Game Theory: FNAF, The AI Uprising! (Security Breach Ruin)

Dina Ways

The day is finally here. Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach has arrived after a year and a half in the making, which means that I only have today, one final chance, to solve Security Breach once and for all before Ruin clarifies everything for us or, you know, just adds even more layers of confusion on top. So, can I do it? Can I give you the theory that will finally pull together everything and unite the very fragmented fan base in time for the newest game release? Let’s find out. [Music] Hello, Internet! Welcome to Game Theory. And you heard that intro, right? The Ruin DLC is finally out. In fact, it just dropped today as I upload this video, which is kind of crazy to think about because it means that we’ve spent the better part of two years trying to solve one game and one game only: Security Breach. But all that time hasn’t just been us spinning our wheels over and over again in Roxy Raceway. We’ve had ourselves some help, kinda. Since the release of Security Breach, it’s felt like the new Tales of the Pizzaplex books have been trying to offer us clues as to what the story of Security Breach was trying to be. But those clues have been, um, challenging for the community to interpret, to say the least. Mimics and tiger rocks and Dr. Rabbits, the Storyteller Edwin, GGY, the list has been huge. And even if you follow every detail of every book, it’s still pretty darn confusing. But finally, finally, with the release of this latest book, Tiger Rock, everything has come into focus for me. I think I finally get it. I think I finally understand the story that modern FNAF as a whole has been trying to tell us this entire time, which, you know, is kind of a good thing because it’ll put us all on the same page as we try to theorize moving forward. This theory, I suspect, is the final key to the puzzle, the thing that’s going to help us all understand what the heck we’re seeing throughout the new DLC and from this point forward in the franchise. And I suspect it all comes down to one topic: AI. Obviously, AI has been the buzzword of 2023, talking about how powerful it is, fears about it taking our jobs, and concerns about the ethics of it. If you read an article online, there’s a chance that it’s been written by Chat GPT. Did you see some cool artwork that just won a competition? Turns out Dolly made it. Watch a cool YouTube video. Geez, MatPat, you’re using a lot of power. You wouldn’t last one minute playing 2020 mode, which I totally beat on my first try, by the way. There’s a chance that those voices were produced by AI. But for all the talk about it, what exactly is AI? Basically, artificial intelligence is a machine’s ability to think like a human. You feed the machine a bunch of data, and the computer brain is able to learn from it. It ingests all that information and then makes decisions based on that data moving forward. It actually closely parallels the way that we learn. We also ingest data from our environment and then use that data to make our decisions. And just like with humans, the more data that you’re feeding into these things, the more sophisticated and well-rounded the responses become, and the more lifelike it seems. Well, within reason. You see, there’s a problem with all of this. You have to be careful about the data that you’re feeding it. If you aren’t properly filtering the information that’s being ingested, making sure that it’s factual and unbiased, then bad things are going to start to happen. If I put in a bunch of misinformation, the responses I get back are just going to be wrong. And that makes sense, right? The computer doesn’t know any better. It only knows what we tell it. But things can actually get a lot worse than that. What if I put in a bunch of hateful opinions or biases? Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to get back. You’re going to get a dark reflection of that data. And we saw that exact situation play out live in real time over on Twitch last year. Back in December of 2022, one of the big trends was an AI-generated show called “Nothing Forever.” This show was designed to parody the old comedy series, Seinfeld, with its dialogue and assets all being generated by AI in real-time. Chat GPT wrote the scripts, Dolly provided the visuals, and a few others. And I gotta say, it was impressive. Not only was this thing a pretty darn accurate replica of the classic series, but it was also just cool to see how all these systems could work together to make something entirely brand-new. But then one day, GPT-3 experienced outages, prompting the creators to switch over to a different AI chat system, one that was less filtered, one that was less sophisticated with its ingested data. All of a sudden, the jokes the AI was making in the show became harmful and abusive. Characters started using slurs and making hateful jokes, and the show got suspended from Twitch. Bad data equals bad results. But then, how does this all apply to FNAF? Well, each new Tales of the Pizzaplex book has leaned more and more into AI. In The Mimic, we watch as Edwin, a close parallel to Henry from the games, makes an AI program to help entertain his son while he’s away at work. In The Storyteller, we watch as that same AI