What was in the FNAF 4 box? It's a question that's plagued the FNAF community since it first appeared back in 2015 and yet last year Scott finally told us that he doesn't really know anymore. Naturally this felt like a gut punch to us theorists. People were mad to say the least. But my question is, was he wrong to do this? Should he have planned for this better? Or is something else going on here that makes this decision a stroke of genius? Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory, the show where the biggest challenge is thinking Inside the Box. Released Inside One Box in particular, the FNAF 4 box. This box was the big reward you got for beating Night 7 in FNAF 4. Once you hit 6am you'd see this box with two locks and the words, perhaps some things are best left forgotten for now. At the time, Scott Cawthon expected theorists to easily solve the lore of this fourth game and once they did, he'd reveal what was inside. But after a mere month of watching the fandom spin around in circles, he realized that no one was even close. So instead of waiting it out, he decided to keep the box closed for good. Writing in a steam post, perhaps some things are best left forgotten forever. The contents of this box have been driving the fandom wild for the better part of a decade. There have been theories upon theories upon theories written by every theorist from every corner of the fandom. But Scott's remained tight lipped and it seemed like the box was going to join the creation of Stonehenge and the identity of Jack the Ripper as one of history's biggest unsolved mysteries. That was until our good friend Dorco finally managed to convince Scott to spill the fazgoo on what was really inside the box. I'm sorry, what? He presented this box so prominently and we've spent years trying to solve it and he didn't fully know what was in it? As you'd expect, this completely shook the fanbase and people were not shy about saying as such. For some, this felt like a complete betrayal to find out that the big mystery was really just a nothing box. For others, it was much worse. It was revealing that Scott didn't have a grip on his own story. It was revealing that Scott was a bad storyteller. I know former head editor Dan was ecstatic at this news. He'd been beating that drum for ages. But as a longtime FNAF fan, I did find myself asking the question, are they right? Is Scott actually a bad writer? Or is it actually us, the children, who are wrong about all of this? The answer, dear theorists, is an unequivocal yes and neither is for the reasons you'd think. I know, typical FNAF right. So come with me as I go through my box of old film school literary techniques to see whether there should ever have been something inside the FNAF 4 box. In the full context of Scott's answer, he talks about his writing process and how he puts ideas into his games that develop over time. He likens his ideas to the start of a rope and when he continues to write, he pulls on that rope. Eventually, the rope leads to something satisfying. So to be clear, when Scott says he didn't pursue the contents of the box and doesn't know if he can find those contents again, he's not saying that it slipped his mind or that he misplaced a document in his basement that has a definitive answer. He's saying that his original idea was never fully developed. He never finished pulling on that rope to find the definitive answer. Then, over 11 years, a saga of games, dozens of books and two movies, that rope became harder and harder to pull. The rope frayed into strands that became knotted into different ropes and other strands that were cut off entirely. Both the rope and the tapestry it was a part of changed. Now, if Scott wants to pull the piece of the lock box rope that he does have, he needs to be careful or it will unravel everything. Oh hey, future Tom here. So I recorded this video a few weeks ago and then I went on vacation and during that time, Scott released this, the Ultimate Guide 2.0. And in it, there's a strange entry called Chica's Secret Party, a game that nobody ever knew existed. Now, this thing needs a whole episode on its own, but I wanted to mention it because here it says, it's here you'll catch a glimpse of a box that longtime fans will be familiar with, as well as a peek inside, which won't be spoiled here. This implies there was something inside the box and that Scott had figured it out all the way back in 2016. But remember, in Scott's first interview with Dorco, he mentioned how Matt was right and that the contents of the box have changed over time, meaning he may have known what was going to be in it back in 2016, but as the games went on, it had to change and now he doesn't know exactly what it is. Plus, the Ultimate Guides are notoriously bad on the accuracy front and if Scott remembers this supposedly real game enough to bring up a year after the interview, he could have just said, yep, there is, and no one's found it yet, tihi, rather than the much more controversial answer that got people upset in the first place. Scott is known for winding up the fanbase after all, that would feel much more in character for him. So yeah, I don't really think this is going to change anything I'm going to say, but I