Game Theory - The LOST Episode (Slenderman)

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he goes back in time and chooses Slenderman over FNAF for a Halloween theory... Writers: Matthew Patrick, Mike Keenan (The Pokémon Biologist) and Tom Robinson Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick, AbsolutePixel and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman

Back in October of 2014, one fateful decision changed the course of this channel and my life forever. Hey Twitter, time for some scary theories. Which of these guys would you rather see a Halloween theory on? Slender Man or this new game Five Nights at Freddy's. And the rest is history. Five Nights at Freddy's became synonymous with the channel. Ten years later, we still have yet to touch Slender. But what if things had turned out differently?

What universe lies behind the other choice? What episode got lost to time? The freak accident that killed Afton's side. I'm back to finally put the original Fnaff Tetralogy to arrest today and solved that. Hello internet, welcome to game theory, the smartest show in gaming. And welcome to our very spooktacular Halloween episode. Earlier this month I put out a tweet asking you what franchise you wanted to see covered. The results were close, so close.

But in the end, Slender Man won out by a single vote. Good thing too, because I had no idea what I was gonna say about that weird spooky bear game. Now it's been about two years since our Slim Shady Man first hit the scene, and in that time we've been distracted with plenty of Harlem shaking and flappy birding. So in case you've forgotten, let me catch you up. Slender Man is basically the grandpappy of horror here on the interwebs. Even though the game released in 2012, the character actually dates all the way back to June of 2009, when Eric Nudson, under the screen named Victor Surge,

posted these two picks of a deadly figure photo-bombing some kids as part of a spooky picture contest. In the caption, Eric called the figure the Slender Man and the internet was hooked. The character bounced around creepy pasta forums and spawned internet videos, but really the turning point came when the fan game Slender the eight pages was released. To say that this game was a viral success would be an understatement. You can run for more than, whoa. Slender Man, come rescue us. We're trapped. I don't know where it was. No, I'll just get out of the wickory. Literally overnight, the whole let's play culture of screaming way too loudly at mildly scary things was born. I mean, that last guy, Markapillar? He only had about 2,000 subscribers when Slender came out.

Now he's nearing 4 million. Keep up the good work there, Mark. I could see you go in places one day. But what could I, Matt Pat, a gamer without a let's play channel do about this sort of franchise? Well, while everyone else was busy screaming their heads off at footage of slow walking through repetitive, low-poly trees, no one stopped to ask the real question here. The hard-hitting question that everyone surely needs the answer to. Is Slender Man actually a Slender Man?

Sure, he's tall and thin, but does Slender Man's weight to height ratio? His body mass index actually classify him as slender? Or is he just lying to us? Is that a dumb question? Yeah. Does it fit with all the other stupid stuff that we talk about on this show? Absolutely. Is this yet another excuse for me to avoid doing part two of our Watch underscore dog series?

You betcha. So prepare to whip out your rulers. or pixel rulers, that is, as we weigh our options and answer the most massive question in the Slenderverse that no one but me would ever want to solve, just how Slender is Slender Man. So in order to figure out Slender Man's figure, we should probably get ourselves a baseline of what makes something slender in the first place, which means that it's time to turn to my dear friend Webster, Miriam Webster, that is. Pulling up the dictionary and looking at the definition of Slender though, doesn't give us a lot to work with, quote, Sparren frame or flesh

Limited or inadequate in amount or scope I mean makes sense but it's not really given us a clear bar of what we would and wouldn't classify as slender The closest one of the batch is probably this quote again Narrow in circumference or width in proportion to height better but also pretty obvious For our theory today we need something that's a bit more clear cut something more specific We need a place where they ruthlessly tear body types apart by the fractions of an inch We need fashion Which means I did the unthinkable I stepped into

the world of the beauty gurus. That's right, Web Overse. I pulled my best Bethany Moda, did myself a smoky eye, and dug around through runway walks, and get ready with me tutorials to determine the definitive definition of slender. Miss Glamarazzi, eat your heart out. And let me tell you what I found was shocking. Shockingly incomplete, that is. Honestly, the world of style was just largely devoid of scientific rigor and quality testing.

Oh sure, some definitions I saw equated a slender body shape to being with rectangular. Another source I found talked about how the arms and legs are typically longer, which yeah, both of those do fit for slender man, but again, it wasn't given me the mathematical precision that I was looking for. Someone should probably fix that one of these days. Anyway, with the wordsmiths and fashionistas let me down, there was one last place to go. One resource I could turn to. One brother from another mother that was never gonna give me up and never gonna let me down. I turned to science. When it comes to the tools that we have to measure slenderness, nothing is quite as ubiquitous. as body mass index, or BMI. BMI is a formula that we use to estimate someone's body fat percentage given their height and weight. But Matt Pat, I hear you bold, beautiful commenters saying, Body mass can't distinguish between weight from muscle mass and weight from body fat. And well yeah, you're certainly right, just hold on to your pewty pants there friendos.

