The Petscop Investigation
Presented as a "Let's Play" webseries on the video sharing site YouTube, Petscop masquerades as a somewhat-quirky, somewhat-broken obscure PlayStation 1 game where the player must explore a realm known as the "Gift Plane" in order to capture and collect an array of "pets". We follow the player Paul, a narrator of sorts, as he guides us through the first few pets before putting in a cheat code he says came with the box he got as a Christmas present. This then transports him to what fans of the series are calling the "Newmaker Plane", a "dark void with a grassy floor". The already unsettling atmosphere turns sinister as Paul comes upon the "Quitter's room", a direct reference to the child abuse case of Candace Newmaker, who suffocated under the weight of four adults as they chanted, "Quitter, quitter, quitter, quitter!" during a 2000 session of rebirthing therapy. He also finds himself chasing down pets who look suspiciously like children, and taking advice from ominous polygonal shapes such as the Tool.
This game is trying very hard to make it seem like, uhm... Like there's an entity in it. Like a... A ghost, or an AI, trying to communicate with me. It's interesting. But you know, the way you know, that there's a ghost in a game trying to communicate with you, is if it comes out, if it stops being distant, and it comes out and you can have a, you know... A real time back and forth with it. Uh. And it stops being so one way.
[Paul, Petscop 6]
As of this posting, the Petscop channel has published thirteen videos of varying lengths documenting Paul's playthrough. They are often almost completely silent save for his little green avatar's footsteps, occasionally punctuated by Paul's comments, where he either theorizes on what he just saw, talks out what he needs to do, or reacts to unsettling or revelatory information. After a time, the mediums begin to bleed into one another; game footage is censored, cut, or rearranged without warning or explanation. There are instances where it appears that Paul or another entity is playing the game while it is in demo mode; a censored item that Paul finds on a table is believed to have personal significance to him outside of the game, as it provokes an alarming reaction from his otherwise monotonous demeanor; notes, descriptions, and lines of text allude to living people who have since disappeared. The videos end abruptly, and sometimes months pass before the next one is published. Investigating the "ABOUT" tab sheds some light on why: the channel is not run by Paul, but by those who are believed to be "proprietors" who seek to "preserve and display the recordings" that Paul made for a friend in 2017. "He later passed ownership of the channel to us, but continued to record himself at our strong suggestion. Though he had issues with the arrangement, these have finally been settled." The viewer is then encouraged to enjoy the recordings. "We do. :)"
Theorists on Reddit believe that Paul is being held hostage in some way that is forcing him to uncover Petscop's deepest secrets, and losing himself to the game in the process.
Needless to say, Petscop is not a real game, nor is Garalina a real game developer, and the person behind Paul and the Proprietors is carefully chugging out carefully-edited videos of a game they were able to make on an emulator. However, a great number of people have made it real regardless. When talking about Petscop as a whole, we are addressing three different pieces of lore: Petscop as the game itself and the puzzles that lie within; Petscop as a performance, narrated by “Paul”, with gameplay footage edited in an intentionally stylistic way and uploaded to a place like YouTube where it is guaranteed to be seen by a number of strangers; and Petscop as an investigation, the majority of which takes place in r/Petscop on Reddit.com and a collaborative 84-page Google Doc available to anyone who wishes to view it, entitled “Comprehensive Progress Document”.
As a game, Petscop is intentionally unsettling. There is no plot, no NPCs, no guidance. The first video opens with the Sony and Playstation loading themes, establishing that this YouTube video is just another Let’s Play. But as soon as the game loads, the player’s sprite – a green humanoid with white eyes and large feet – reads a sign that informs him that “The Gift Plane is closed indefinitely”, and that all personnel have left. Already there is an absence of time and of characters the player can communicate with. We are alone, and we are told to collect 48 “pets” from their homes, to finish what the personnel of the Gift Plane could not. As the player continues to the right everything disappears; apparently, the game is unfinished. There is now an absence of space; we are alone with ourselves. We can backtrack and enter other portions of the game with content, but within the first 90 seconds the viewer is shown that this is a game of fragmented reality. In the era of AAA games with million-dollar budgets, the idea of an “unfinished game” is laughable, yet nevertheless intriguing. Malinowski believed that “Folklore is especially concerned with the satisfaction of repressed wishes” through the use of fairy tales and legends, but can also apply to proverbial sayings and “stereotyped modes of abuse” (4:58). While many games are praised for their ability to immerse the player in its story, there is also a subset of people who want to see the layers of this constructed reality peeled back, so that they too could access the tools of creation. If we are postulating that Petscop as a whole is an example of Internet folklore, then the game itself – the parts of it that are shown, at least – is the raw data to be grappled with. It is the starting point, the “nature” being observed and examined; it is unfinished, so we can only get glimpses at the kind of story it wants to tell. It is unexplainable, so we hasten to explain it.