wanted to mention it in case you wondered why I didn't bring it up for the rest of the video. But let's get back to past me and Scott's supposed lack of forward planning. The general consensus I saw online focused on this being the problem. To a lot of people, this felt laughably amateurish, that he put such importance on an undercooked plot thread, to just have faith that any random idea you have would work out eventually. If he was a good writer, he would make sure that all the pieces were actually in place for us, that they fit together nicely, and that he knows what the ending of the story is to pay off whatever he set up throughout. Basically, what people were saying is that to be a good writer, you have to be what the writing world knows as a plotter. You would have thought creative writers could have come up with a more, I don't know, creative name for themselves, but actually, it's serious, straightforward nature tells you everything you need to know about them. Plotters are the ones with dozens of note cards literally plotting out every part of the story before they even begin writing. The main place you'll see plotters work is in movie scripts. Oh, hang on. Oh, yeah. Screenplays are a great example of plotter written stories being used to incredible effectiveness. 99% of movies you've seen are written as outlines first. Most moviegoers aren't willing to sit through more than one and a half to two and a half hours, so that means your script can only be so long. The standard for movie scripts is that one page equals one minute of screen time, so that means your story has to fit within 90 to 150 pages. When you do plan for it, you get fantastic movies with good pacing and solid endings like The Shawshank Redemption, Fight Club, and Forest Gump. But if you don't plan for that, then your story can end up feeling rushed in places or bloated in others, because you have to go back retroactively to either cut things down or bulk them up to fit within that window. We actually do a similar thing here at Theorist. We've spent a long time figuring out what the optimal length for a video is, and so before any script is written, we have outlined the entire episode, its intro, the evidence, the twist, all to fit within that timeframe. Long story short, yes, good writers absolutely plan out the story and its twists, but actually, bad ones do too. Plotter written works benefit from having focus. They know the story they are telling. They write with the end goal in mind, but that means the process can become more methodical than passionate, which can then lead to stale scripts with characters that aren't fleshed out and plot points that just happen in ways that don't feel natural. Take Hallmark movies for example. We all love a good holiday movie, but go on to TikTok and you can see dozens of videos with people making fun of the predictable storylines that happen in every single one. Those movies are so planned that they're practically checking story beats off a list, which might be fine as a cheesy movie to pass the time on a slow Christmas evening, but it doesn't exactly invoke those feelings of intrigue and excitement that we want out of stories like FNAF. It also gets way harder to be a plotter when you're dealing with a franchise that goes beyond just the first couple of entries. That doesn't mean it can't happen, it's just rare. The voice director of Has been Hotel and Hell of a Boss, Richard Horvitz, said exactly that when asked about those two shows. Also, if you don't recognize this guy, you might instead know him as Invader Zim, Billy from the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, or Alpha 9 from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Yeah, this guy is a veteran in the industry, so when he says this isn't a common way to write long stories, he means it. Not only is it rare, it's also super risky. TV shows often don't know how many seasons they'll be getting, or whether all their actors will stay on board for the full run, so planning every detail and how it's going to pay off can be incredibly challenging to do and to get right. One of my favorite sitcoms growing up was How I Met Your Mother. It's not aged particularly well, but actually, the thing that tarnished its reputation more than Barney's treatment of women was its ending. The show's creators had planned how the show would end all the way back in season 1. They even pre-recorded the kids so that they could keep the show's framing device for the final episode. However, the ending didn't end up sitting right with people because after nine seasons, the characters were different people. They'd grown and evolved. Their relationship dynamics had changed, so in order to make the ending fit, the creators had to basically undo five to seven seasons worth of character development to shove them into a hole that they no longer fit in. This is why writers for longer running franchises, for TV books and yes, video games tend not to be plotters. Instead, they are what are called pansas. While plotters plan everything out before they write it, pansas write by the seat of their pants, just writing and seeing where the story takes them. Now, doesn't that sound familiar? And it's way more common in professional