Just look at our subject for today. I don't think either one of those are gonna be a problem. There is nothing on those bones, which means it's time to guesstimate his height. A quick Google search for how tall is slender, Reveals that there's no consistent answer, but since most of us heard about Slender Man from the game, and this is game theory after all It's not a bad place to start looking in Slender the eight pages. There are several objects that we could theoretically use as a potential measuring stick for Slender Man and most of them suck Between the cars the buildings and the trees none of them have a definitive standardized size Most of the things in the game are just too generic and could therefore be just about any size

But there is one object that I think we could translate one-to-one into the real work And that is this right here, the brick wall. You now have my permission to ooh and up. Tucked away in the corner of the slender map, this generic forgettable wall may actually be the key to figuring out Slender Man's true height because, while brick walls can just be about any size, the bricks they're made of are not. They're standardized, or at least they're standardized by country. In the US, the origins of the Slender myth, a standard brick is 2.25 inches tall, and the mortar joints between them are usually around 3 eighths. of an inch thick. After analyzing the wall I found it to be 41 and a half bricks tall with 41 mortar joints in between When put all together that means that the wall is a hundred and eight point seven five inches tall or just a shade over nine feet

That's the wall, but then what about slendy? Well here's where I was in for a surprise You see when I lured Slenderman over to the wall to see how he stacked up Let's just say that he came up a bit short Physically short Slender Man wasn't towering over the wall. He was barely half its height I counted the burrowered and ran the calculations only to find that Slenderman topped out at the crushingly average height of 5 foot 9 inches, thereby making him one inch shorter than me. It would seem like the stories of the towering ominous Slender Man have been a bit over height.

In reality, Slender Man is just a short king. That said, I did want to double-check my work. After all, when he gets close to us in the game, we have to look up to match his... Uh, can you call it an eye line if he has no eyes? Something just wasn't adding up here, so to confirm my results, I went back to Slender Man. the origins, all the way back to those original creepypasta photos. This pic shows our pal Slanderman enjoying a nice day out at the playground, but not just any playground. This picture was supposedly taken in

Stirling City, California, which tells us that this is America. Judging by the rest of the kids that we see in the picture, the girl in the background must be about five to six years old. In the US, the average five to six year old girl is somewhere between 109 and 121 and a half centimeters tall, or about three feet six inches to four feet. Whipping out our trusty pixel slender man is exactly twice as tall as that little girl, meaning that his height should be canonically somewhere between seven and eight feet tall, significantly higher than that brick calculation gave us and far more in line with the way that he tends to be portrayed across

media. And since this eight foot number comes to us from the very first piece of slender media ever released, I'm gonna say that slender man is rocking the higher numbers here. Clearly he's taller than your average human, but obviously nowhere close to the 10 foot tall wario. So, with the height of Slender Man now settled between 7 and 8 feet next comes his weight. Unfortunately, there wasn't a lot of great sources out there to weigh up. Can't exactly figure out someone's weight just from a photo after all, so we're gonna have to expand deeper into the Slenderverse to get ourselves our answer. Back in the earliest days of Slender Man, a pair of creators started a found footage series here on YouTube called Marble Hornets.

Many of the powers and abilities that we now associate with Slendermen, like teleportation and causing hallucinations, were brought into the Slender Canon by this video project. However, the thing that this series didn't bother to make was his weight. The creators are famously tight-lipped about what they did to build their Slender Man stand in. There isn't even a listed actor on IMDB that we could use as a starting point. I even analyzed all of Slender Man's appearances in the series frame by frame to see if one I would enjoy it, which I very much did, and two, to see if I could find some hidden detail that would reveal his weight. But alas, another brick wall. And as we just learned during the height discussion, brick walls are not useful during this theory. Go figure. It's almost like these indie games don't bother to think about what theorists like me might need. Who knows, maybe one day game designers will actually bother to care about their own lore. That said, I wasn't done. In my research, I stumbled across this. A mathematical formula helping doctors estimate the weight of a patient given only their height,

for all those times that you can't get them on a scale. And considering that we only have Slender Man's height, and Wangham sure does seem impossible, this might just be the key that unlocks this mystery. Their formula is weight in kilograms equals n minus 1 times 100, where N is the height of the patient in meters. Plugging in the height of Slender Man, we get that Slenderman weighs 143 kilograms or a whopping 317 pounds. Tall, dark, and handsome? More like tall, dark, and dense. So, there you have it. That's our solution, is what I'd be saying if there wasn't a teeny tiny issue with this answer. Well, I'm sure this formula is a great tool for hospitals and emergency situations.

