Subtitles section Play video
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You're holding tough today, by the way
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Until Dawn ain't getting me
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OH MY GOSH
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OH
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*Game Theory Intro plays*
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Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory
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The show whose viewers wouldn't be surprised to see an episode dedicated to Sam's anti-gravity towel
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Seriously! She's getting chased by a psychotic killer and it stays up like that??
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And then she crawls through vents and it stays so clean?
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This towel is clearly worthy of a theory
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But not today
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So if you've watched our GTLive live streams then you know that we recently completed a playthrough
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of the horror game Until Dawn
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*devastated MatPat* "No!!"
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If you haven't watched our GTLive live streams then you probably STILL knew that we recently completed
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a playthrough of the horror game Until Dawn
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because YouTube hasn't put a toggle in allowing subscribers to opt-in to those notifications
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Hey! Don't blame the messenger
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Regardless, chances are if you watch gamers on YouTube
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You've seen this choose-your-own-adventure, teen murder simulator hybrid
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A game that mashes so many horror movie tropes you'd think they'd pulled Keenen Wayans out of retirement
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And had him do Scary Movie: The Video Game
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But here's the thing, while we were all making fun of the gameplay
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"We are playing a game that encourages you to not move the controller"
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"COMPELLING GAMEPLAY"
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The really good, but still not really good enough graphics
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"Didn't quite make it out of the Uncanny Valley on that one" *laughs*
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And hammy dialouge
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We all missed something: The point
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Along with a totem or two
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Whether it was intentional or not,
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Until Dawn is more than just a goofy horror movie cliche simulator
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And the villain is far more menacing than a gangly spider-zombie
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It's a much darker, much sadder, and much more serious game than any of us YouTube gamers thought
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Carrying an incredibly serious message about mental illness and the nature of choice
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Now before I go on, this is a heavy spoiler alert
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We're covering everything from the game, so if you haven't watched any of the hundreds of Let's Plays
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And still want to experience it for yourself, turn back now
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But if you want to completely change the way you look at the game
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Well, spend another few minutes with me
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We all clear?
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Good.
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Now this game is a blast, not only to play but to discuss
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You see, the game not so subtly points out that it's built around the Butterfly Effect
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Where decisions you make earlier in the game have significant ramifications down the line
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It's a game about choice
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And what makes this game endlessly discussable and watchable
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Is seeing how different choices lead to different gruesome murders for our -
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*record scratch* Jeez they're 18 and 19 years old?
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Oh man, now I feel really creepy about trying to get Jess into her underwear
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No! No it is NOT when some of these kids are literally under the age of consent
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Creepy revelations about everyone's true ages aside
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Make the right choices, nail each QTE and miraculously
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you may be able to keep everyone alive...Until Dawn
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Roll credits *CinemaSins ding*
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Well, not everyone
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Meet Josh, older brother of both Beth and Hannah
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We see in the game's prologue that one year prior to the events in the game
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Beth and Hannah were killed accidentally after a prank went wrong
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Yes, you can roll the clip one last time
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Fast-forward to the present day where, halfway through the game, you learn that Josh is The Psycho
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A masked madman setting up elaborately sadistic, Saw-like traps
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For his quote-unquote "friends" to make them pay for the deaths of both his sisters
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Well, that and to get them all a few thousand clicks on a certain video sharing platform
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Gah! Everyone is a vlogger these days
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Now, outside of the supernatural and cannibalistic wendigos,
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Josh is the villain of the game, putting his friends through torture
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As such, it's only fitting that he is the only playable character who will never survive the night
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regardless of your choices
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He only has one of two fates
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Either getting his head crushed by a wendigo
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Or, if you find enough clues, turning into a wendigo himself
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A fitting end to a crazed maniac
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Except, hold on. Josh's story isn't so cut and dry
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True, the torture of his friends is extreme
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And he isn't adverse to going so far as to punch Ashley out cold
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But none of his actions directly lead to anyone's death
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His traps are only there to scare, not kill
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Fake bodies, fake bullets, saws that don't go all the way down
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Now compare that to Mike, AKA the village bicycle where anyone gets a ride *horn honking*
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Who can kill Emily in cold blood, and the world rejoices *party blower noise*
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Or how about Ashley? Who in some scenarios can choose to kill Chris while he pleads for his life
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Simply by keeping the lodge door locked
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Then, in the final scene, Sam can actively choose to blow up the lodge early, killing everyone else in there
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And then Matt who can basically leave his girlfriend, Emily, for dead when a tower falls
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I mean seriously, the game gives you a lot - A LOT - of opportunities to kill off Emily
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In short, pretty much every playable character in this game
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Can take an action that will directly lead to someone else's death
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Except for Jessica
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And except for Josh
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But unlike all the other characters, Josh doesn't get a happy ending
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And sure, I get it. He tortured his friends and, yeah, thats really bad
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But don't let Beth's yoga pants distract you from the truth
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What these teenagers did to Hannah was also really bad
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These aren't good people
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They set up a prank where Mike, Hannah's crush, leads her on to the point that she starts undressing,
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expecting a little totem action, if you get what I'm saying
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All while they film in secret and laugh at her embarrassment
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It's ruthless!