system gets installed and starts controlling the entirety of the Pizzaplex. In the epilogues, we watch as an AI program takes its ingested data too seriously, ripping the arms and legs off of people wrongly assuming them to be robots. Bad data again yields bad results. And the newest story, The Monty Within, makes all of this crystal clear. When a boy named Kane gives a presentation about the human brain, he proposes that the left hemisphere of the brain is essentially like a computer, an AI within every person. That AI is then responsible for all the negative self-talk and flaws that human beings have. Quote from the story: “My point is that AI can only use what it’s given. When the AI has bad data, it can turn into something that’s harmful to itself and to the systems around it.” The actual theory that this guy is spouting is a little bit out there in terms of realism, but the fact that he specifically calls it “the AI within” is no coincidence. The new villain of FNAF is rogue AI, unpoliced and then unleashed, with us humans helplessly trying to pick up the pieces too late and getting ripped to shreds in the process. But obviously, all that’s just happening in the books. Nothing like this actually exists in the games. Otherwise, we’d be aware of it, right? Right? Well, it has been there, and it’s been under our noses the entire time. If you take this knowledge of AI from the books and start to take a look back through the games, you can see Scott sowing the seeds for these ideas as far back as Help Wanted. In fact, I actually called this very plot twist four years ago. Calling this character William would be missing a huge chunk of this game’s story. This isn’t William. It’s no longer the same guy. He’s now an AI replicating the behaviors of William. To truly unpack what I’m talking about here, we have to actually rewind all the way back to FNAF VR and the origins of Glitchtrap. It’s hard to remember this now, but when the happy-waving bunny virus first filled our screens, there was a lot of confusion about what exactly he was. Was this the spirit of Afton manifesting within the code, or was he just a digital copy of Afton? We’re told in the game that, I mean, they sent us that stuff in the first place with no explanation. Told us to scan it. It was just junk, circuit boards, and things like that. Looked pretty old. Somehow, though, there was usable code on some of it. He’s Afton, scanned into the system off of circuit boards. But how exactly? Afton is, and was always, still a human. Why would his essence be on a circuit board? Back then, possession was the order of the day. Remnant spirits infused into animatronic parts. And so, for a long time, we just collectively settled on the idea that Afton somehow managed to escape his purgatory of Ultimate Custom Night by attaching a piece of his soul to a circuit board that was buried in the spring lock suit that he was wearing. That circuit board then got scanned during the events of FNAF VR and AR, creating Glitchtrap, a virus that would then spread throughout Fazbear’s systems, eventually passing into Vanessa. The series moved on, and we all moved on with it. But I would be lying if I said that this was the cleanest solution out there. The solution implied that Fazbear Entertainment went to the burned-down FNAF 6 Pizzeria, found the spring lock suit with Afton’s dead body still inside, and then just, you know, took out the circuit board to use somehow. I’m not convinced that the workers would have been happy to continue their job when they pry open a suit and discover the remains of the company’s founder inside. And yet, that was just the best that we had because, up to that point, that was largely the rules of the series. It was about the supernatural, not the sci-fi. It was possessions and ghosts, not rogue AI and technology on the fritz. Or at least, we didn’t think the series was about that yet. But we were wrong. In Snap World, take a look at the world map. For me, it’s messy, right? This thing is just so odd. It’s hacked together with no transition between the lands, complicated with all these twisting pathways that have no rhyme or reason to them. And then also, just on a basic level, why is it so zoomed out like this? See what you will about Scott Cawthon’s game programming, but he should know enough to make a better, more usable map than this thing, right? Well, that’s because it’s not a map. It’s a diagram. It’s a blueprint. A blueprint of the human brain. I know that sounds absolutely insane, but just take a look at this map and now take a look at this map. This map of the human brain. Notice all the parallels here. A long brain stems right here in the middle where Pinwheel Fun House is. Deep Metal Mine and Black Tomb Yard. Two smaller rounded areas in the back match the cerebellum and occipital lobe. Two smaller rounded lobes in the back of the brain. Even the twisting nature of the game’s various pathways acts exactsly like the brain. Our brain is full of wrinkles, the gyri or curves, and the sulci or grooves. It’s built that way so we have as much surface area in there as possible, which allows for more neuronal connections to happen, thereby making us smarter. