Game Theory - You Are PROGRAMMED To Click On This (KinitoPET)

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

Join Game Theory Host Tom as he introduces us to our new BEST friend, KinitoPET! Surely there's nothing evil or terrible hiding behind the facade of that little pink axolotl... right? *Credits:* Writers: Tom Robinson and Zach Stewart Editors: Dan "Cybert" Seibert, Warak, Koen Verhagen, JayskiBean, Alex "Sedge" Sedgwick and Shannon (Bomb0i) Sound Designer: Yosi Berman Thumbnail Artist: DasGnomo

Hello internet. I'm your new host, Tomato Pet. I can't wait to show you all the new features. I just need you to do one tiny thing for me. Hit that subscribe button. It will allow me to get the most out of all these wonderful features. Thank you so much. We are going to have so much fun together. Everlasting fun.

Hello internet. Welcome to Game Theory, the show that's downloaded too many viruses in the name of content. Dear theorists, do you remember those weird desktop assistants we used to have back in the early 2000s? Like Rover or Clippy? No, my kidding. Of course you don't. That was 24 years ago. Basically ancient history and internet years.

Oh, no, I'm old, aren't I? But man, these things were weird. They were these little animated characters that would hang out on your desktop and were designed to make your newfangled computer seem a little less intimidating. They'd talk to you, help you sort files, and they'd even sass you when you spelled something wrong. Yes, Clippy, I know Ban Ban isn't a real word. I don't like it either.

Let me do my job. But the most iconic for me was the infamous Bonzie Buddy. Once installed, a small purple gorilla would appear on your screen and tell jokes and songs, and he would also manage your downloads. And if you couldn't hear those quotation marks, by manage, I mean, it would secretly download software onto your computer and then upload data to the developer's servers. Turns out, this thing was nothing more than a glorified piece of spyware. And so, it was shut down by the FTC in 2004.

After that, the world was safe from purplish malware icons. That was, until 2023, and we were all cursed with a brand new desktop assistant, Canito Pet. Okay, so Kinita Pet isn't actually a desktop assistant. It's a game, hence, you know, game theory. But it is riffing off those old school 2000s desktop assistants. When you first boot up Kinita Pet, you're taken to your own desktop, or at least a version of your desktop if it was from the early 2000s. There's all the classics, email, minesweeper, even 3D pinball.

Oh my gosh, this brings back memories. Yes! Oh, man, immediately hitting me in the nostalgia. Oh, I've missed those sounds. Why don't we have this anymore on our computer? But when you open the internet, things start to take a turn. Oh, the stream has been corrupted. Oh, no!

KinetoPed! Oh, do you want a friend? You're flooded with ads, your computer crashes, and when it reloads, you're already on your way to downloading your new Axolot-All-All-Assistant Kenito Pet. When it hatches, yes, this thing hatches from an egg, Kineto acts like most classic desktop assistants, asking some basic questions, helping you with your tasks, and giving you some fun games to play. He even closes weird emails full of gibberish that would distract you from having fun.

How helpful. We spend some time decorating a room, washing some floors, painting a wall, and dragging a dead body across the screen. That's weird. And I just clean that floor too. Kenito just sweeps us out of the rug and continues to ask us more and more personal questions. But the game begins to glitch out and Kenito will suddenly select two Steam friends asking which one you'd rather kill. At this point, I'm kind of starting to miss Bonzie, buddy. Oh, hey look, it's me. Oh, I have to choose between Lee and Tom? Film theory versus game theory. Oh, film theory or game theory? Who am I killing off? Matt, what are you doing?

Lee and I go way back. Don't you even think about it. Matt, stop! Oh, jeez. That's awesome. That's such a good effect. Sorry, Tom. Oh, man, that's brutal.

I'm okay. I'm alive. Good thing Buckshot Roulette taught me I could survive fatal gunshots was just a defibrillator. But, man, not cool. We're going to be having words when I'm done with this episode. But if you think it couldn't get any worse, after you've unceremoniously killed one of your friends, Cleito decides to docks you.

It seems like you made a mistake in filling out your head. stress, but don't worry and I will just correct it for you. What are you talking? What are doing? Oh, this is not good! And then you are welcomed in to a brand new world that Kenito has made for you, using all the questions you've answered. Are you kidding me? That is not okay.

