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What makes the FNAF series so good? (warning tl;dr)
10 years ago
General
Yeah it might be a bit tl;dr, but I thought it was interesting.
Lately I've been in a Markiplier mood and blazed though some old videos of his, and I also revisited some of his old videos of Five Nights at Freddy's 1 and 2. I couldn't help but think there's something really uniquely cool about the basic idea of the game, and it got me thinking.
I might have a working theory. A game theory, hehe, except instead of looking at the lore, it looks into what makes the "feel" of the games click so well for so many of us.
I call it the Backstage Effect. It starts out with bright colors and friendly faces, but after a while you can peek through the cracks and notice the scary machines behind it all. The eerie machines and darkness back there don't belong. But it's behind all the bright colors and friendly faces and driving them. That tends to give off an unsettling sense of, "it's all just superficial, and what's driving them on the inside is in fact something very different, hiding from us." A good example of that I think is the industrial employee tunnels you find beneath Disney World.
Horror uses the Backstage Effect a lot. Pretty much everything that uses children's themes does it, like demonic teddy bears, demonic little girls, demonic clowns, etc. They give an outside appearance of something nice, friendly, and following the laws of physics, but later reveal a core beneath that's hostile, violent, and violating physics as we know it. The contrast between the friendly outside and the sinister inside, the feeling that the inside "doesn't belong" and yet is the essence controlling the outside, is what makes it work so well in horror. It's all about *contrast*.
Sometimes physics is all you need. SCP-173 is a statue. Statues are supposed to stay in one place. But when you blink or look away, it moves to a different place. Even without its homocidal tendencies, that's enough to make it creepy. SCP-173 appears to be one thing, but turns out to have a completely different inner essence. That's the Backstage Effect.
What makes Five Nights at Freddy's stand out as a horror franchise, I think, is that it employs the Backstage Effect not just once, but on multiple levels at the same time:
1. You're an employee working literally *behind the scenes* of the kids' restaurant. Already you're being exposed to the bowels of the restaurant where the kids don't belong, with industrial doors and phone guy's "I'm working" tone of voice not really fitting in with the spirit of being kid friendly. And yet that's the core that drives the restaurant. The cheapness, the "hollowness," of the restaurant gives it the Backstage Effect, kind of like seeing the industrial employee tunnels underneath Disney World. Seeing the restaurant from an employee's point of view makes it a little creepy, even without any of the monsters you see later.
2. At first, the movements of the animatronics seem to be just the way phone guy described them. Ok yeah, they're programmed to move around at night, and yeah they're programmed to act as if I were an endoskeleton without a suit, so yeah I should just be careful they don't accidentally see me. But later, when you see them staring at you and focusing so intensely on you, that's when you start to think, "Maybe it's not so accidental, but they're *deliberately* trying to get to me. Maybe it's not just lifeless programming. Maybe the animatronics actually *know* I'm here and *want* me dead..."
Also if you think about it, the two levels are kind of inverses of each other when it comes to *living* vs. *dead*:
On the 1st level, the restaurant *appears* to be full of life and colorful friendly animals, but *turn out* to be all run by lifeless machines.
On the 2nd level, the animatronics *appear* to be lifeless machines, but *turn out* to have living spirits on the inside.
In a way, the demonic supernatural side of the restaurant in FNAF almost serves to correct the cheapness of the restaurant itself. It's all kind of one big closure that way. It's almost as if the souls of the dead children were taking revenge for being lied to by the restaurant, and forcing that lie to become the truth by bringing Freddy and his friends to life.
Further, without all the scary monsters and the supernatural, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza seems to be a very cliche concept for a kid's restaurant. The cliche of it makes it feel dead. If you were a kid and you went there, you wouldn't really notice that except maybe as a vague, unsetting notion. What better way to put that unsettling notion to rest than to do the work of bringing Freddy and his friends to life by yourself. To *be* Freddy, and Foxy, and so forth.
Even further, I wonder if that's what furry means to a lot of us? Filling a void. Bringing life to something that needs life but feels dead. Closure. We grew up with things very similar to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, like Disney characters, Pokemon, etc., and these things are where a lot of our inspiration as furries come from. By themselves, they feel dead, cheap, cliche, the products of soul-deadening commercialism. By doing the work of bringing them to life ourselves, by distorting them into our own visions of them, we're doing a good, we're making right.
So yeah, theories. But I like it when the theories not only try to explain the lore and the plot, but also try to explain the *feel* of the game as well.