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here in this FNAF world map. That’s also why it stays zoomed out the entire time, so we can see the silhouette. We can understand what Scott was actually going for. That white blob in front, it’s either an eyeball or the frontal lobe. This, I suspect, was Afton’s earliest experimentation with AI, turning a robot brain into something truly intelligent, to try and put things back together like he promised his dying son. Back then, we weren’t looking for clues to humanoid robots. But now, going back to the series and looking forward, we see those hints everywhere. Fast forward to Sister Location. There it is again. Afton literally has human heads sitting there on the desk, leaking, hidden in plain sight. Right in the lobby, he was trying to create people. He was experimenting with creating artificial intelligence. Either he or Henry, maybe even both of them, created an AI program to speed up the programming process, to learn the way that a human learns, to copy and bring new life to their dead children. By observing Afton, by copying him, the program was basically able to act as a second brain. Inputting bad data got them bad results, and we wound up with Glitchtrap. There’s also another related possibility here. In the books, the genius inventor Edwin, parallel to the game timeline’s Henry, creates the mimic, programmed to entertain a small child, giving it a rudimentary body so it can play and learn from the small boy. Eventually, his child dies, and Edwin abandons everything in his grief, including this mimic program. Fazbear Entertainment rolls in to collect what was their property, and in doing so, collects the mimic, but not before it kills a number of their employees. In true Fazbear fashion, that doesn’t really stop them. Instead, they collect the parts, and repurpose them, including the circuit boards, in order to create “new scenarios for VR, AR, and arcade games,” which is exactly what we see happening throughout Snap VR and AR. Old circuit boards of the original games made by a rogue indie developer, getting scanned into the system, child murder and all, and from that data, the system spits out Glitchtrap. Bad data again yielded bad results. The mimic basically got itself a crash course in Afton. The AI is watching and learning how it should behave based on its actions, leading to it manifesting as a man in a rabbit suit. Either way, whether the mimic program was built by Henry or William, an AI trained itself up to be Afton incarnate. Speaking of training, it’s time for all of us to start training so we can change the course of history. Theorizing about the battle between good and evil in fictional worlds is fun and all, but have you ever thought about those “what if” scenarios happening in real-world battles? What if the Romans had never conquered Egypt? What if Britain hadn’t conquered, like, literally everyone? Well, I suppose not everyone, everyone, foreign. Regardless, thanks to today’s sponsor, Rise of Kingdoms, you can concoct your own all-star matchups of history. Rise of Kingdoms has 14 historical civilizations that you can play as, like the Ottoman Empire, the Vikings, as well as the newest and arguably the coolest, Ancient Greece. We all know that the Greeks were some of the smartest people in history, paving the way in subjects like math and science. Probably why I liked them so much in history class. But they weren’t just a bunch of nerds. They also wielded incredible military prowess. So finally, you can live out your dreams of commanding an army of 300 unstoppable soldiers. 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Thanks again to Rise of Kingdoms for sponsoring this portion of today’s episode, which means it’s now time to talk about the elephant in the room, or, I suppose, the elephant down in the basement. Crispy Boy, Burn Trap. Burn Trap showing up during one of the endings of Security Breach was one of the weirdest and most frustrating things to ever happen in this franchise. We all collectively rolled our eyes and uttered his catchphrase, “I always come back,” thinking, “Yeah, but did you really have to?” It just raised more questions than it answered. Like, how are you still alive? Was Henry wrong about Remnant being destroyed at high temperatures? Did Afton manage to escape the fire? It was nearly impossible to say. We had a few ideas that involved Vanessa repurposing Glam Rock Bonnie’s endoskeleton. But now, I think we actually know the truth. And again, that truth is rooted in this AI concept. Probably the best and scariest part of the Security Breach was the utility tunnels. A bunch of narrow passageways full of endoskeletons that only attack when you’re looking at them. But throughout this area, there’s also a lot of posters on the wall. Weird posters, were all meant to teach the Glam Rock endoskeletons how to behave. How to correctly hold a child’s hand, how to play nicely with other kids, how to not scare a girl in a bed that has a bedspread and lamp of the FNAF 4 house. Hold on, that’s not just anybody either. It’s a hospital bed. Oh, that feels like it has huge implications for the lore of FNAF 4. Anyway, that is not my focus right now. The point is, the endoskeletons down there in the basement, they are being trained up. They’re being taught, they’re being educated. One by one, data is being ingested by their systems. My