That was the question I asked of my twenty something year old offspring. It was an acronym never before encountered in my, long literate life. I was expecting it to be a term of great complexity and importance that had migrated into common usage from the technical domain. Perhaps it was a more advanced form of recreational stimulant like PCP or LSD or a music act like NWA or ELO? Each of these had blazed through my past like bits of space debris before vanishing into the general darkness of ‘who gives a shit’ or ‘whatever happened to’ oblivion. My loving tutors patiently explained to me that the term had originated in the realm of video games, somewhere I never ventured. It’s meaning was simple enough, Non Playable Character. The term basically refers to one of those animated figures who people street scenes or crowd gatherings in video games. Creatures who wander through the digital world with neither intent nor destination. Obedient, immune to the control or manipulation by whomever the main players are. They are the innocents, the unlucky and passers-by so methodically maimed and killed in the algorithmic mayhem willed into existence by the content creators. It is a world of digital ones and twos, subject to laws and forces far beyond their comprehension or control. Sound familiar? I’ve finished my coffee and will now vacate my table at the Brew Bowl and walk obediently to my car, arms passively at my side, and wait for what happens next.
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There is a popular theory that we are all actors in a computer simulation being run by god-like alien children (or scientists) and that most of those that we interact with daily do not exist, but are NPCs placed into the simulation to make it seem real for us, the actors. So when we play video games that include NPCs, we are emulating our creators – those who run the computer simulation that we inhabit.
Do our personal avatars in our games know that some of the characters they pass by are merely NPCs with no real life, not even a simulated one in our game? That they have no human using them as avatars in the game? Of course not, how could they?
So how can we differentiate between people we see and talk to? Which ones are avatars of alien children (or scientists) and which are NPCs? Does it matter in the end? If we knew would we change?
There are people in the world today who act as if no one around them matters, as if we are all beneath them, as if we are NPCs. Do they have some personality disorder, or have they seen beyond the simulation?