st, the day after our video. came out. We kept searching and we kept seeing the same thing over and over again. Mobile game Lily's Garden, video June 22nd, 2021, 100% spike in YouTube search immediately afterward. Andy's Apple Farm, game released November 26th, 2021, our video December 12th, 2021, 100% spike. And it wasn't just for game theory either. Nightmind, a theorist for all things creepy had a video on Catastrophe Crow 64 in early February 2021. And sure enough, we see a sizable spike in trends for the United

United States right after the video releases. When you run the same trends search worldwide, get a different 100% during the week of February 21st to 27th. With Dross Ratzank, award-winning Venezuelan YouTuber, released his video on the topic. And then our video came out on March 13th, setting a new higher benchmark for the whole thing. Theorists, not just us, it would seem, get people excited to search for more info on the games that they talk about. But okay, this is all for small titles that no one would normally be searching for. What about something more mainstream? Well, we see this trend happening with massive titles as well. In 2019, Minecraft saw this massive resurgence in popularity,

with its 10-year anniversary happening in May, and then PewDie Pie picking up the game in June. Long live Sven Svensson. But despite a year full of huge events for this long-running, massively popular series, searches for Minecraft peaked on both YouTube and on the web between July 21 and 27th. The week, we started our deep-dive lore analysis into the game.

In fact, that week was the most search that Minecraft had been since 2015, a record that has only been surpassed in mid-2020 by the surge of some guy that you might be familiar with, dream. Even when you're talking about crazy viral hits like Among Us, the game hits its peak in web search on September 20th, our first video on the title came out the day before September 19th. At this point, it certainly seemed like there was a strong correlation between our coverage of a game and it reaching the height of its search traffic immediately thereafter. And honestly, it does make some amount of anecdotal sense.

When you watch our stuff and we tell you that there's something cool and compelling in this game, naturally some of you are going to want to know more. You're going to want to find more clues and help solve the mystery. I mean, why else do you think we've done 50 videos on FNAF at this point? As theorists, we're not just engaging with these games at a surface level. Making jokes at a game and then moving on to the next like a lot of let's players tend to do. We're trying to immerse you in these worlds. Highlight the storytelling that's being done inside the games,

horror should be being done inside these games. And heck, if you like our little primer on it, then you're inclined to dig deeper and explore the world for yourself. But that's just talking about audience interest. What I want to know now is whether these trends have led developers to start paying attention to us, have online theorists actually made an impact in the way that games are marketed and made? Let's start with the game that we actually went back to recently. Merge Mansion.

Originally, we covered this mobile games lore on October 24th, 2021, concluding that Grandma is a cold-blooded murderer in disguise, Shortly after our theory, a message got sent out to players by the game itself, telling them that Grandma did nothing wrong, she has nothing to hide, followed by a YouTube link where you could find four live-action videos starring actress and sledgehammer enthusiast Kathy Bates. Can I prove that we were the thing that prompted them to go with that campaign? No, no, I can't.

But does the timing work out for them to have seen our theory and then leaned into the whole Granny's innocent wink-wink-wink angle? You betcha. That's some circumstantial evidence, but can we make a more one-to-one connection. What about something more substantial? Something a bit more narrative-driven? What about Bendy and the Ink Machine? We made a theory after the release of Chapter 2 talking about this random angel character, this character that had shown up in a random poster on the walls, speculating that she was going to be important to the story moving forward. First, we'll see

Alice take center stage as the game goes on. Like Betty Boop, we'll hear about how her popularity skyrocketed, surpassing Bendy. Sure enough, when Chapter 3 released 123 days after the video, the world was introduced to Alice Angel. She was front and center. Now, did we predict what the creators were going to do with Alice all along? Or did we somehow speak this new character into being? According to Mike Mood in an interview, we'd like to say we knew exactly what was going to happen,

but really, at the end of the day, we knew the beginning and we knew the end of the game. Everything that happened in between was kind of developed as we went along. In Chapter 2, we had a poster of Alice Angel, and that was just one poster. There was nothing explaining what this character was. The fans just started doing fan art, they just fell in love with the character,

and it made it really obvious that chapter three should be about Alice Angel. That right there is pretty conclusive. They literally took ideas from the fan community and used them to fill out their story, which, let me be clear, isn't a bad thing. It's awesome to listen to the fans and respond to the things that they're all most excited about, but it's clear that we, the collective we, playing these games.

