[Game Theory Petscop Intro]
Hello Internet, welcome to Game Theory.
Last episode, we unearthed the linchpin in decoding the Petscop mystery,
that this haunted game is really just a device for training AI, to perfectly replicate the behaviours of people in the real world.
We actively see it happening in episode 17, where a load of test subjects are unleashed into a situation, in this case,
a replica of Marvin's house, and the ones that managed to find their way out the front door are selected to create
the next generation of test subjects.
This is the principle of a Darwinian learning algorithm. Overtime, those generations become more and more sophisticated.
Until the AI is finally thinking like the person that the game's creator is hoping to replicate.
Further adding to this theory are
the patterns in the game's autosave files, and the fact that these
recordings progress from generation 1 to generation 15, 3 separate times, indicating that this isn't a game generation,
but rather a generation of AI. If you haven't seen that last episode, watch it now because that information
and a general understanding of the Petscop series,
is essential for today's episode, as we piece together what I believe to be,
the definitive solutions to the major loose threads in the series.
Who is Paul? Why is the character Belle here?
What's the deal with the creepy schoolhouse scenes?
And why is this story being told to us in this way?
All that and more today, as we continue to close the book on the scariest game,
YOU luckily, will never have the chance to play.
Let's start with the primary question of Petscop:
Can someone be reborn?
We've seen a number of references to birth and rebirth
throughout the series from a cryptic note in the Quitters Room, reading;
"Can you remember being born?" to Tiaras hypothesis that
some children can be psychologically damaged beyond rebirth.
This is the primary goal of Petscop the game; to rebirth people using AI,
to quantify everything about an individual and then replicate that person in a digital format.
As we talked about last time Rainer uses it to rebirth Marvin, so he can find the hidden grave.
He then uses it to rebirth Care, to find out what happened to her on the day that she went missing,
and he tries to use it on the character Belle in his attempts to rebirth Tiara
except something goes horribly, horribly wrong.
so that's the 'what' of Petscop but now we need to figure out 'why'.
We know bits and pieces about kidnappings, and plucking eyebrows and children dying,
but how does it all tie together? Now that we know what we're watching,
why are we seeing it? Why are we watching what amounts to an AI training simulator?
Well strap in, cause this one is a doozy,
Today, we solve Petscop.
And let me just say, in all my years of doing
theories on YouTube and solving these sorts of video game puzzles, this one ranks up there as a personal favourite because this one was so
thoughtfully put together, and was incredibly difficult to logic out.
You'll see what I mean here in a few minutes.
Let's start with the basics: a family tree, midway through Petscop 17,
we have all our main players laid out for us via a series of text boxes,
Care is actually Carrie Mark, a girl born in 1992, who was kidnapped by her father and kept in a school building for five months.
Her parents are Anna and Marvin, something that we had already pieced together in previous uploads.
What we didn't know though, is that she also has an uncle named Thomas, an aunt named Jill,
and a cousin named Daniel. Now that new information may seem unimportant but it allows us to make a connection to
literally every other important person in this entire series.
Daniel is actually Rainer, the creator of Petscop.
We know this from episode 19, where Mike's playthrough finds a literal Easter egg, that we're told was hidden in quote
"Daniels game??".
Since the game is Petscop and since Rainer created Petscop,
this tells us that Daniel and Rainer are one in the same, and since Rainer and Mike are
brothers, as we've established in the past, that means Mike Hammond, the dead kid,
is Care's cousin as well, and so this whole side of the family now becomes the Hammonds.
That scene from Petscop 19, though, is interesting for another reason.
It tells us the origin of the game itself.
Petscop began as a game for Mike; a place to literally hide Easter eggs.
We see Mike being the first person to play it, over and over in the save files.
We know that Mike loves video games, based on the PlayStation controller design
on the walls of his room in the mysterious child library, and so what this tells us is that
long before it became an AI training simulator,
it was a gift.
It was a gift from brother to brother, before one of them dies prematurely in a tragic accident,
but more on Mike's fate later. Going back to the family tree,
We also now know how our Let's Player Paul, fits into this big web
I've long suspected that he's a part of this family,
but now we have confirmation as to exactly where,
and it all goes back, to the windmill.
