Follow the Purple Bunny: A Brief Analysis of Five Nights at Freddy’s Narrative

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220504.028How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Five Nights at Freddy’s; video game narrative; video game study; horror game

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to briefly examine narratives of the indie horror game franchise: Five Nights at Freddy’s, created by indie-game developer Scott Cawthon. Despite the franchise’s creative gameplay mechanism, what truly captivates its huge fan base is its cryptic story and how creatively these clues are presented to players. I will especially focus on how the story and setting of the latest release on the franchise, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach, has been revealed to fans even before its release by examining secret conversations its VR collection of the previous 5 PC entries titled Five Nights at Freddy’s: Help Wanted (including The Curse of Dreabbear DLC). This paper will also provide a thorough analysis on how the two future villains of the franchise, Glitchtrap and Vanny, are introduced to players through the game in such unconventional means, such as through hidden dialogues in the source code of Scott Cawthon’s website, and fans’ favorite: 8-bit mini-game fused with symbolic lore.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yujie Ji
AU  - Yixuan Zhao
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/06/01
TI  - Follow the Purple Bunny: A Brief Analysis of Five Nights at Freddy’s Narrative
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 8th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research (ICHSSR 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 153
EP  - 158
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220504.028
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220504.028
ID  - Ji2022
ER  -