suspicion is that whoever’s doing the training down there, they’re trying to find the right mix of data, the right combination of inputs to get the desired output. But what would that desired output be? Afton. You see, these robots have clearly been tampered with. If you keep looking, you see one poster where the robot is being taught not to knock over the cake, but then the “X” has been crossed off and replaced with a purple checkmark. Yes, we do want that bad behavior. When you see a hurt child, don’t help them. But as one last reveal for this section of the game, in the big final room, we see an endoskeleton wearing purple bunny ears, and another purple rabbit behind him. That right there is Vanny, messing around with the new mimic line of Glam Rock endoskeletons. It literally reveals her plan to turn one of them into the new Afton. She’s finding the inputs that are required to create an army of evil Afton bots. She’s looking for the data that produces her bad results. And that ultimately is what Burntrap is. The body of Afton with the mind of a mimic. The epilogues of the new book series take place in the FNAF 6 location under the Pizzaplex as it’s being built. A new shipment of animatronics arrived, but one of these is unlike the others, looking burnt and mangled. Since they can’t put this burned one up on stage with all the other new animatronics, one of the workers decides to program it to tear the heads and arms off of the junk endoskeletons that are just lying around. This obviously goes horrifically wrong though, when the little robot decides to take his programming a bit too seriously. He starts ripping the heads and arms off of anything that looks humanoid, including construction workers and later a group of teens who sneak their way into the facility. We learn alongside the teens that this thing is also running a version of the mimic program and that it likes to wear costumes. It’s also physically able to contort itself into any animatronic costume or shell that it needs to, expanding and contracting to fit any space or shape that it needs, even if that space is a human body. Quote: “In a nanosecond, one of the mimic’s spidery legs reached out and peeled open the back of the blue dog costume. The instant the costume was breached, the mimic wormed its way past the edges of the matted blue fur. Shockingly, the mimic shoved itself inside the costume with Kelly. Lucia heard a sickening crunch.” So hold on a minute. A mimic in the ruins of the FNAF 6 Pizzeria that likes wearing old costumes, even if there’s already a human body inside? That right there, is Burntrap. That’s why we see what are essentially new Glam Rock animatronic parts entwined with the old fleshy parts of Afton. It’s not that Vanessa rebuilt the body and just decided that they’d make for good decoration. The mimic is literally contorting itself to fit in with what remains of Afton inside of his existing suit. So feed an AI program a bunch of data about a serial killer, and boom, you get yourself a serial killer. Feed an AI too much data or data that conflicts, things start to get messy in a hurry. Enter Tiger Rock. In the books, AI is represented by two main creatures. One is obviously the mimic that’s roaming around in the basement like we just talked about. But the other is another version of the mimic program, Tiger Rock, an AI that’s in charge of the Pizzaplex, a tiger that very specifically has mismatched blue and green eyes, a very literal way of showcasing the two clashing forces that are operating inside of it. But what exactly are those conflicting forces? The book never makes it clear. In our last theory, I spoke a lot about how Edwin and his son David are stand-ins for characters from the game timeline, one of the creators of Fazbear Entertainment, Henry, and his young daughter, Charlie. In the book, The Mimic was built to copy David, and so presumably, in the game, if the mimic’s there, it would also be designed to potentially copy Charlie, who was sadly killed by William and goes on to possess the puppet. And would you know it, just like the David AI taking control of the Pizzaplex in the book, that’s why we’re seeing puppet imagery weirdly spaced throughout the game. In puppet-colored wires, weirdly placed plushies, and painted staff bots, it’s an AI that’s taken over the operation of the Pizzaplex, infusing itself into the very wires of the building. That’s why both the books and the game have conversations written in weird, mysterious, shape-based lettering. It shows us that the mimic program, Edwin’s son, the entity controlling the Pizzaplex, the puppet Charlie, and Henry are all connected. But while I am absolutely convinced that Charlie exists in the wires of the Pizzaplex, one thing that I haven’t been able to answer yet is why all the imagery is evil. We’re not seeing plushies of the marionette. We’re seeing plushies of the Nightmare puppet all over the Pizzaplex, the scary, evil version of the character. Why, though? This character is not evil. If anything, this character is pure good. Is it because the puppet’s vindictive? It’s mad about being killed? Maybe it’s angry that it’s been summoned again to have to protect another generation of kids? No, I don’t think so. In my last theory, I suspected that it had to do with Afton