Back in Petscop 9, we were given this riddle about Marvin's past,
It's a line that I've quoted many times in all of the different Petscop theories, but here it is one more time:
Based on this letter, we know that 'windmill girl' and Anna, Marvin's wife, are sisters.
But Petscop 17 gives us the necessary information to connect the dots.
In that video, the AI is able to unearth a secret grave,
belonging to a young girl named Lina Leskowits, who died at the age of 9. Based on the face on that gravestone,
which matches this face back at the windmill, we know that Lina is 'windmill girl',
which makes her Anna's sister, and Marvin's missing friend from all those years ago.
In summary, all this information confirms that Petscop is the tale of three connected families: the Hammonds, the Marks and the Leskowitz'.
but how this tie back into Paul? Get ready cause this one is just brilliant!
If you look at the first mention of Petscop online, it was via a Reddit post, entitled
The one and only post on Reddit made by a user named,
Paul Leskowitz.
But Paul's connections go deeper than just being related to windmill girl Lina,
He also shares a surprising number of similarities to Care.
Throughout the series, bit by bit, we learn of a growing connection between these two characters.
In episode 11, Paul mentions that the two are
exactly the same age.
Then, he admits that he looks similar to Care.
Even conversations that he's had in the past, seemed to make their way into the game; only they appeared through the character of Care.
For someone who's connected to this family, has some passing awareness of who these people are,
even Paul can't believe that he wouldn't remember the emergency of Care suddenly going missing.
When you take all of this information in the context of a Darwinian Learning Algorithm, the evidence is clear;
Paul is another iteration of the Care AI coming from the same generation.
Remember last time how I said that each generation of AI features
hundreds of possible candidates, set out to accomplish a task,
with only the strongest performers being selected? Well, Paul is one of those, and he's made the cut.
He is, in essence another iteration of care. One that's made slightly different choices, but is still passing this test.
That's why they're the same age, why they look he same, why he can't
remember anything about her disappearance, and why they're having similar conversations.
It would explain why there would be so many instances of weird syncing between the episodes, where
movements are perfectly recreated from one playthrough, to the next.
It's all iterations of AI playing through the same movement patterns. That's also why there's this repeated question,
posed to Paul of "Remember being born?"
He can't! He wasn't really born, he was created.
It's also why Paul has a room in the child library, alongside Mike and Care and Lina, despite never having
any connection to this game prior to his playthrough.
And since according to that letter we know that Care is a
reborn Lina, by the transitive property of equality,
it means that Paul is a reborn Lina too. That's why in Petscop 15 whenever you pick up a party hat trinket,
you're immediately dragged back to this picture and the word "Girl".
The party hat is the object that appears on Lina's gravestone, because she died on her 9th birthday.
And Marvin, as represented by green tool here in these school sequences, is dragging you back as he tries to
reprogram you, all in his attempts to rebirth his long dead friend Lina.
I hear you saying.
Yes, that's absolutely true but it doesn't discount him as an AI. Consider this, in Petscop 20,
We see Marvin's playthrough. At the beginning of it, it seems like he's having trouble distinguishing his left from his right.
He then pulls up the control menu. And what do we see? That left and right on the controller are reversed.
So now rewind to a much earlier
part of the series and what fun fact do we learn about Paul?
That Paul too, has trouble telling his left from his right.
Whether he's real or digital, that confusion would
stem from him being born out of a system, where the controls are reversed.
I mean, I told you this series was deep! We're talking the control schematics.
You can just tell how no detail throughout this entire series is too small to matter!
It's just unbelievable to me how tightly scriped this whole thing is,
it's really impressive, especially for something that has such a casual feel to it.
I'm sorry, I just really love this series and the game has
clearly established a connection between the real world and the game world.
By cranking up the exposure of various loading screen transitions throughout the series,
we're able to see real world versions of various in-game objects.
Stairs down into a basement, a piano hooked up into a PlayStation,
and perhaps the most chilling one of all, Care's box of spilled crayons from her room
in the child library. These bridges between the game and real-world objects are solidified by Petscop 16,
an episode which, in my opinion, is the most disturbing installment of the entire series, which features an
emergency distress warning, as well as a live feed of something
identified as the "Ghost Room". By the end of that video, a dot which is tracking something
slowly makes its way over to the chair, and begins doing something..with this: the TV. To me it's pretty clear
Whatever it is, in that room, it started to play Petscop.