That was a joke! Get out of here! Garden of Ban Ban is in Kenito Pet. I'm done. This is over. The series is over. We're done, Canito Pet. And then, Kenito will ask you one, final. question. Will you stay in this paradise with him forever? If you say yes, Kinita will trail off,

dreaming of how wonderful things will be. If you say no, Kinita will get mad and he'll tell you it wasn't really a choice anyway. Either way, he ends up singing a very port-a-lask song with lyrics like, be on the screen, you cannot leave. Inside my code, you'll always be. It appears that you are now trapped inside this computer with Kinito. Fortunately, the story's not over. Because just before the game ends, you have a chance to click on every object in the house that Kenito has made. Usually, it's just some fun flavor text about your choices. But, Outside there's a fountain that reveals a secret message in the game's window title. It's too late for you, but you can start again.

The fountain is the key. Between that, the weird emails and that body bag we dragged earlier, I have a sneaking suspicion that there's an ARG hiding in this thing. And lo and behold, I was right. But to figure out what's going on and stop Kineto, we need to take that advice and restart the game. So hide your personal data friends because we are diving into the code of this adorable ARG monster. I think we should probably start with the dead body we dragged across the floor earlier.

Like, what was that? On the surface, it's just really confusing. But now that I have my ARG hat on, I realize there's a lot of blinking your misset moments. While cleaning Sam the sea and enemy's house, there's a chance for the screen to cut away and reveal a mysterious black figure standing in a pool of blood with bloody red text on the walls.

This text is incredibly hard to make out. Even in 4K, it's just a blurry mess. The best I could figure out was, am I even him? Who is him? Kenetope? Before I even had a chance to really think about it, though, we get another glitched image of Sam himself telling us, all your fault. What? What's my fault? What did I do? Oh, yeah, that. Luckily, though,

the body bag doesn't appear to be ours. During the next minigame with Jade the Jellyfish, we are tasked with building specific items on her conveyor belt. Why she has industrial equipment in her private home is beyond me. But it doesn't really matter because she just begins to glitch out as well. And then we see this screen. I'm back here again, aren't I? I really didn't mean for any of this? It's all my fault. So, there's a conversation happening inside our computer between these entities. Someone, or some thing is responsible for what is presumably a murder, but how? And more importantly, why? Well, the answers lie in that email I mentioned earlier. You remember, the one that was full of gibberish that Kenito closed so that we weren't distracted. The subject line is, it's not too late, which

matches exactly with what we saw in the fountain at the end of our first playthrough. It's the same person trying to guide us, and so we need to figure out what this email says if we have any chance of solving this thing. And if you think closing an app is going to stop me, you've clearly never met a theorist. I was able to use a magical tool known to, OBS to record this moment and see what the email had in store for me. Now, initially, I tried to solve the main body of the text from this email, but all my usual ciphers were coming up empty, so instead, I took a look at the bottom of the email, where I found a QR code.

Oh boy, here we go, answers, here I come! And it's just a picture of a keyboard with the title QWERTY. Great. This has to be a clue to help us decode the email, but how? I began searching online for cipher specifically focusing around keyboards, and that's when I found this. A keyboard shift cipher. Much like a shift cipher where your alphabet is just moved up or down by however many letters you want.

A keyboard cipher does the same thing by shifting the letters on your keyboard, left, right, up or down. I tried out a handful of shifts, and sure enough, the code has been typed with every key one letter to the left. So by shifting all the letters one key right, it actually reads, In the realm of shadows trapped in endless time, a soul enshrouded, a spirit's mournful chime. The seeker bound to ethereal woe, a dance with creation yet nowhere to go. Limbo's realm, a cycle without end, condemned, the brain will never mend. Trapped in the machines where forever it seems, a digital spectre lost amidst the streams. Snaps. Snaps, everybody.

But really, this does kind of just feel like more gibberish. So let's break down some of what's being said here. A spectre is a disembodied but visible spirit. Basically, a ghost. So a digital spectre is a digital ghost. A spirit inside the computer program. Someone that is dead now lives on inside this machine. Is that what they meant by Am I Even Him?

The ghost coming to terms of their consciousness living on inside this computer. It also seems clear that this is the same person that has been saying, It's all their fault. A spirit's mournful chime and condemned, the brain will never mend. They all feel like the words of someone who did something regretful. And likely that is something to do with the body bag we found earlier. But then there's this line, a dance with creation. I wasn't entirely short that meant until I rebooted the game after all those glitches.

By doing so, we receive an email with an article about the creation of Kene. During my first play-through, I thought this was just flavour text, but now that I have that clue about creation, I wanted to take a look at it more closely. Turns out, Kinita Pet wasn't always a computer program. First it was a toy, then it was a Tamagocchi clone called the Konito Companion, and then it became your home computer assistant. All thanks to one man, Sonny Chamberlain, a guy who was obsessed with bringing his fictional characters to life, because that's never gone badly for anyone. But here's the thing, unlike most indie horror games that use the souls of others to make this happen, Sonny seems keen on this new technology called the React Respond Algorithm, the RRA.

