Dear Scott Cawthon,
Hi! It's me! Austin!
You know, I have to say it's really weird doing these for indie games.
I mean, originally, when I started these, I was harassing Bethesda
about game mechanics that they hadn't thought twice about,
bugging CD Project Red about the lack of genitalia in their games,
and, generally speaking, having zero idea what the crap I was doing.
Now, though I find myself with a formula,
Well, if you consider incredibly unhealthy volumes of caffeine abuse,
sleep deprivation, and stress-induced meltdowns a formula,
An editing team,
*throws rock because why not*
and generally running out of Triple A games to bother people about because
damn, 2017!!! Why is your lineup so freakin' bad?!
So I've been hitting the indie circuit because thank GOD someone's making good games out there!
But it puts me in the unenviable position of writing letters that start out like
"Dear Toby Fox", or "Dear Scott Cawthon".
Which, unlike "Dear Big Evil Pile of Dog Faeces in the Shape of a Konami Logo",
makes these videos feel a lot more PERSONAL.
Instead of writing to a developer about the flaws in the science of their games, it feels
more like I'm instead stapling a passive-aggressive
note onto a neighbour's door about the loud,
yet embarrassingly short, sex they're having.
I CAN hear you guys and, bro, you need to
step it the hell up!
This was one of the most difficult episodes I've ever had to do.
It wasn't because it was particularly complicated to research. It wasn't.
And it wasn't because the concepts in it are all that terribly difficult to understand
and explain because... They aren't.
and I know this will bug some people, because it's making the intro take longer than it should and
I'm not getting to the point and blah blah blah, but
this episode was difficult for me because of one
thing.
Fear. I have post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's manageable, I'm in therapy
And I take medication and life is generally AwEsOmE!!!
That being said,
willfully inducing fear responses in myself, even in the name of science-
That's not necessarily a walk in the park for me.
In fact, in the process of making this video,
I lost quite a bit of sleep after the jump scares; my body does NOT deal with anxiety well.
But, anyway,
I'm on the other side of it now, so
strap on your hard hats, try to ignore the flood of
TRIGGERED in the comments section,
and let's get to picking apart one of the most fascinating
biological processes on the ENTIRE EARTH!
The reason it's taken me so long to get around to doing a FNaF video is, well,
there's not a lot of material for my particular brand of show.
But then I realized... If I can't take the science OUT of Five Nights at Freddy's,
maybe I can bring the science to Five Nights at Freddy's,
which is exactly what I did.
Specifically, I wanted to study the physiological effects the game would have on a person,
and before we get to my methodology,
let's talk about something first and discuss how, in
theory, Five Nights at Freddy's may not only be a way to scare the crap out of you, but may,
in FACT,
be capable of
straight-up
murdering you. In real life!
Five Nights at Freddy's, following in the tradition of thousands of scary stories come before it, relies on,
you know, fear. Specifically, though, FNaF stimulates your
fight-or-flight response.
The fight-or-flight response is one of the oldest mechanisms in ecology.
(aggressive erm-ing)
Biology. Animal stuff.
Basically, as long as there have been brains, there's been the fight-or-flight
response. It can be quantified pretty simply - something utterly
MIND-BLOWINGLY terrifying happens. Something that could possibly kill us.
What do we do: Do we dig in our heels and try to beat the crap out of it to scare it off?
OR do we strap on our PF Flyers and run for the hills?!
As I said before, fight-or-flight is OLD.
Which means it hangs out in our sympathetic nervous system. Or, more broadly, the limbic system.
We've talked about this a bit before in the Pokemon episode,
but this is the part of our brain that forgoes logic
It's WAY deeper than our cortex or even our neocortex. This is some primal animal stuff.
This is why fears can be so difficult to overcome
and why fear based mental illnesses like anxiety and post-traumatic
stress disorder can be debilitating and seemingly illogical.
When I'm walking around at night, when I hear an
unexpected noise, and it spooks me,
I'm not thinking about the logical situation
which is... I live in a city a college town with roads, police, taxes,
infrastructure, and society. So the likelihood that the sound was caused by... Say...
The fricken' ravenous coyote hunting me for my burritos,
is a lot,
lot lower than the likelihood that it's being caused by a random inebriate pissing in the bushes
Unfortunately, my logic brain doesn't get a vote on this matter
because my limbic system, at that moment, just started screaming
RED ALERT!!! Which brings us to the key component of fear
Perception.
Specifically, the perception of
control. If I think that I have control of the situation like, oh, I don't know,
it's just me sitting in my chair in my apartment watching Netflix?