Not just us theorists, we influenced how Bendy turned out those middle chapters. Now we're starting to see how theories can have an influence for the better, or for the worse. Which segues nicely to the 300-pound elephant in the room, Hello Neighbor. At least he's a dapper elephant. I mean, he wears a sweater, vest, and everything. Now, you might remember this little series of tweets from April 2020. For anyone that doesn't, Tiny Build, one of the developers for Hello Neighbor, had just released a TV pilot and began tagging my Twitter in their posts, seemingly trying to get another theory out of me. However, some have suggested that this block of tweets is part of a larger pattern of behavior.

A pattern that implies that tiny build changed the game Hello Neighbor during development to chase theory videos like ours. But is that true? To figure it out, we decided to look at the development cycle for the game. I'm gonna skip the first couple of Alphas because they didn't give us too much to work with. Basically, during this period, Hello Neighbor's popularity was doing fine, but nothing to write home about. Alpha 2 was released on November 22nd, 2016, 27 days after the last build. In fact, up until this point, Tiny Build was releasing a new version of Hello Neighbor every 27 to 30 days like clockwork. And, wouldn't you know, 30 days after Alpha 2, Alpha 3 gets released.

Players are treated to a much larger house with more rooms and a ton more to look at. But then things start to get weird. You see, sandwiched in there on December 15th is the release of our two-part Hello Neighbor Exposé, which looked at all the demonic and satanic symbols around our dear Mr. Rogers wannabe. In the latest Alpha build of the game, you can find a house on a dark, Street. And look at the bottom of his shoes, a seal that reads 6666. The Sign of the Beast. Combined, these two videos have been viewed 19.3 million times. Now, there's such a short time period between our video on the 15th and the Alpha 3 release that there's no way our video

could have altered that version of the game. Beyond that, though, things get a little bit odd. Alpha 4 is released May the 4th, 2017. A whopping 133 days after Alpha 3. Now, remember, all the other releases were only a month apart, but Alpha 4 was in development for over four times the length of anything prior to it. It's also an oddly similar amount of time to the gap between our video on Alice Angel and the release of Bendy Chapter 3. But it wasn't just the length of time between versions that was noteworthy. It was also what Tiny Build had used the lengthy design time to create, specifically the game's brand new nightmare sequences. We're broken away from the main stealth gameplay that had been the selling feature up to that point and transported to another.

section to play surreal mini-games where lore takes the center stage. And this is the trend that would continue until the game's release. Once Hello Neighbor came out, it was disappointing to say the least. A lot of people were really excited about this game, myself included. The original concept of an AI learning how you broke into a house and changing tactics accordingly was brilliant. But it seemed that there was a decision made to chase the hype at the cost of this original concept. They changed tactics and focused more on the lore of the series, which again, seems to be backed up by the tweets and their eventual book series and their

TV pilots, and in turn, they lost focus on the game itself, which became a broken, buggy mess. But of course, if we're talking about buggy games, no one else takes the cake like security breach. Uh, Freddy, Freddy. I'm going to shove a beak inside of you, and you are going to be able to talk better. You, did you hate the idea that much? You haven't seen so many things, and yet you've seen Karate Kit, huh? Yeah.

Oh, hey, hey, wait. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. What happened?

What happened? I fell through the wormhole, apparently. If you've watched my theories on the game, you'll know that I walked away, confused and disappointed with the lore. It felt like the pieces didn't all quite fit together. And now there's a ton of speculation about whether or not the game that we got was the game that was intended.

And to be honest, I'm right there with you. I get it. We released a video back in late 2020, right around when security breach was due to launch. But a few weeks later, the game was delayed. We did another theory in April of 2021 when the game was once again due to release. But shortly after, the game was once again delayed. Both of these videos were heavy on the predictions as to what the game was going to be about.

So, would it be that strange to believe that we may have gotten a bit too close? If you look at all the content that was cut from the game, via channels like Tetrabit gaming, you start to see elements of the original story start to poke through. Like the fact that, at one point in development, there was such a thing called the Vanny Meter. And as that Vanny meter got full, security guard Vanessa would disappear only to transform into the evil Vanny,

Something that we had actually theorized about a lot, but also something the final game was weirdly cagey about. Now, I can't necessarily say that I have solid proof that security breach changed things based on online theories, but Scott himself has admitted that he's changed things based on what the fan base has found interesting. As Scott, in his own word, says, I watch all the game theory videos, you know, and, you know, me and Matt Pat have sometimes had an antagonistic relationship back and forth. You know, I inconvenience him with my games, but sometimes he's, you know, inconvenience of me with his theory, you know, but it's all in good fun. He did a video on that box, and he kind of said that he thinks the contents of the box changed over the years.