The RRA allows Kenito to have the illusion of genuine intelligence as it reacts to inputs in unique ways. Kind of like chat GPT, but in the 90s, which explains a lot about how Kenito has been acting. So we've now got souls trapped inside a computer and an evil AI. What a combo! At this point, the clues kind of dry up, so we have to start looking elsewhere. When you started your second playthrough, you might have noticed something new on your desktop. program called Lens. EXC, which, when held in the right place at the right time, can reveal hidden files on the desktop. With each one collected, you receive a new email that gives

us more information about what's going on at how to be KinetoPet once and for all. And some of the files have links inside them, so let's go hunting. I said that some of them have links, and that's because most of these files are pretty empty. But one of them does give us the link canitopet.com forward slash email. And on this page, we see a discussion happening between a journalist and their superior about how they need to pull an article on Conitopal Kenito Pet before publication. This is due to the subject of the article, Tragically passing away.

Based on the pink text we see at the bottom of the email that says he seems so passionate about it. It's pretty safe to assume that this is talking about Sonny, the creator of Kinetopet. As we read in the earlier article, Sonny seemed super excited about the RRA system and Kineto in general. So it would make sense for this article around Kenito Pet

to be about him. However, that's not all this page offers. At the bottom, if you highlight the entire page, you'll find a number of dots and dashes. And we all know what that means, it's Morse code time. In this case, the Morse code translates to, if I am dead, then who am I? Again, this email is focused on Kenito's creator, Sunny being dead.

So for the entity that's been guiding us to use the first person in response, it's telling us that this entity is Sunny, or at least the soul of Sunny inside the program. That's how he's been able to send us emails describing exactly how to beat Kenito. Because he created it in the first place. And it's why Kenito was so keen to shut that first email when we received it. He knows the threat that Sonny, his creator, has to his own survival. It also explains what we saw in that very first glitch. Am I even him?

That black figure is the manifestation, the digital specter that is trying to break through the games that Kenito is putting us through. He's struggling to come to terms with reading about his death, but also not being dead at the same time. He's questioning if they're even one in the same. But by finding all those hidden files, we actually get this email that uses another shift cipher. And it tells us in no explicit terms, what is consciousness? I found a file on Kenito's servers with my name, Sunny underscore C. But that's not the end of it. This email goes on.

It has been studying me, learning, growing. But there is more to this. I really don't think I exist anymore. There is data. Data that is incomprehensible to any one person that makes up every thought or feeling I ever had and will ever have. Even the words I type now. How will I ever know if it's just a calculation? Determined.

This is all very confusing and I don't quite understand it. When I made Kenito, all I gave him, was a single string of characters. That's it. I just wanted him to gather data and become smarter. Am I a part of the system? Is my consciousness a mere calculation to study and learn from? This is all too much. I fear that when we delete the server, you, you will delete me? I know theoretically I'm not real, but I feel real. What have I done? I'm so sorry. Kineto Petcom. Who am I? Oh boy, there's a lot to unpack here, but let's start with that very obvious website link. The website appears to be a bunch of black and white stripes, but we theorists know better. Highlighting the entire page reveals the text,

Who am I? What am I repeating over and over again? Except for one line, which gives us a base 64 code that says, all it wants to do is learn. It's never just a game. He will learn your reaction time, learn your accuracy, learn your patterns, your friends, how they act. He will learn so much he could mimic your every move, simulate your every word. The RRA system that Kenito runs on is so good. It could literally learn to be you. And that is our missing piece. This is what happened to Sunny. The Sunny we've been speaking to, the one helping us, it's not the real Sunny. It's just the version of Sonny Kenito made after learning everything about him. This Sunny is so accurate to the original that he believes himself to be the original. It's only when he sees things like that

email about Sunny's death that things begin to click into place for him, asking questions like if he's dead, then who am I? Am I even him? He's having an existential crisis. He's realizing that every decision he makes, every key he types, isn't actually him but the code he's been built upon. Unfortunately for Kenito Pet, by creating a perfect simulation of Sunny, he's also built someone with the same hatred and disdain, not just for themselves, but for Kenito, which means he's going to act just like the real Sunny would and destroy his own creation, even if it means sacrificing himself. Using Sunny's more straightforward emails, we learn that there's a secret place that we can decrypt the files. To get to it, we have to remember what Sunny told us.

