The NPC meme is pretty hilarious to me. I don’t really want to tweet on main about it because I think there it takes on a sort of performative element, but I think it’s interesting enough to prompt some introspection.
Video games have always been a part of my life and I’m very grateful for them. Some of my favorite games are RPGs that are full of NPCs. I don’t know if it ever specifically occurred to me to think of other people in my life as NPCs – I do have a word vomit (0547) exploring the thought experiment of “if everyone were zombies”. I’d like to think that I explored that with some thoughtfulness and good-faith – the idea there seems to be that some other people might SEEM like NPCs, but obviously it’s improbable that they feel that way themselves.
There’s a Verge article exploring the NPC meme and it talks about how it’s been “weaponized” – which I think is the real story here. How everything is “weaponized”. I don’t want to be the “oh, wasn’t it better in the good old days where things were just things without having to be weaponized” guy, but I do have a version of that thought in my mind. What’s with the… vitriol? Why so angry? Why so upset? I guess I know why, it’s because life is hard and you don’t really have anybody to talk to about it in a constructive way, and it’s easier to be bitter than it is to be constructive and nourishing.
Growing up, I did feel in many ways like some sort of misfit, some sort of outcast. My favorite game in recent times is Horizon Zero Dawn, where (spoilers, kinda) – the main character starts out as a literal outcast from a tribe, and ends up becoming a sort of savior figure. And the whole time I find myself thinking, man, it’s so silly how humans are. It’s so silly that we need to dehumanize other people, either by writing them off, or by pedestalizing them. It must be lonely being Aloy, or being any celebrity in “real life”.
I tweeted a while ago about how, in a funny way, a common theme in a lot of my writing is “people are people”. It seems like a surprisingly strange and foreign concept to a lot of people, that other people are people. They might see people in their in-group as people, but people in the outgroup always seem somehow less… people-y. I had this feeling myself when watching a Netflix special about Rajinikanth fans (For The Love Of A Man). I found myself thinking, wow, there’s something really crazy about those fans. But it’s also such a human thing, isn’t it? To want to have something greater than yourself to participate in.
I was troubled by how those young men were saying things like, “if the movie is late, we cannot take it, we will throw bottles at the screen”, and “if something happens to Rajini in the movie, we will get angry, we cannot help ourselves”. Like, nervous chuckling, what the fuck? What do you mean you cannot help yourselves? I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that people are so fundamentally incapable of controlling themselves. I think it’s a sort of choice. It’s like that bit about domestic abusers – they claim to lose control, and yet the patterns of violence themselves tend to fit within boundaries. It’s often a thoughtful sort of violence, contained, controlled.
I found myself thinking some nasty, negative thoughts watching those guys on my screen. At some level I empathize with them. It must be hard, feeling voiceless, insignificant. I don’t know what that feels like. I was talking to my wife recently about how I’ve felt my whole life like my voice has always been amplified even when I don’t want it to be, like I get picked on and called out disproportionately whether I like it or not. When somebody tries to insult me with some variant of “you don’t really matter”, “you’re not important”, “you’re not significant”, I find rather… amused? Unfazed? Confused, even? Because that’s simply not consistent with my experience. I feel like the anime character with the different colored hair. I was born different, somehow. I don’t fit in anywhere. I don’t have a natural ingroup that I can hide in.
And I guess that brings me to what’s so funny about this whole NPC meme thing. It’s perpetuated by a group of people who think they are somehow special or different from everybody else, because they think deep thoughts and have profound feelings. But in sharing in the joke – and remember, all jokes exist in social contexts, and function to sustain social orders – they are all creating and sustaining an us-vs-them view of the world. To have a problem with NPCs is to in a way be an NPC yourself. A differentiated NPC by your own estimation, sure, but you’re still falling into a predictable sort of pattern. And there are some funny results where people try to turn the meme onto itself, describing how the users of the memes are themselves formulaic.
So the only winning move is not to play. You demonstrate your non-NPC-ness by literally playing your damn game, however you define what your game is, as dictated by your own tastes and interests. You look for things that are novel, interesting, surprising, things that catch your attention in particular. And you basically live your own damn life, damnit. Writing people off as NPCs is not a way to make friends. Is it? You could build a bond with someone else out of a shared hate of everyone else, but what sort of relationship would that even be? I almost don’t want to think too much about it. But having started down that train of thought, I instantly find myself reflecting on past relationships I’ve had with friends where our common interest was mocking others. Pretty much all of those relationships didn’t end well. On retrospect, it’s kind of obvious why.