writing than you'd think. Margaret Atwood and Stephen King are famous for writing this way. King actually takes it to an extreme in his memoir when he says, Outlines are the last resource for bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing master's theses. Perhaps a little harsh, but it just shows how these pansas stories can be incredibly successful and creative. However, the word pansa gives me the ick. In England, a pansa sounds like someone who's going to be tried for indecent exposure. So instead, I'm going to use a term used by another novelist and notorious non-plotter, George R. R. Martin. He calls plotters architects because they follow blueprints and outlines. And he refers to pansas as gardeners, which not only gives these writers more dignity, it also gives this style of writing a much clearer and less chaotic definition. Rather than completely winging it, it's about letting a story blossom and cultivating it as it grows. It's not that gardeners lack structure completely, it's that these types of writers let the process evolve the final product, while architects already know what they want the final product to look like. Gardeners like Martin seed their stories with a myriad of ideas that they believe may lead somewhere interesting. At the end of it, you'll have a garden full of beautiful surprises. This is what Scott was talking about with his idea of ropes. He would start an idea and he knew it would end in something. He just didn't know what it was at the time because he hadn't pulled enough. He hadn't let the plant grow fully. I understand that this can look like complete chaos to those who don't operate in this way. Believe me, I love a structure in everything I do. I am an architect through and through, but I can see why it would be hugely rewarding for those writing the story. Because there aren't predetermined outcomes, gardeners are able to write about whatever excites them personally. This ultimately leads to passionate character-driven plots where heroes are written into fatal corners and where unexpected side characters become scene stealers. We get beautiful rich worlds filled with detail and complex rules and systems by which they operate. These are the things you need to capture the imagination of an audience and keep them coming back for more. Of course, there will always be exceptions. There will be architects that write TV shows that plan every detail and nail the landing, which is the approach Vivsi Pop is going for with Hasbin Hotel. And there will be gardeners that don't plan a single movie and it will still work out. The truth is, this distinction between architects and gardeners isn't binary. It's a spectrum. Writers will have their own unique combination of order and chaos and don't fall completely into one camp. J.R.R. Tolkien is a prime example of someone that managed to do both. Tolkien famously took what was supposed to be a short simple hobbit sequel and gardened it into a Lord of the Rings novel so massive that his publisher had to split it into three books. He had a plan but was able to build the world around that plan like a gardener. Oh, I know. Somebody ain't talking about Lord of the Rings without me. No, no, no. I've just finished. I'll get out of your hair. Bye. The point is neither way is technically right or wrong. Each person is going to handle their own stories differently and they may change their tactic as time goes on. I think in my mind, the original, the story was going to be three games. And in all honesty, I think Financi's 3 was where I kind of started letting myself be driven a little bit more by criticisms. After the first game, Scott took the architect approach, planning the original trilogy to be the complete story. But as time's gone on, he's become more and more of a gardener. And at the end of the day, it's that strategy that has kept us all coming back to FNAF over the last 11 years. This ever-growing lore. This fantastical world full of ghost kits, AI possession and characters, each with their own motivations that continue to drive the story forward. At least we think so. It's kind of hard to tell sometimes. So was Scott wrong for not fully planning out the box? Absolutely not. But what's not okay is that he has given up on ever figuring it out. What? You didn't really think I'd let Scott get off Scott Free, did you? What he's done is extremely common across all forms of media. It's just not the method you or I would necessarily choose to use. And that's okay. However, by Scott's own admission, he's basically written himself into a corner with the box. And he doesn't know if he can find the motivation to solve the hanging plot thread. I don't know if I can find it again. The reason this is so egregious is because it breaks one of the most fundamental principles of storytelling. Chekhov's gun. If you're unfamiliar with this term, it comes from the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who famously wrote about the importance of narrative payoffs saying, one must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep. By drawing attention to any story element, be it the lore of the clock tower in Back to the Future, the complication of Iron Man's suit freezing in the first movie, or the