Coming back to “stereotyped modes of abuse” – for those of us who were lucky enough to escape childhood unscathed, we can only imagine how the human brain internalizes such a traumatic experience as ritual child abuse. The victims, however, must cope with its impact on their core identity and psyche. As soon as the player enters the cheat code in the Gift Plane, the bouncy music stops. When he exits to the left, back to where he began, he now stands in front of a stark brick building with a concrete door. There is the grass under his feet, and a void of darkness on all sides. He wanders around this area, dubbed the “Newmaker Plane”, for almost fifteen minutes before he stumbles upon a cellar door. The rest of the game unfolds as a hunt for the remaining pets, who live in houses and sleep in beds and have human faces. Part of the indiscernible tone and dark appeal of the game is that we do not know if it was made for the victims of child abuse and abduction, or for those who perpetrate it. The horror that real-life Candace Newmaker suffered for 70 minutes is unimaginable to most readers, and this is reflected in Petscop’s design: a candy-colored world hides a sinister one, scary not because of monsters lingering just beyond one’s sightline, but because of the emptiness, the darkness, the lack of form or reason that most games make it their top priority to have.
As a performance, Petscop successfully avoids the pitfalls of even the most well-known creepypastas by giving as little information as possible. The narrator never explicitly names himself, nor shows an expert understanding of the game, and may spend entire videos just wandering around and letting things happen to him. His first words to the viewer are: “Alright, so this is just to prove to you that I’m not lying about this game that I found.” He’s played this game before, and now he’s replaying it so that “you” (there is a lot of debate over who this is referring to) can know what he knows. Although there are separate theories pertaining to “Paul” and if he’s acting of his own free will, his character – though passed off as just another YouTuber – is meant to serve as the go-between between the raw data of the broken game and a swarming horde of Redditors. As Lévi-Strauss puts it, he “builds up structures by fitting together events, or rather the remains of events” (2:15), acting as a bricoleur, a craftsman who “makes do with whatever is at hand” (2:17). Presenting unedited game footage on its own would be useless, since we cannot interpret natural phenomena without assimilating them to his own actions, the only ones "whose essential mode of production he could ever believe himself to understand” (2:220); the direction provided by his editing and narration point our attention to other possibilities. The creator of Petscop speaks through several mediums, with each creative choice urging us onto a particular path, towards particular conclusions. “Any classification is superior to chaos and even a classification at the level of sensible properties” – like a short YouTube video of a Let’s Play – “is a step toward rational ordering” (2:15). What the masses do with this digested, ordered information is akin to the construction of a Bible.
As an investigation, Petscop is a community effort that does what Reddit does best: it brings together thousands of strangers with only the common interest in solving a mystery. Perhaps there is no “solution” or moral-of-the-story for Petscop, but there is a general attitude that we may at least discover the character, if not the identity, of the bricoleur. I recommend taking a peek at the Comprehensive Progress Document, as there is a great deal more to dissect about this series than I could ever hope to offer here. There are extensive notes on each character (or mention of a character), recordings and the censorship thereof, color theory regarding text and assets, comparisons of the “Surface Game” to the “Secret Game”, theories about Paul and his relation to the events and pets in-game, and links to the sources of sound files and fonts used by the creator. The posts one can make to r/Petscop must fall under one of the following tags: Theories, Findings, Creations, Videos, Shitposts, Discussions, Art, Unsubstantiated Findings, Debunked, Modposts, Fluff, and Questions. This meticulous organizing of the webseries is evidence of Lévi-Strauss’s idea of mythical thought as “a liberator by its protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless with which science at first resigned itself to a compromise” (2:22). To the outsider, the little quirks and glitches contained within the Petscop videos are directionless and provocative, but to r/Petscop, they are something more.
Petscop is a three-layered mythological operation, the progression of which is laid out on the Web for all to see: the primal simplicity and loneliness of the game is filtered through Paul, who guides the viewer to objects of interest in order to construct a flimsy narrative from which the community-determined meta-narrative arises. It hints at the horrific fate of Candace Newmaker, who was, until recently, lost to time.