Lately I've been in a Markiplier mood and blazed though some old videos of his, and I also revisited some of his old videos of Five Nights at Freddy's 1 and 2. I couldn't help but think there's something really uniquely cool about the basic idea of the game, and it got me thinking.
I might have a working theory. A game theory, hehe, except instead of looking at the lore, it looks into what makes the "feel" of the games click so well for so many of us.
I call it the Backstage Effect. It starts out with bright colors and friendly faces, but after a while you can peek through the cracks and notice the scary machines behind it all. The eerie machines and darkness back there don't belong. But it's behind all the bright colors and friendly faces and driving them. That tends to give off an unsettling sense of, "it's all just superficial, and what's driving them on the inside is in fact something very different, hiding from us." A good example of that I think is the industrial employee tunnels you find beneath Disney World.
Horror uses the Backstage Effect a lot. Pretty much everything that uses children's themes does it, like demonic teddy bears, demonic little girls, demonic clowns, etc. They give an outside appearance of something nice, friendly, and following the laws of physics, but later reveal a core beneath that's hostile, violent, and violating physics as we know it. The contrast between the friendly outside and the sinister inside, the feeling that the inside "doesn't belong" and yet is the essence controlling the outside, is what makes it work so well in horror. It's all about *contrast*.
Sometimes physics is all you need. SCP-173 is a statue. Statues are supposed to stay in one place. But when you blink or look away, it moves to a different place. Even without its homocidal tendencies, that's enough to make it creepy. SCP-173 appears to be one thing, but turns out to have a completely different inner essence. That's the Backstage Effect.
What makes Five Nights at Freddy's stand out as a horror franchise, I think, is that it employs the Backstage Effect not just once, but on multiple levels at the same time:
1. You're an employee working literally *behind the scenes* of the kids' restaurant. Already you're being exposed to the bowels of the restaurant where the kids don't belong, with industrial doors and phone guy's "I'm working" tone of voice not really fitting in with the spirit of being kid friendly. And yet that's the core that drives the restaurant. The cheapness, the "hollowness," of the restaurant gives it the Backstage Effect, kind of like seeing the industrial employee tunnels underneath Disney World. Seeing the restaurant from an employee's point of view makes it a little creepy, even without any of the monsters you see later.
2. At first, the movements of the animatronics seem to be just the way phone guy described them. Ok yeah, they're programmed to move around at night, and yeah they're programmed to act as if I were an endoskeleton without a suit, so yeah I should just be careful they don't accidentally see me. But later, when you see them staring at you and focusing so intensely on you, that's when you start to think, "Maybe it's not so accidental, but they're *deliberately* trying to get to me. Maybe it's not just lifeless programming. Maybe the animatronics actually *know* I'm here and *want* me dead..."
Also if you think about it, the two levels are kind of inverses of each other when it comes to *living* vs. *dead*:
On the 1st level, the restaurant *appears* to be full of life and colorful friendly animals, but *turn out* to be all run by lifeless machines.
On the 2nd level, the animatronics *appear* to be lifeless machines, but *turn out* to have living spirits on the inside.
In a way, the demonic supernatural side of the restaurant in FNAF almost serves to correct the cheapness of the restaurant itself. It's all kind of one big closure that way. It's almost as if the souls of the dead children were taking revenge for being lied to by the restaurant, and forcing that lie to become the truth by bringing Freddy and his friends to life.
Further, without all the scary monsters and the supernatural, Freddy Fazbear's Pizza seems to be a very cliche concept for a kid's restaurant. The cliche of it makes it feel dead. If you were a kid and you went there, you wouldn't really notice that except maybe as a vague, unsetting notion. What better way to put that unsettling notion to rest than to do the work of bringing Freddy and his friends to life by yourself. To *be* Freddy, and Foxy, and so forth.
Even further, I wonder if that's what furry means to a lot of us? Filling a void. Bringing life to something that needs life but feels dead. Closure. We grew up with things very similar to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, like Disney characters, Pokemon, etc., and these things are where a lot of our inspiration as furries come from. By themselves, they feel dead, cheap, cliche, the products of soul-deadening commercialism. By doing the work of bringing them to life ourselves, by distorting them into our own visions of them, we're doing a good, we're making right.
So yeah, theories. But I like it when the theories not only try to explain the lore and the plot, but also try to explain the *feel* of the game as well.
I'm curious to see what the next few months will give us. :)