box in FNAF 4, a writer is making an implicit promise that these elements will pay off in some way. Chekhov's gun, by its very nature, is an architect's tool. You're putting something in the audience's faces early on, knowing that it's going to come later because you've already figured out where it's going. Instead, Scott fell into the classic gardener trap. Believing an idea, a seed, was going to become something big and so forced our attention onto it, without having the final something planned out, which leads to this. Oh, what's this? It's my own Chekhov's gun. This here is JJ Abrams' mystery box. Nearly 20 years ago, writer and director JJ Abrams presented the idea that storytellers should be planting mysteries for the audience, but without strictly knowing what's inside. Chekhov's gun without the planning. The concept came from this box of magic that Abrams' grandfather bought him. Supposedly, it contained $50 worth of assorted tricks, but it only cost $15. However, Abrams never opened the box. If he did open the box, he'd know what was in it and the Jorian wonder would dissipate. But closed, it had infinite potential. To him, the mystery, the withholding of information, was worth more than what was inside. He demonstrated this idea with his show Lost, which continually introduced mystery on top of mystery on top of mystery. On the odd occasion, they'd actually resolved something, but the show really thrived on asking questions, not answering them. That's not to say that Abrams didn't want to pay off his mysteries down the road, just that his method put the clues before the climax. And often, they were pointing to a climax that wasn't fully fleshed out. He was essentially trying to apply the principles of Chekhov's gun to a gardener's writing style. At the time, this seemed revolutionary and allowed long-running series to put cool ideas out there and get tons of engagement without having to spend all the time planning, especially in fields like TV shows and video games when you didn't know when things would end. But the problem was, they did all end eventually. So, the gardeners had to start forcing wild branching plots together in order to make a resolution, and most of them struggled to stick the landing. Lost infamously had a divisive final few seasons. The answers either became so convoluted because they're trying to tie together all these loose mystery boxes that didn't fit together, or the answers were just straight up bad because they were brushed off as simple and unimportant. Abrams went on to then bring his mystery box philosophy to the Star Wars sequels, and that same lack of narrative foresight is often credited as the primary reason those movies missed the mark. This is exactly what Scott was saying in his interview. FNAF is a series full of mystery upon mystery, with very little confirmation or tying up of and now we have a mystery box that we're basically being told isn't really important to the story despite its prominence. But what's even worse is Scott telling us that not only wasn't it important, his gun won't even go off. That's the real issue at play. Our time has been squandered. Humans are hardwired to want closure. Heck, it's one of the reasons we theorize in the first place. When an element you introduce doesn't come back, it's not only a waste of narrative resources, it frustrates us because we now lack that closure. I don't think fans would have been as upset if he had just admitted that while he was struggling to nail down the answer, he was still planning on returning to it in the future. Because for a story to be seen as satisfying to the audience, who have been in love with it for so long, now that you have presented it, the gun does eventually have to go off. So Scott, if you're watching, no, you weren't wrong to not have fully planned out the box. But that doesn't mean you stop trying to find the end of that road. You're gonna need to find your old architect groove, at least partially, to help put this mystery box to rest once and for all. I'm not saying you need to solve it immediately and cause all of it to fall apart like we saw with Lost, far from it. Let's face it, you're like Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, you're gonna be wheeled out to do FNAF stories until you're 90. So you have time to find what's in your Chekhov's box. I'll even give you a hint. In that TED Talk, J.J. Abrams did say that often, when we look at stories and mystery boxes by extension, there's this idea of what we think we're getting and what we're really getting. He goes on to list some of his favorite movies like E.T. but explains that it isn't a classic because it's about an alien and a kid, but because it's about a child dealing with his family's divorce. The theme is what's inside the box. So take some time, search your story for the themes and fill your box with those. That way, even if the physical contents of the box don't quite live up to the expectations the fans have, it will still resonate and show that despite the difficulty, despite the challenges, despite your gardener writing style, you do care about the story as much as we do. As always, theorists, remember, it's all just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!
