NPCs

Everybody reading a whole lot into the concept of the NPC, but like… do y’all play video games?

NPCs literally exist. They are an existing category of actor you can engage. They live in their little worlds. On some levels they appear to have agency. When you skip past the dialogue of a shopkeeper, that’s an NPC. When a boss kicks your virtual ass? Who is the PC now?

When you are swarmed by an army of bots because you said the wrong code phrase, how different does that feel from being brigaded by humans on the same app? What qualities do we use to recognize each other’s humanity, when most of our interactions are virtual?

Our “uniquely human pursuits”, like writing, planning, creating art and music… these will be done as well or better by machines in the near future. I know people have been claiming this for a long time, but if you look at SOTA results we are at the inflection point.

What happens when you realize your favorite author is an algorithm? That your chatbot understands you better than your family does?

When you give instructions to your computer and it mysteriously runs its own processes to figure out how to solve it… how do you trust that it’s doing what you want? What if your computer was a player character?

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People already experience fear and love for the characters in video games. How are we going to feel when the average virtual person is smarter, sexier, and more creative than the average human? How will we humanize AI? How will we dehumanize each other?

From the DMs

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