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And unlike the quote-unquote "heros" of the story, who did this out of sheer meanness
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Josh's saw traps aren't just born out of revenge
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He has another excuse, mental illness
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Throughout the game we gradually learn that Josh has had behavioral issues since the age of eleven
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Since then, he's been treated with various medications for depression
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In total, for nine years
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And we learn that the mysterious analyst appearing between chapters in the game
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Was actually Josh's psychiatrist helping him to cope with the loss of both his sisters
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When we finally get to step inside Josh's eyes at the end of the game, Chapter 10,
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It's clear he's being haunted by the vision of his sisters
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"No no no no, you're not real" -"Why didn't you save us Josh?"
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Through his hallucinations, we see that he blames himself in large part for their deaths
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Despite being passed out that night, physically unable to do anything to help them
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Now, does all of this excuse his eagerness to strap two people to chairs
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Force one to choose between his life and the life of his crush
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All while spinning saw blades descend from the ceiling?
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No, but it certainly sheds light on Josh's motives
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Showing that he's not a sadistic killer or cruel sociopath
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He's a confused and grieving kid
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Remember, these kids are like 18 to 20
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*record scratch* Still - still kinda creeped out about the Jess thing
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And the game actually acknowledges this
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*another record scratch* Not the creepy jess thing, just the fact that Josh is in need of help
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In alternate dialogue for Josh's big reveal as the psycho
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Sam makes it clear that his behavior is more of a cry for help than it was anything malicious
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"Come on, it was just for fun! Nobody got hurt!
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"You're crying out for help, Josh"
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In short, Josh is a sympathetic character who needs help, medical help
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Help that, quite frankly, he's not getting
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And this is where we go from Josh being in a weird gray area
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A character who did some awful things, but had some excuses for it, to someone who is outright innocent
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Throughout the game, we can piece together Josh's illness by the symptoms he demonstrates
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Chapter 10 shows us that he clearly has very vivid visual hallucinations
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He also has auditory hallucinations, hearing both his sisters' voices in his head as well as the Psycho's
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It's important to note here, though, that the mask-wearing Psycho isn't a separate personality
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Which would change his diagnosis
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How do we know?
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Well, if Sam escapes being chased by Josh, she can find a tape where he's practicing his "Psycho Talk"
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"Hello - Hello, children...That's not right..."
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I mean every good masked killer needs a catchphrase, right?
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The Psycho is just a character he puts on for the purposes of this theatrical event he had planned
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Not a split personality
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So we have visual hallucinations, auditory hallucinations, but Josh is also delusional
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The delusion that this is all a fun prank or game
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That this would actually be socially acceptable to his friends
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He also has delusions of grandeur
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Seriously, in his opening video:
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"Hello, friends and fans"
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"Hello, friends and fans"? Who's he talking to anyway?
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Seriously, his channel has like, what, seven subscribers
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And after the events of the game, he's going to lose all of them
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"YouTuber tortured me and gave me PTSD... unsub"
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I'd say that that's a fairly solid reason to unsubscribe from a channel
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He's also operating under the delusion that his friends don't care about him
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Feeling so persecuted that he physically saws himself in half simply to prove how little they care
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When that actually couldn't be further from the truth
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Finally, we see his speech deteriorate into incoherent rambling
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Based on these symptoms, Josh appears to have schizophrenia
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A brain disorder in which a person has trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy
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And has trouble managing normal emotions
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Symptoms include: everything we just mentioned
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Visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal, disorganized speech
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And the condition tends to appear between the ages of 16 and 30
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See that age joke at the beginning wasn't just a non sequitur, it actually had a purpose
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All in all, it sounds pretty cut and dry, right?
