Read the more updated Primer for FNAF here – Editor

Five Nights at What?

I used to visibly cringe when someone mentioned Five Nights at Freddie’s (FNAF), the horror jump scare video game starring animatronics possessed by the souls of murdered children.

It’s Chuck-E-Cheese meets Freddy Krueger. It’s actually Showbiz Pizza meets Freddy Krueger if you want to get really specific. When my kids were five and younger, they had a friend who played the game, and so they wanted to. But we explained how it’s too violent for them to play, and even though their friend was also 5 years-old, his parents had different rules.

Once we started watching gaming YouTube, it was impossible to avoid FNAF. The fan fiction and playthroughs are endless, but still, we monitored their videos and could remove most from their sight.

Then came the schoolyard. [insert ominous piano keys pounding here].

Horror Recess Games

Whether their friends at school actually played it or watched videos or had older siblings, everyone at school knew FNAF. It’s the new version of The Boogey Man or Bloody Mary or whatever horror game you played at recess. A good friend of mine has a theory that it’s the modern-day Grimm Fairy Tales, and I can’t wait to share her perspective soon. The schoolyard got them interested in the story behind the game. They were older now and had a better grasp on fiction versus reality than when first introduced to it.

So I took one of my classic deep breaths and jumped into Five Nights at Freddie’s with them.

Dialogues

• I started by asking what they like about it. “I like to watch people get jump scared,” “I like to train myself to watch scary stuff,” were some of the reasons. And I get that. I liked a lot of scary stories when I was younger. I loved being scared. I still do. I learned my limits on horror and also learned how to push them. And so far, they just like the stories and games, but don’t actually play the video game.
• I asked myself what I didn’t like about it. When they were younger, I simply didn’t want them to play as the person pursuing a character in a video game with a knife or running away from an animatronic bear trying to knife you. Not only did it seem too scary, but I didn’t want them taking that kind of violent play to recess. We made a point always to clarify pretend or fantasy violence from actual life violence, and our oldest was starting to understand it. Still, we were very careful about which games he played while he was processing those ideas.
• I realized that what I didn’t like about the game three years ago didn’t apply to the ages my kids are now. We’ve since played Among Us as a family (very silly violence, but still violence), the kids have beaten Zelda: Breath of the Wild; they know enough to purposely ignore a toxic storyline of a game if the actual gameplay is fun (see: It Takes Two). So, my initial dislike of the gameplay wasn’t as important to me as long as we talked about it.
• If they got too scared, we paused their privilege to watch it. At one point, Freddie showed up in some nightmares. Nothing traumatic, just your normal scary dreams. So we explained that we’d pause their viewing for a while and could reconsider it when they felt more comfortable. I’ve heard from some parents that their children had more intense nightmares, so proceed with caution.
• It made sense once I learned the full (theoretical) story behind the games, and we could discuss story points in more detail. Now, my kids didn’t watch a rabbit hole of YouTube videos explaining theories of the origin story of all the games, but I sure did. I personally love detailed stories where you learn backstory via a slow drip, and not an expository info dump, so moving through each game chronologically helped my understanding of it. And I have to say that as a B or C level horror story, it’s pretty good. If I were their age, I probably would have read the books to learn more FNAF lore. Half the lore was also found in clues that the creator of the game left for his fans to discover.
• I put myself in my kids’ shoes. At first, they just wanted to know what game the other kids were playing — and inviting them to play — in the schoolyard. Then, they got interested in the story. I can’t blame them for that. They currently treat it as more of a story to follow and have no interest in playing the game. I am much more comfortable with all of this now that I know the story. Yes, it’s frightening. It’s not altogether my kind of horror, but as pure story-driven entertainment, I came to terms with it.

By engaging with the story, it’s less of a general horror violent video game, and now it’s a piece of media (many pieces: games, YouTube videos, books) that I can discuss with my kids. It’s scary, but anything with jump scares is scary. If my kids were prone to nightmares or got obsessive about play-acting animatronics, I’d curb their viewing of YouTube videos on FNAF again.

Possible Story of Freddy Fazbear

For now, I am less scared of it because I know the story. And if you’ve gotten this far, here is the very basic theoretical story of the video games, based on reading more Reddit threads than I care to admit.

Sweet Dreams!

Photo/Image Credit: Five Nights at Freddie’s, Fredbear’s Pizzeria Management Wiki Fandom

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Read more: Fortnite and Disney? A Parent Primer if You’re Still Unsure

Sources:

• Goulding, Erin Johnston, Explaining the Entire Five Nights at Freddy’s Timeline, Gameplay, December 23, 2021. https://gamerant.com/five-nights-at-freddys-chronological-timeline-explained/.
• Herd, James, “What is the Chronological Order of Five Nights at Freddie’s? FNAF Story Explained”, Gamer Journalism. April 21, 2022. https://gamerjournalist.com/what-is-the-chronological-timeline-of-five-nights-at-freddys-fnaf-story-explained/.

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