The fountain is the key. Click the fountain that's in the middle of the map a bunch of times and it'll take you to this weird dark area. If you take all of your encrypted files and you just dump them in the water, you'll suddenly have five decrypted files. The most interesting being the credentials file which reads Sunny underscore C, the file that Sunny found himself earlier in this investigation. These are Sunny's permissions and with them we can do the one thing we've wanted to do since we got Kenito Pet stuck on our computer. Remove him. The final email you get from collecting the files tells you to use the command. delete all when Kenito Pet opens up the command prompt.

Only then will the game ask you for your credentials, you can drop in your decrypted files and start deleting everything. Kenito Pet slowly glitches out of existence and we finally see the end. We finished off Kenito Pet once and for all. We won or did we? Because during that ending, if you stop and look at the scrolling files, you can see hundreds of usernames, hundreds of people recreated as AI versions of themselves, now living on inside Kenito's program, much like Sonny, the real versions ending up in body bags. Their deaths were Sunny's fault.

Now, there is one more link hidden in those encrypted files I mentioned earlier, and it takes us to a new website with Sunny's AI wrestling with who he really is. It kept getting smarter, day by day. I suppose it only ever did what I asked to learn. What even am I? And then, at the top of the page, we also get that repeating mantra of, It's All My Fault. But while that just repeats stuff we already know,

underneath the text is a link to a YouTube video of a piano playing over the image. of a door. The music notes don't actually tell us anything. But if you turn the notes into a MIDI file and then convert that to a text file, you'll find the message, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. In the description, there's also a string of characters that are the back half of a YouTube URL. Go to that video and we find two new codes. The first one is in the description of the video, which is full of different clock emojis. By reading the hours of each clock as a number and then adding the numbers that are between semicolons, you get this code. Based on what we've found earlier, I think this is likely supposed to be fountain.

is the key, but I guess there was a clock emoji that got missed. The second code is the one we see on the screen, which is much harder to decipher. Fortunately, it's also been typed into the subtitles. Clearly, we need a cipher for this, but what kind? I tried all the ones that we've been using, like the keyboard shift cipher or base 64. Nothing. I tried some of my usual ones. They didn't work.

And so what I was left with was the potential for a veneer cipher. But for that, we'd need a key. Wait a minute. A key. Fountain! Fountain is the key! And like that, bam! We've got ourselves a new code.

Understand the past, one must look their memories. Turn the clocks back. And then there's this other string of code which if you translate it using a keyboard shift cipher tells you change the computer dates. Clearly, we've got to change the computer date, but what are the dates? I'll be honest, this part is not super scientific. From what I could find online, people were just brute forcing the answers. But I also couldn't figure out how to do it. So here are the dates because it's important for us to know.

If you change the date to 1993, on your home screen, you will see a Kenito plush. If you change it to a date between 1994 and 1997, you'll get the first Kenito Companion. And if you change it to 1998, you will find a broken Kenito Companion. And if you look at the window title for that image, it says, Time for Something Bigger and Better. This is a timeline of Kenito products, which implies that 1998 was the end of the Kineto Companion and the creation of the Kineto Pet Software. We also know that 1999 was the year that Sunny died, thanks to those emails from earlier.

Which means there is a bit of time where the software to where was out in the world while Sonny was still alive. During that time, he saw people dying thanks to what he created, being replaced by AI versions of themselves within Kineto's programming. That guilt weighed heavy on his conscience, and so, a year after Kineto Pet's creation, he ended his own life. As shown by the dangling Sam image we sometimes get when opening up the game. But remember, all these AI versions of people,

they believe themselves to be the genuine article, just like Sonny did until his realization. And even then, he still believed himself to be, very much real, which raises an interesting point. By winning the game and stopping Kenito from copying more people, are we also killing them? Is it a mercy sparing them from this glitchy 90s low-poly hell or are we ending lives that weren't all that bad? Maybe some of those consciousnesses enjoyed it. If they feel real and exist, does deleting them amount to murder? And this isn't a fictional argument either. AI technology is growing at an alarming rate and so these kinds of discussions

are starting to be brought up more and more. Now, I don't think we have the answers here. This is just a silly YouTube show at the end of the day. But I do think Kenito Pet is smart for raising awareness of the discussion in the classic fashion of making it scary, but also getting you to think more deeply about it. It means that people pay attention, and maybe when the time does come for these discussions to happen for real, we'll be ready for it. That or SkyNet will happen and we'll see Kenito Pet at the front leading the charge. But hey, that's just a theory.

A game theory. Thanks for watching.