The authors of the paper admit that this formula tends to overestimate the weight of patients the taller they get. Considering Slender Man is taller than anyone in the study by quite a large margin, This is gonna cast some serious doubt on the accuracy of our number. I did consider using the weight of the world's tallest man in recorded history, Robert Wadlow, to try and counteract this. Wadlow, born in 1918, was the tallest man who ever lived, standing at a gargantuan 8 feet 11 inches, or 2.72 meters, and weighing in at 439 pounds, or 199 kilos. This guy was so tall that he makes our estimates for Slender Man seem puny. But, using a nice little ratio, we can use Wadlo to scale Slender Man.

Since Wadlow is 8 foot 11, 439 pounds, and Slender Man is 8 feet with an unknown weight, we can set up this nice little proportion here. Solving for X, we get Slender Man's weight, which ends up being 392 pounds, or about 177 kilograms. But once again, this doesn't really account for our full picture. Slender Man's limbs are strangely lanky, and while it may not make a huge difference, it would ultimately make some difference in our calculation. The problem is, I don't have any other options. I'm out of ideas, out of sources, and out of formulas.

I guess I just have to throw in the towel, raise my white flag, and say, Slender Man, you've bested me. There is no way that I can calculate your weight. In 2014, but then again, this is 2023. And 2023, Matt Pat can do a lot that Matt Pat in 2014 couldn't. In recent years, the team and I have learned how to rip the 3D models directly out of games, which means that we can now use a 3D modeling program like Blender to figure out certain measurements, specifically Slenderman's volume. This may not initially seem like the answer that we're looking for,

but volume is only a few steps removed from that all-important weight that we're getting stuck on. You see, mass is just volume multiplied by density. And fun fact, regardless of their height or weight, people tend to have similar densities, around 985 kilograms per cubic meter. So by turning Slender Man into Blender Man, and then scaling into that 8-foot estimate that we got from earlier, I found that Slenderman's volume is 0.1776 cubic meters.

Now we just plug in those numbers into our equation from earlier to get a way. weight of 175 kilograms or 386 pounds. Now I can say boom, we nailed it. We finally have as close as we can possibly get to Slender Man's official weight, which means it's time to plug these values into a basic body mass index calculator, which is going to tell us that Slender Man's BMI is, drum roll please. 29.4, which honestly probably doesn't mean anything to you. But if you take that number and apply it to a BMI chart, it tells us that Slender Man is actually overweight. You heard that right, friends. I double and triple-checked my math here, and it turns out that Slender Man is overweight by about 61 pounds. In fact, at his current weight and

height, he's only about five pounds away from being classified as outright obese. In short, Slender Man has been lying to us the whole time. Fourteen years after the Slenderman myth was born, we've not only proven his height and weight, we have fully debunked his name. Slender Man is in fact not a Slender Man at all. To truly gain that title at his current height he'd need to lose about 60 pounds honestly it's a conclusion that would have made 2014 Matt Pat proud. Heck it's a conclusion that makes me proud today but wait who then would qualify as video gaming's new Slender Man with the title role now vacant who are we gonna get to wander around the woods for Smosh

games to scream at? Well the answer is downright shocking link in tears of the kingdom you can actually lift and fuse objects together and people have been going wild with these things building combat planes cannons someone even built a pod racer but the best invention of was done by Reddit user recommendation OK-6842 who made a working set of scales. I know, theorists really do be the most wild. What's even wilder though is when you put Link on those scales, he weighs exactly the same as 10 apples, which is an improvement from Breath of the Wild where in-game scales made him weigh about 8.5 apples.

Clearly, unlike Slender Man, Link is trying to chase after them gains. Your typical apple weighs around 6 ounces, so 10 apples is going to mean that Link weighs about 3 and 3 quarter pounds. Well, Link doesn't have himself a canonical height. YouTube, the Bread Pirate, figured out that his in-game height is about 5'2, which makes Link's BMI the absolutely minuscule .7. That BMI right there is 136th, that of our Slender Man. Even if these apples were the heaviest apples ever to be recorded, which, according to the record books, weighed in at about 4 pounds,

then his BMI would still be at 7.3, falling well short of the 18 and a half that you need to fall into the normal weight range. So, there you have it, Frendos. Game theories own, what if you have it, episode about Slender Man. Slender Man isn't actually Slender and Link is the true successor to the crown. That said, I think it's safe to say that you made the right choice going with Fnaf. Ain't no way I'd gotten this many theories out of the Slender franchise. For as difficult as it may be to believe, I think for once we may actually exist in the better of the two timelines. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory. Thanks for watching.