Game Theory - The Detail Everyone Missed from Kindergarten 3

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Kindergarten 3 is here and as I was playing through the game on my own, I found myself drawn to Linda for a very specific reason. Seeing how she was used as a mode of transportation between the school yard and the secret lab made me wonder…how DO they fit in there? This question has been taunting me and in today’s episode I will be getting to the bottom of it!

Kindergarten's back, and it's weirder than heck, with teachers on pills and a lab on deck, kids getting tested like rats in a maze, and a nugget cult chanting in barbecue haze. It sparks some weird questions, absurd and profound, like, could chicken nuggets break you all fall to the ground? And what's with that janitor who's mopping up gore? With whispers and rumors that hinted strange lore. But none of those riddles stuck deep in my brain, like one that's both stupid and slightly insane. In kindergarten 3, when logic heads south, how many kids

fit in an alligator's mouth. Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The show that knows an apple a day will keep the smoking, definitely a real nurse, away. Just like we've been kept away from our favourite murderous kindergarten game for far too long. No, not you. I'm talking about the pixelated comedy gold with gratuitous violence. That is Kindergarten 3.

In fact, it's been so long you could have had your own kid and had them finish kindergarten while waiting for this sequel. But despite the tardiness, kindergarten is still top of the class. We still play as an unnamed protagonist whose goal is to survive yet another death-filled day at kindergarten, reliving the same day over and over again until we start to piece together the ever-expanding mystery

happening underneath these schools. But the magic of kindergarten has never been about the story. It's about the characters. And many of our favourite staff and students are back once again for Kindergarten 3. Like Monty, the genius entrepreneur who, due to a series of accidents, now has robotic legs. Huh, maybe that's where the mimic got them from. Or there's the janitor who has a fondness for stabbing children, mostly Monty. And of course, who could forget Dear Nugget, who now add eating radioactive goo to his list of obsessions.

Nugget requires more goo. Well, this baby daddy has the goo. Oh, oh! Ash, please, this is a kindergarten full of monsters and murder. Anyway, with kindergarten. 3 taking place in yet another good-for-nothing kindergarten, we are also treated to a bunch of new colourful characters. There's Miss Lovelet, the theatre teacher who insists her students fully embrace their roles, death and all. There's Emmy with her bloodthirsty vegetable patch, and there's

Davy, the son of the missing principal. But it's fine, he doesn't seem all that bothered about it because he has become infatuated with Linda, the humongous alligator just chilling, uncaged in front of the kindergarten. But when I was playing through the game on my own, I also found that I was drawn to Linda, just for totally different reasons. Not because she was in the war with the janitor, although that's definitely strange, it's because of this moment right here. Don't worry, the kid's fine. It turns out, Linda doubles as a mode of transportation between the schoolyard and the secret lab hidden underneath the school.

Immediately, my theorist brain wondered, how do they fit in there? And then, the game literally asked the very same question. It's like they're taunting me personally, begging me to get to the bottom of this ridiculous premise. Well, like Nugget with a basket of delicious chickeny goodness, I too can gobble down dumb math like there's no tomorrow. Literally. So join me theorists as we crawl into the belly, or at least the mouth of the beast with nothing but a prayer and a tape measure. And that is actually a pretty good place to start. Where is lovely Linda actually storing these kids?

In the game, it appears as though we just jump into her mouth, it closes and that's it. Initially, I wondered if maybe they could be making their way into her stomach, you know, just for the sake of room, only to essentially get thrown back up on the other side. But when I looked into it, there were a few interesting factoid that changed my mind. One, alligators have this flap at the back of their mouths, known as the palatal valve, that sort of acts like a fleshy barrier. It's there to make sure that gators don't accidentally swallow water while they're hunting underwater. And given we are using Linda to traverse underwater, I doubt she's going to go.

going to be opening hers to let any children through. Even if she did, they'd run into reason number two, which is that getting stuck inside a gator's stomach might be among the worst deaths they could face. And that's saying something given this game. A gator's stomach is super inhospitable. When they're digesting a particularly large morsel of food, like, say, a child, they actually shuttle blood away from their lungs and towards their stomachs so they can

pump it with more carbon dioxide and make their stomachs even more acidic. As a result, some estimates say that gators have stomachs that are as much as 10 times more acidic than any mammal. So, yeah, these kids ain't surviving that, which means we're going to stick to them staying firmly inside Linda's big old mouth. But before we can measure that mouth, we first need to figure out the size of our would-be crocodile hunter. Sorry, alligator. Now, while most of the children in kindergarten appear to be around the same size, that doesn't tell us exactly how big they are. I mean, their school is leaking radioactive goo, for all we know they could be mutant children. Normally, this is where I would bust out the pixel measurements and look around the school to find something with a standardized set of measurements that we could use.

You know, something like the height of a door or the spacing of bricks, something we know has a fixed measurement. And actually, the school has a bunch of those things available to us. The only problem is, how do I put this? The scaling in the school makes no sense. School doors can vary in size, but the widest standardized door is 6'8 inches tall and 4. foot wide. But if the doors in this game are meant to be that same height, they would be 5 foot 3 inches wide. And if you kept their width more standard, it would make the doors only 5 foot 1 inches tall, which is too short for most adults to walk through. But then we have air vents that are usually 2 feet

by 1 and a half feet, but here they're nearly the size of Miss Applegate's massive brain. Heck, if you compare our protagonist to a roll of toilet paper, which at most is going to be about 5 inches tall, he's only like two rolls of toilet paper tall. Of course, this shouldn't be too surprising. This is a pixel-based game after all. It's more about aesthetics than it is accuracy. But that does mean that for one of the first times ever, pixel measurements had failed me.

