There is a term that, for a few years now, has been close to ubiquitous online, and by which I find myself equally troubled and fascinated. The term is “NPC”; it originated in video games, and it’s an acronym for “non-player character” or “non-playable character”. If you’ve spent any time gaming, you’ll likely know these guys: the villager who helps you on your quest, or the storekeeper who sells you inventory items, and whose dialogue is limited to the point where, if you keep talking to him long enough, he begins to repeat himself ad nauseam. These are characters who are positioned within a game in order to advance the plot or to otherwise give the imagined world a feel of depth and reality. They’re the unimportant bystanders in, say, the Grand Theft Auto series whom the player can casually murder without any consequence to the overall trajectory of the game.
The reason the term has become ubiquitous online is that it functions as a potent rhetorical shorthand for whole groups of people whom the speaker wishes to dismiss as not possessing minds of their own. In a way, NPCs can be seen as basically interchangeable with such categories as normies, basic bitches, sheeple, and so forth: people whose taste in culture, products, and political ideas mark them out as essentially just drifting through life without any real agency or originality of though – in crucial distinction from oneself, a person with a high degree of agency and intellectual autonomy. One prominent recent usage of the term came from Sam Altman, the cofounder and chief executive of OpenAI, announcing his change of mind about a US president of whom he’d formerly been critical: “i wish i had done more of my own thinking,” he posted on X, “and definitely fell in the npc trap.” The fact that this change of mind was made in exact sync with the mass adoption of Trumpism among his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires reveals much about Altman, and about the volatile irony at the heart of the NPC concept.
Although the term is not an explicitly ideological one, it has obvious political connotations. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, especially favoured as an epithet by the online right, who are inclined to dismiss leftists and liberals as collectively in thrall to a rigorously enforced set of groupthink norms.
The meme that is often used to illustrate this critique is a crude and simplistic cartoon of a grey and near-featureless face – two tiny black dots for the eyes, an acute angle for the nose, a perfectly straight and grim slot for the mouth. This character, known as “NPC Wojak” is often shown surrounded by speech bubbles expressing various reductive renderings of bien pensant liberal sentiments – “diversity is strength”, “orange man bad”, that sort of thing.
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Its popularity can partly be explained by its containing a kernel of truth, albeit of a subjective kind: looked at from one’s own vantage point, people on the other side of an ideological divide can often appear to hold the same cluster of almost arbitrary opinions, and to be driven by a kind of herd mentality. As with so many insults and epithets, it’s partly a kind of psychological projection: a person who accuses his enemy of being an NPC might be attempting to ward off the deep suspicion that he himself is somehow not the protagonist of his own life.
In one sense, this seems like an expression of a sharply contemporary condition: a kind of solipsism that arises from spending a lot of time online, and in particular on social media, where other lives are glimpsed in the form of avatars, scrolling text, fleeting video, and where it’s increasingly difficult to tell whether one is encountering a genuine human intelligence or some kind of algorithmic emanation. But this suspicion that other humans might not be real is, of course, an ancient one with a varied philosophical heritage. The Gnostics (adherents of a widespread early Christian heretical sect) believed that there were levels of human existence: the spiritually enlightened Pneumatic, and the so-called Hylics, who were without minds or souls. Descartes, in his Meditations, explored the idea that we can know only our own minds, and therefore can’t be sure that other minds exist. Nietzsche basically never shut up about herd mentality. And let’s not even get into The Matrix films, other than to acknowledge that it is the obvious proximal source of most of this contemporary NPC stuff.
For all that the idea is rooted in philosophical antecedents, it’s not Descartes or Nietzsche or the Gnostic heresiarchs that I really think of when I see a person dismissing people as NPCs: it’s myself, as a teenager, in my more foul-tempered and alienated moments. There is, I think, something fundamentally adolescent about the desire to see oneself as an authentic, self-guided freethinker, hemmed in on all sides by herds of conformist sheep. It’s this realisation, ironically enough, that allows me to identify with, and even feel for, the people who call others NPCs.
I have never met an ordinary person. There are no NPCs
It suggests a view of the world constrained and impoverished by incuriosity and isolation: a level of dehumanisation of others that can only arise out of a deep alienation from one’s own humanity. And I don’t mean this as a cheap dig: nothing is more profoundly and irreducibly human than a deep alienation from one’s own humanity.
In a sermon he gave in 1941, CS Lewis delivered two sentences that I love for their simplicity and beauty and almost shocking clarity: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Although I don’t share the Christian conviction out of which Lewis wrote – that every human being carries within them the potential to reflect the divine light of God, and that we are all of us on our individual journeys toward final salvation or damnation – I admire, and in my better moments share, the sentiment. And it is, too, something I have learned again and again through my own work, where I have mostly written about other people, in all their inexhaustible strangeness and fascination. I have never met an ordinary person. There are no NPCs; there are only worlds you have not yet met the responsibility of imagining.