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But then we look at his medical records
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The slate of doctors listed for treating him over the last 9 years, Dr. Hill included, are all MDs
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Meaning that they're psychiatrists, people who went to medical school, had a year of medical internships,
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And have 3 years of residency to assess and treat mental health conditions
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Training which now enables them to prescribe medicine to their patients
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So Josh seems like he's seeing the right people for his issues, except apparently he's not
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Looking down the list of medicines and treatments he's been given, they're all for extreme depression
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You see, nerve cells in the brain communicate using chemicals called neurotransmitters
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I've mentioned them before in my video on the addictive qualities of mobile gaming
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And, as you can imagine, there are a bunch
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But the most famous are dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine
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Well, depression and schizophrenia are currently thought to be tied to different neurotransmitters
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With schizophrenia being linked to the overactivity of dopamine, while depression is thought to be tied
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To a decrease in the production of serotonin
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The drugs we see Josh being prescribed, though, are all focused around serotonin
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Fluoxetine is an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor
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Which - to grossly simplify - is meant to increase the amount of serotonin in the brain
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Duloxetine is a selective serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor
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Which again leave dopamine, Josh's actual issue, untreated
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And both Amitriptyline and Phenelzine are some of the earliest antidepressants developed
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Effective, yes, but now replaced with newer, less side-effect heavy drugs
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And neither of them primarily focused on what Josh's true problem is
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Regulating the amount of dopamine in his brain
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Knowing this, the results of Josh's medical reports are unsurprising
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Each time, the medicine didn't fix his problem
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And occasionally he would resort to taking more in an attempt to see any sort of result - any sort of relief
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And here's why! He was being treated for the wrong disorder
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His primary issue is schizophrenia, not depression
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Of course the medicines would have limited effectiveness
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They weren't doing anything to treat the primary symptoms
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of hallucination, delusion, paranoia, and disorganized speech
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What does this mean?
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It means that Josh wasn't getting the help that he needed to mitigate his condition
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And leads us to the true meaning of Until Dawn
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In a game that prides itself on choice for its characters, Josh had no choice
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Schizophrenia is tied very closely to genetics, so he had no choice to get the disorder in the first place
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Josh had no choice when placed in the hands of experts, who misjudged and mistreated his condition
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He was passed out and had no choice when the rest of the group pulled a prank that would ultimately
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kill his two younger sisters
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And even in death, he has no choice
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You, as the player, cannot save him
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No matter what you do, there is no happy ending for Josh
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He was doomed from the start
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In a game all about choice, probably the biggest one that you can have is forgiving Josh
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Looking beyond his actions, the awful things that he did, and choosing to save his life
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Recognizing him for the young man in need of help that he is
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But you can't do that.
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When you look at it this way, Until Dawn is a big metaphor, where the true monster
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Is psychological disorder
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It strikes randomly, has no mercy, and gives you no chance of escape, no chance to run and hide
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And the true villain of the game is Dr. Hill and the system that didn't know enough, or simply didn't care enough
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To give Josh the help that he so desperately needed
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Now that is truly a horror game
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But, hey, that's just a theory
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A Game Theory
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Thanks for watching :)
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Welcome back to the SUPER AMAZING END CARD TOURNAMENT
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Today we covered a game full of sexy characters and important choices
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So in honor of that, today's poll has one important question for you
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Hot or Not? The wendigo
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Bangable undead or a face only a mother could love
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Click on one to choose or click the links in the description to cast your vote
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And find out next week whether you guys would swipe right or swipe left
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♪ Bow chicka bow wow ♪
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And hey! If you want to check out some hilarious highlights of our playthrough of Until Dawn
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Click here to check out the GTLive channel for moments like this:
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*Josh screaming* While MatPat and Steph repeatedly say stop
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"Oh no it's actually killing him!"
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"Oh it's - oh no!"
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"Oh no!"