Five Nights at Freddy’s: Job Simulator
(Originally written in December 2015)
I hate my job. Not in the passionate way that one might hate injustice, but rather in the cold dispassionate way someone might hate traffic. You sit there behind the wheel of your car, begging and pleading for the boredom to stop, for the cars to move, for something, anything to change. The radio offers no solace, the music on your ipod has gone sour. You’re frustrated and this frustration boils over into dripping hatred. A hatred so mundane, people make small talk about it. This is how I feel about my job. I dread going in, I relish leaving only to have the bad taste at the back of my throat remind me that I’m coming back too soon. But when I am there, I enter a sort of neutral state. Yes, I’m miserable, but I’m here by choice. I choose this. I choose this windowless room in which time has little meaning. I choose the dim lighting and the headaches. I choose this because I need money. So I continue the cycle, the doing and doing until I can finally leave only to return, because I need this money to live. I struggle with my desire to leave, to bolt from the door and strip away my all black work clothes and never come back. Every day so far I’ve beaten this desire. Sometimes I smoke to keep the desire down. Sometimes I shove crispy m&ms down my throat until my teeth hurt. And so far, success. Hollow, but tangible with every paycheck I receive.
There are a few games about jobs out there. Oftentimes they are structured in a very satisfying way. Challenging or tedious, but very often satisfying. “Viscera Cleanup Detail” is a good example. You use various tools, occupying first person weapon slots, to clean gore covered rooms. You have to be careful about tracking blood around, and you must burn the bodies, but watching the room get clean is so satisfying it’s hard to fault the tedium. Another bleaker example is “Papers, Please”. You are an Immigration Officer for a fictional country, and you have to check the papers of every person coming through customs. As the game develops it gets harder for people to come into the country, there are more required papers, and more restrictions on travel, but at the end of the day you get paid depending on how many people you let in, with the proper authority of course.
These games are good and they are fun to play. But work isn’t fun. At least not for me. “Five Nights At Freddy’s” forces the player to deal with all of the terminal toil and ennui of working in a job you hate. It’s a rather infamous game known mostly for two reasons: firstly, it’s ruinous jumpscares and secondly, the fact that, as of writing this, all three games in the series were released within twelve months. I’ll only be talking about the first game in the series, for simplicity’s sake.
When you get down to it, Five Nights is a game that is only about having a job, and keeping that job. It’s not a game that is fun. Most people play the game because of a dare or for bragging rights. Maybe out of interest. But it’s never about fun. There’s no sense of accomplishment, there’s only a sharp beautiful wave of relief when the night is finally over, then a acute feeling of dread and sadness when the next night starts.
The game opens with a newspaper ad for a job as a security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, offering one-hundred-twenty dollars a week in small print at the bottom. You enter the Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria along with your hapless player character, Mike Schmidt, with no desire other than to simply survive until you can clock out. Then you sit there trying to garner some useful information from the only other employee who will speak to you, even if it is over voicemail. Finally you get to the bulk of the game: waiting. You quickly learn real struggle is not surviving, but rather staying put. At every turn you have to remind yourself that you’re here by choice. The game knows this as well. It has no illusions about being kind to the player. This is most illustrated by the fact that if you hit the escape button in an attempt to pause, you quit the game. So in a way it does offer you an out, but no reprieve. As I write this I keep wanting to say that you and Mike are stuck. In truth, you aren’t and that’s the killer. All you want to do is leave and for it to be over, but on your terms, not on the game’s. So you fight every instinct against quitting this game and never looking back, and Mike is right there with you. Never budging from his chair, never even attempting to escape. After a while you will enter a neutral state similar to the one I described earlier. Miserable but accepting. The jumpscares just become part of the game to be dealt with, like a customer dropping a wine glass. You have to act quickly, but eventually the extra work you have to do to deal with it just doesn’t feel important anymore. You close the door, you sweep up the glass, and continue with the rest of your routine. There might be things that still get to you, dying at five a.m., getting yelled at by a manager, but ultimately you come back again and again. Why? Sometimes you won’t really know why. After all there’s always more work, and similarly the only way to 100% Five Nights is to beat 4/20 mode, a feat which was thought impossible by the game designer.
A few months back, as a “Team Bonding Experience” some co-workers, managers, and myself went to real-life escape room. At the beginning of my shift before the escape room I sat in the only chair in the server’s alley and mused aloud to my co-worker: “So we get paid to sit in a dark windowless room and not escape, but we’re paying to sit in a dark room and try to escape.” She said it was too early for philosophy shit. I laughed, but I kept thinking about it. Now here I am thinking about it again and thinking about how I’ve played enough Five Nights to equal a shift at work. Maybe I should work at a pizzeria instead.