I'm unlikely to have a FEAR response!!!
Notice how I'm using words like "perception" and "think", here.
What's important,
is what your subjective experience is. NOT the reality of the situation.
So, at night walking home, when I just want to eat my burritos in the dark
away from my baby so it doesn't try to take them from me, I feel out of control
There's RANDOM people who are BIGGER and STRONGER than
my floppy YouTuber muscles can beat away.
There's mutant RACCOONS, there's... BEARS, probably!
The reality is none of us are ever really in that much control, at least as individuals.
We've discovered less than 1% of the
estimated 1 million asteroids that could impact earth and caused serious damage to cities, if not the entire
human race.
There's a super-volcano building pressure beneath Yellowstone National Park that's due for an eruption
any time now, that would essentially
turn the entire western United States into a giant crater; and LESS esoterically, at least 111 of you
watching this video right now will die from injuries caused by a car accident in the next YEAR.
"Control" is an illusion, and in that illusion, we find safety and comfort.
Which is WHY FNaF is so utterly.
Terrifying. It routes you in place, gives you minimal movement, minimal
control. It robs you of your power.
It gives you just (ow, my ears) enough agency to ACT and get INVESTED, but stacks the deck
against you. You're not in control, the animatronics are.
And... Maybe, if you're unlucky,
Five nights at Freddy's would manage to do a whole lot more than just scare you.
(musical reminder I need to practice my trumpet)
What happens when you start that first night of the game, and you hear the first
clattering of pans in the distance?
Your brain instantly starts going to work: your amygdala, uh, located here goes
OH, F*CK SOMETHING'S HAPPENING! And it sends a signal to your hypothalamus located here.
The hypothalamus, now on red alert, squeezes your pituitary gland
like a sponge, releasing adrenocorticotropic hormones into your body,
which makes your adrenal gland dump epinephrine and norepinephrine
into your system. Epinephrine and norepinephrine work together
to make you more alert, increase your respiration rate, your blood flow, and, CRITICALLY,
your blood pressure, and your heart rate.
WHICH is where things can start to become deadly.
The fight-or-flight response increases blood flow to your limbs
and brain to prepare you for action. Either to equip you with the speedy reflexes
you'll need to rip your assailants throat out, or to hopefully
outrun the danger and live to flee another day.
But it's here that we start to get into trouble.
The fight-or-flight response is, essentially,
an overclocking of your system. EXCEPT, unlike a computer,
component, if you accidentally push an organ too hard, you can't just turn it off or swap it out.
Here's a human heart. It doesn't look quite like the candies made of sidewalk chalk
from Valentine's Day, but whatever. Now the right side
Uh, no.
Switch that. MY right. Th-the right when it's i-in your body.
No-not when you're looking at it. It's STAGE right not house right. There you go.
The right side is responsible for taking blood that's delivered oxygen
to the body and sending it off to the lungs; the left side takes this blood in and sends it off to
the rest of the body.
These two sides must harmonize in order to work properly.
In from the body, out to the lungs, in from the lungs, out to the body and on and on.
It goes forever UNTIL. YOU. DIE.
The heart does this so many times per minute, measured in beats per minute (bpm),
which goes up and down depending upon whether you're sleeping, just sitting there, exercising, et cetera.
The average beats per minute, or BPM, for adults at rest, known as the resting heart rate, is about
75. Which, incidentally, is the exact BPM of the music running in the background right now.
(Beethoven - Ode to Joy)
A healthy heart running at this rate is perfectly capable of moving the amount of blood
it needs to where it needs to go.
But when you're scared like, oh, I don't know. When you're trying to hide from
freakiest hell animatronics that are out to murder you
and your adrenal gland doses you with epinephrine and norepinephrine, your heart rate SKYROCKETS.
And if it doses you with enough, your heart rate can break 200 beats per minute,
which sounds more like this.
And at theses heart rates. your heart can start to beat irregularly, which is called an arrhythmia.
And you're at risk for a ventricular fibrillation.
Your heart, when it's beating this fast, can burn through its store of electrolytes,
which causes irregular electrical signals making the heart just sorta...
Quiver instead of actually pump!
And it doesn't take too much of this for your brain to become starved of much-needed, oxygen-rich blood
and put you into a coma. Or your valves could be moving so quickly that it actually causes your blood to
"cavitate", which means it causes little air bubbles, which IN TURN could cause an EMBOLISM and an ANEURYSM!