being mixed in with the puppet program. So you have these two competing codes, these two competing forces, have to share one space, one body, for lack of a better word. And I think that I was really close on that one, but still not quite right. Think about it. Tiger Rock is very clearly meant to have a green eye and a blue eye. Green and blue. Charlie and Elizabeth. The puppet and baby. The protection of the puppet mixed with the violence and anger of Elizabeth. Throughout the books, Tiger Rock is depicted as having a duality about him. He’s good and loving and fun, but then suddenly he turns sinister and threatening. There’s this moment in one of his stories where he literally helps a kid, like quote, “a puppet on a ring.” Doesn’t get much more explicit than that. And yet, later that same story, he just rolls up and rips the kid’s arms clean off. No joke, that is how the story ends. It is very bizarre and dark. We have a lot of evidence to suggest that Elizabeth might be mixed in there. Yeah, I’d say I have like a medium amount. Outside of Baby’s iconic blue eyes, we also have years of book canon establishing that Elizabeth and Charlie are often revealed to share the same body, most explicitly in the fourth closet novel. We also have this weird moment in the main Tiger Rock story where he takes the form of a white clock face. This moment comes out of nowhere and is unlike anything else in the story. But where have we seen that sort of thing before? Sister Location and the white baby-faced clock. Let’s just call it a theorist hunch. I suspect that that is why both the puppet and Baby are deactivated when we see their masks in the blob. Their actual AI code, their spirits, whatever you want to call them, they’re off elsewhere. They’re in a separate AI entity, the wires of the building. But speaking of the blob, the AI theory also solves that one too. So, Daddy AI is down in the basement, and the AI trained on the two warring daughters is fighting for control up in the Pizzaplex itself. What about the blob then? Well, the blob is just everything else. It’s mixed data. It’s the AI when you feed it too much information. When you open the entirety of the internet to Chat GPT, a confusing mess of wires and information and a lot of angry people. As Glam Rock Freddy says, “My friends are here.” Take a look at this description for the mimic from one of the book’s epilogues. Quote: “Creeping out the back of the overalls-clad mushroom was an abomination of twisted and contorted metal. A massive metal joint with wires, with one of its eyes on one leg and the other on its back. One of the legs extended from where its mouth should have been. Unlike the mimic’s footfalls when it was upright, this configuration of the mimic’s parts made a disc sound, a sloppy ticking that was at the same time squelching wet and dryly brittle.” End quote. There is only one creature that’s still around in the series that matches that description: the blob. That’s right, I’m telling you that I think the blob, this confusing, weirdly designed mess that we found in the basement of Security Breach, is actually one final version of the mimic. Just listen to the sounds that it makes, its appearance and the sounds that it makes match how it’s described in the book almost word for word. A twisted body that’s able to grow and shrink, slither into suits, expand and contract, a mass of twisted and contorted metal parts, wet yet dry-sounding movement. It is absolutely him. There’s even some in-game evidence to suggest that this is more than just speculation. The fast watch tells us that a huge amount of power goes down to the basement. We all thought that it was meant to keep Burntrap’s body alive, but what if instead, it’s to keep the blob alive? In the books, whenever the mimic appears, the lights tend to flicker and go out as it draws power from anything around it. That also means the ending then, where the blob scoops up Afton, it’s just him ingesting more data, the Afton data. It’s all the data coming together, getting mixed up, getting more complicated inside that Freddy spaghetti. It’s a mimic sweep. And as I discussed in a previous theory, it’s also why I suspect that Gregory is not who he says he is in the Ruin trailer. It’s the mimic still, an AI trained by watching Gregory’s behavior throughout Security Breach, hearing Gregory’s voice talking to Freddy bit by bit. This AI is absorbing everything around it, learning from it, assimilating it. And we’ll see how that ultimately plays out in Ruin. Or, you know, maybe I’m completely wrong. So with that theory out of the way, what are you guys doing now? The game is out today, literally today, as this one’s uploaded. I’m sure you’re all probably scrambling to get through it as quickly as possible to see whether I got anything right, literally anything right. I’m actually doing the exact same thing right now over on GT Live. Tom and I are probably playing through the game as we speak. So please keep an eye out on GT Live for all those uploads coming soon. That lore is not gonna find itself. Happy hunting, dear theorists. Fingers crossed that I’m not completely disproven in the opening minute of the game. And as always, my friends, remember, it’s just a theory, a game theory. Thanks for watching.

As found on YouTube