Notice in the corner, a wheel that should look pretty darn familiar,
It's the same wheel that cycles through different iterations of the AI for any given generation,
but we can actually go one step further with this little clue,
it's set to the same alignment that we see Care's AI in, at the end of Petscop 17.
So what could all of that mean? Well to me,
It seems to indicated that Care AI has somehow been able to
transition out of the game, and into the real world,
and it's now being very closely monitored in this observation room. At the very
beginning of that same video, for a brief moment, we can actually glimpse some text on the pause screen.
Now, that's certainly vague but here's how I interpret it:
a ship in a bottle is a perfect replica of a real-life thing, but it's kept preserved and protected,
inside of its bottle. You can look but you can't touch. The ghost room then, is just that; a place where
replicas of humans are made, preserved, protected and then observed
without any chance that they'll be able to escape. Further supporting this idea is
u/pickledsarcasm on Reddit, who pointed out that calling it ship in a bottle, may be a reference to a
1993 Star Trek episode of the same name, where characters from the Holodeck become real, as they basically will themselves
into being physical forms Which is why, it's finally time to talk about Belle. Up until this point
I've tried to focus the narrative of this theory, and this game, around family because that makes sense.
It's nice, and it's concise, and all the pieces fit pretty cleanly together.
But then you have Belle, a character who the game outright tells us, isn't part of the family.
A character, though, who seems unbelievably important to the plot, and has clearly tied to something
very, very bad happening in the world of Petscop, based on this progression of save file names.
But whose role in this thing is vague, to say the least but here's the thing; Belle is the
linchpin, to proving that people can cross into and out of this game.
Based on the progression of save files, we know that Belle was one of the game's
earliest human testers, and she was good at it. Relative to all the other playthrough snippets that
we watched, Belle is quickly able to solve all of the games puzzles, but then something happens, and apparently she's gone.
She's trapped somewhere, presumably inside the game and she's still good.
inside the game too, as we see her actively able to hack into the game from the inside.
So much so, that she's now able to change texture files.
This potentially leads her to eventually escape,, as in episode 12,
We're told that she's finally free, that she's somehow been rescued, that she's been running the game, aka
trapped inside of the game, for over 17 and a half years.
But most importantly Rainer asks her this,
This all shows that the ghost room is real, and that Belle, at least at one point has been sitting
in a chair in a real room, and that upon getting rescued, she's back in that real space. A real space that
Marvin was also apparently in. In one of the most crucial bits of lore that I've ever covered in this series ever,
in the final five seconds of the final episode of Petscop (minus the dance break) we get the big reveal:
As we enter a pause screen, that exists inside of another pause screen,
we're left with the concluding message of,
Yep, thats it, ladies and gentlemen. The final clue in this epic multi-year mystery, is a quote about a butt groove.
But why, what's this telling us?
Well, it tells us that the chair is real, the cavity is real and that once you pass through a couple layers of meta,
your butt is real too. ("I'm dumb thic[c]").
Your butt, is the answer. That is the final note of Petscop.
Or is it? Because we still have one final set of clues to look into.
the road, the pets and Tiara. Up until this point, we've broken this series
down into very small pieces, just like you work on a puzzle. Chunk here and a chunk here all united by themes or colours.
But now it's time to step back and assemble the bigger picture here. The actual story of these 21 episodes.
How do all of these individual events connect? What really did happen to Mike and tiara and Lina and Rainer?
Where's Paul and Care, now that some AI is out there in the real world?
And what does the future of Petscop hold, if indeed, there is a future to Petscop?
All that is coming up, in what I predict to be my final
Petscop theory, where we get away from a lot of the finer details
and tell the story that this game is trying to tell us, It's honestly not gonna be next week because..
Honestly, I could use a break from covering Petscop and I'm sure you'd like to see me cover something else
But it's probably gonna be another week or two. If Petscop is truly the tale of three families,
what exactly happened to those three families?
That sounds like I'm rehashing FNAF now. Anyway more on that soon, as we conclude the series once and for all.
But until that day comes, remember,
THAT'S JUST A THEORY. A GAME THEORY. Thanks for watching!
Subtitles by Celicly
Ok cya later everyone