I saw that and I was like, he's absolutely right. He's absolutely right. The contents of that box have changed over the years. What I was intending the game to be when it happened, and then after the reaction of it, I was like, I need to craft this into something better for the people who see this as important. And that kind of indirectly does change the contents of the box, you know, because it changes the contents of everything that came before. When you start recconning lore elements or changing the details within a game, your story, and in turn your fan base that theorized and loved your game, are the ones that ultimately suffer.

Let's be honest, Fnaf lore always been complicated, even when you're not talking about these changes. But it never felt like the games suffered. It felt like Scott was very much in control of the story and where it was going. But security breach was just a lot messier than your standard Freddie Fasbear experience. From a gameplay standpoint and, from a lore standpoint. And if fan theories were right and they changed the original story because of it,

well, then it would explain why the game was so unpolished and the lore so incomplete. By rushing to try and make something surprising, they ultimately shot themselves in the foot. They changed elements of the story to make it different, but forgot to take everything out. And so we're left wondering if Vanny and Vanessa are the same person, which everything up to that point had been leading up to. They even went back and changed the princess's name in the game files back to Princess instead of Cassidy. The one lore piece that we felt like we had nailed, they've now changed retroactively, which makes it all the more confusing.

Were we right and they changed it? Was this an Easter egg? Was it intentional? Who knows? Just let us have something! And you see, that's the point. Let us have something. Developers, if you're watching, just let us be right.

Don't be afraid that YouTubers or Reddit threads guessing the story is going to make your game any less fun. If anything, it adds to the excitement for us theorists. When we get to that final boss and the twist is revealed, and we realized that we had called it all along. That is way more satisfying than a half-finished game with a messy story meant to subvert our expectations. It means that congratulations. You laid out the clues in a sensible way

that some very dedicated fans were able to follow and piece together. And hey, if and when we get stuff wrong, that's great too. We're okay with that. It just means that we have more to theorize about. In the end, don't sacrifice your game's integrity just trying to make us wrong in retrospect. I think Game of Thrones author, George R.R.R. Martin said it best.

You know, I have certain things that I'm laying clues for, that there'll be revelations later on. Some people had put together those clues, even as early as 1998, are adding things together. What do I do with that? What do I do with that? These people have guessed the secret that I'm going to reveal in book six. People have already guessed that here, and book two is just out. You really have two choices there. You can ignore it and proceed with your plan, despite the fact that some people know where you're going.

Or you can get all panicky and say, oh, my God, they figured it out. I can't let that be. I'll have to change it. I'll have to go in a different direction. And I think some writers do that, and I think that's always a mistake. Yeah. You know, if you've planned your book that the Butler did it, and then you read an internet, someone has figured out that the Butler did it, and you suddenly change in midstream,

and it was the Chambermaid who did it, then you screw up the whole book. They should get these foreshadowing early on, and you've got these little clues you've planted. Now they're dead ends, and you have to introduce other clues, and you're retconning. It's a mess. We know developers recognize the impact reactions from fans, and YouTubers have. And at times include extras and games for us to find, hoping for us to get excited about finding them.

But too many games that started out in a really good place with a passionate team making something they love get a taste of that height train and start changing things. Suddenly, they're trying to chase the train for just one more ride rather than staying the course. Obviously, we love great games with hidden lore, but not at the cost of everything else. We love when developers try and stretch themselves

to achieve something special. But we don't want to see internet clout cause them to compromise their vision. Just make the game and the story that you want to make, the one you intend to make. Because if it's well made and enjoyable, then we'll inevitably want to play it and talk about it. If we guess the story early, that's totally okay. Add some Easter eggs pointing to the next installment. If you get something wrong, that's okay too.

And if you don't want to include any real lore at all, fine, I'll still be here. Ready to claim that it's secretly a sequel to Earthbound anyway. Let them argue their theories, whether they're right, whether they're wrong. But I don't need to know about that. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.