Let's get some Fs in the chat, boys. We lost a good one today. And so, since scaling in our game isn't going to do us any good for our little experiment, I had only one choice left. I had to face reality. And by that, I mean, use the dimensions of a normal kindergartner and shove that into the mares of our angry, Reptile. The CDC tells us that the average height of your typical tyke is around 43 inches,

or just over one meter. They also give us the average weight, which is about 44 pounds or 20 kilograms. But those are just the tip of the mathematical nugget iceberg. What we really need to know is how much space they take up inside of an alligator. Hmm. If only there was a formula that could help us figure out a child's volume. Oh DMV, I thought you'd never show up. Since all humans, even children, have roughly the same density around one kilogram per liter. or volume, we can use the formula density equals mass divided by volume, plug in our values, and boom, we find out that our average kindergartners should have a volume of around 20 litres. Math so easy, even a kindergartner could do it.

Okay, maybe like a super smart kindergartner. Now, this does bring up the slightly obvious point that children are not liquids. They're notoriously hard to stuff into small spaces, animatronic suits notwithstanding. But for the simplicity of math, we're going to assume that our child can be contorted in whatever way is necessary. to make sure it fits inside Linda's mouth. I mean, when Lily describes how they fit, she does say it's very uncomfortable. Plus, with how ridiculous this thing gets, it's really not going to matter that much, trust me. So, we have the standard size of a kindergartner, making our next question, how big is the inside of Linda's mouth. Surprisingly, despite spending days and

days looking, there didn't seem to have been any kind of research or scientific papers out there about the internal volume of an alligator's mouth. I know, I was so shocked as you are, But just before I was about to head out with my ruler and get the results firsthand, I was able to find this. This is an actual 3D model of an American alligator skull that was scanned from a real alligator skull. It was uploaded to Sketchfab by Holiday Lab and the skull sample originally came from the University of Missouri Vertebrae collection. So shout out to those guys. My still attached limbs are forever grateful. Now we can import this model into Blender and start the real magic. All we have to do is create a shape inside of Linda's mouth.

and use that to perfectly tell us how much space is inside those jaws. Once that's done, we can then use Blender's scaling tool to resize our Linder to be the size of a typical female gator, which is 8.2 feet to 2.6 meters lost. So, can Linda's mouth fit our little 20-liter guy? Heck no. And it's not even close. At this scale, Linda only has an internal mouth volume of 1.6 litres, around 12 and a half times too small to safely carry our boy.

At first, that volume might sound a bit small. I mean, gators have been known to attack and kill small children before, including those in today's age bracket. But as this video sort of demonstrates, gators tend to funnel their food down their throats as they swallow. They don't hold the entire snack in their relatively small mouths. But don't think that means we're done, loyal theorists. If an average alligator would be too small to comfortably fit our protagonist in its chumpers, how big would Linda have to be to make our trip possible? Well, back to Blender.

But instead of scaling our Linda skull to match the real-world gator, Now, we're going to take the volume inside of the mouth and scale that up until it's exactly 20 litres, just enough to fit our little friend-o uncomfortably inside. Doing that, we get that the length of the head that would be needed to fit our protagonist inside would be around 0.833 meters, or 2.72 feet. But that is just the length of the head. What about the rest of the body? Well, it turns out that American alligator's bodies are approximately 7.3 times the length of their head.

That means our 0.833 meter head would correspond to an alligator that is 6.1 meters long. That is over 20 feet. If Linda was that big, she'd be bigger than the largest verified gator ever on record. By over four feet. Just over the size of the tallest average kindergartner, funnily enough. But here's the kicker. We are not the only character that hitches a ride on the Linda Express. Oh, no, no, no.

Later in the game, we see not one, not two, but three. three children enter Linda's mouth at the same time, meaning Linda has to be even bigger than we initially calculated. If we assume that all three children are the same size as our protagonist, 20 litres, that means this new beefier, or gatoria, Linda, would need to be able to fit a whopping 60 litres of children in her mouthhole. That's roughly the size of the gas tank in your car. A gator big enough to hold that in its mouth would need to be an absolutely gargantuan 8.76 meters or 20,000. 38.7 feet long. That's about half the length of a bowling alley. No thanks. I'll stick to ski ball. But even that still doesn't represent Linda's true size. Because at the very end of Kindergarten 3, she manages to fit even more inside of her mouth. She waltzed down four kids as well as two bunny rabbits and a guppy. The dog and the bird take the scenic route because having them also fit in there. Now that would be ridiculous. Thankfully though, this time someone had done some of the hard work for me. I found this paper on the average volume of rabbits, which gave me the answer of 3.5 litres.

And the guppy, well, it's a guppy. In the real world, they basically take up no space, plus they're super squishy. So, adding all the 80 litres for our four children and the 3.5 litres for our... Oh, Linda ate one of the rabbits as payment? Well, that's one less thing to worry about. So, 83.5 litres from our five passengers that made it, plus the guppy, which is basically too small to count, means that the actual size that Linda would need to be to be to barely ferry all of these characters down to the secret layer would be just shy of the length of a school bus, 9.8 meters or 32.1 feet. Turns out she doesn't need to be mutated by radioactive goo to become a Godzilla. She already is one. Although if we were to take her final size and give pixel measurements a second chance,

you would find that this magical goo has turned our sweet little or big Linda into a behemoth with a final length of 17 meters or 3rd. 57 feet. That is bigger than the length of the Hollywood sign and nearly as long as an entire cricket pitch. How big are these tunnels underneath the kindergartens? And yet our perspective shows that we are still the same size as two rolls of toilet paper. I told you the scaling in this game was whack, but hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.