And while most healthy hearts won't do this, it doesn't mean that NO healthy hearts won't do this.
Idiopathic ventricular fibrillation, science speak for people's hearts that
stopped working for no frickin' reason, happens at approximately
1% of people who go into cardiac arrest outside of hospitals, which means, in the United States,
if you take into account the 0.1% of the entire population that'll go into cardiac arrest this year,
take that and multiply it by the 1% of people who will have idiopathic ventricular fibrillation
AND taking into account that the survivability of people who go
into cardiac arrest outside of the hospital is only 10%, we're looking at AT LEAST
ten of y'all who are gonna have a heart attack this year,
and only one of you is gonna live to tell the tale.
So far, that's 120 of you who're gonna die this year
as predicted by this show!!!
So, you know, if you're not subscribed yet, do it! Cause the clocks are tickin'!
And I need warm bodies to replace those of you who are gonna bite the dust!
Taking all of this into account. It's an
undeniable fact that Five Nights at Freddy's, if it scares you enough, could absolutely,
definitely kill you for realsies.
But enough theoretics: I want to know for sure. In fact, as someone with
anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and a caffeine addiction,
I'm an amazing test subject for death from animatronics!
SO, I did what any pioneering scientists with genius
unrecognized by his peers in his time:
I tried to kill myself
with SCIENCE.
I decided to take biometrics of both
blood pressure and my heart rate while binging my way
through every single Five Nights at Freddy's game.
The... The first three, anyway.
Remember how I mentioned I have severe anxiety?
Yeah, I couldn't keep going after number three, since I couldn't afford to drop 5000
bones on an EKG machine, I did the next best thing:
picked up the best reviewed heart rate monitor for athletes I could find, strapped it to my chest,
and got to work. And my findings?
Well, obviously, I didn't die, since I'm here now.
I have a resting heart rate of 40 beats per minute. Oh.
Holy crap.
I mean, I exercise a bit, but I also sit on my butt and play elite dangerous way too much.
Well. You're some motivation to keep at it and not pick up those cigarettes again.
Anyway, I started to get nervous literally the INSTANT
I turned FNaF on, where my heart rate increased to 60 beats per minute!
Every game, when I started a night be at night one or night five, my heart rate jumped AGAIN,
to a baseline of 90 beats per minute, and it just sat there, just CONSTANT ANXIETY.
Just... There. ALL THE TIME!
And then, invariably,
(scared me)
115 to 120 beats per minute. BOOM, SON!
Follow that by several hours of nervous pacing while my hormone levels calm down.
You'll notice these numbers are, honestly,
pretty low.
Granted, I apparently have an efficient heart, but
even if you take these numbers and control for the average adult who doesn't exercise that much,
you're looking at a pretty normal heart rate at worst of about...
180. For most people, that's like, I don't know, climbing a ton of stairs really fast.
And my heart rate only sustained this high rate for a few minutes before calming down again.
So I have to say, even with several sustained jump scares in a row, FNaF is
Holy crap - Is... Is Five Fights and Freddy's actually good for you?!
I mean - this is just, like, doing some exercise; this is Cardiovascular exercise.
Sure, you're not building muscle mass, but you're exercising your heart and lungs.
That's AWESOME!
Dude! GUYS! As long as you're not nursing a freakin' heart condition, horror games are
amazingly good for your body!!!
This is because, well, getting frightened to death requires real stakes.
Jump scares and video games, while capable of catching you off guard, just don't compare
to someone jumping out and trying to hack your head off with a machete in real life.
Some part of your brain is constantly aware that it's fake.
Even if you're an anxious, mentally ill wreck of a human being like me.
So... Cool, I guess we'll just, like, end it here.
Horror games are like
exercise. But... Better, cuz you get to sit down.
Thanks for the free cardio, Scott!
Sincerely, Austin.
Thank you, everyone, for watching my video on Five Nights at Freddy's,
Th- one of the biggest topics on this channel
and I finally covered it and, like, it was not exaggerating my anxiety.
It was a really hard thing for me to cover. I don't like horror games! I don't even like... I get surprised
when my wife all the time, just in my own apartment.
She'll like walk around the corner be like - I'll be like "YAH!", so yeah, I don't need that in my life.
(If) you're not subscribed to the game theorist yet, you need to do it RIGHT NOW.
Just do it, and there's more videos from me. There's more videos from Matpat,
I'm gonna go and do stuff, and, uh, yeah. Follow me on Twitter, "arhourigan", and I'll see you another time, son!!!
Or daughter...