Don’t Play Me | The Untouchable NPC

Down bad.

Unapproachable. 

Untouchable.

Unplayable.

NPC discourse has evolved over the years, since the term was first wielded as an insult by the chronically online to describe those who lacked “main character” energy. In short, it implied that, while some people were will-wielding protagonists in command of their own destiny, others were just blank assets who ran on simplified behavioural code. Differences in awareness, taste, and intellect separated the active agents from the pre-programmed masses.

“The NPC conceit conjured a bizarre theory of everything drawing on occult mysticism, pop psychology, and the simulation hypothesis,” writes strategist Robert Bolton for Newest. “To summarize: Given the scarcity of souls in this video game, some of you are basically furniture.”¹  

It works as a metaphor — since, through one lens, ours is a game-world organised according to intricate layers of rules, protocols, incentives and rewards. But the question of inner emptiness, or having little control over life’s outcomes, predates the social platform — fate is just a lack of agency by another name. It remains unclear how our will arises from biological drives. Many actions taken in daily life bypass or exclude conscious deliberation, emerging from different cognitive orders that predate consciousness.² Our intentional, conscious self — our agentic self — is but one operator among many. 

The “agency fetish”, as Marek Poliks and Roberto Trillo call it in their collaborative lecture of the same name, arises precisely at the intersection of technological determination and human hubris.³

Neither the millionaire habit-hacker nor the feral communard solve the problem of diminished personal agency.

Even the most counter-cultural or counter-operative figures have failed to fully resist the platform’s complex and responsive behavioural imperatives. As you may well know, the platform continually reshapes itself in our image, just as we continually adjust our image in resistance to or relation to its demands. 

The reshaping extends to the entire world, affecting aesthetic trends and production planning, company valuation and logistical flows. For some, acting as machine-like as possible — transforming oneself into sets of statistical probabilities and clusters of likely outcomes — simply guarantees success in an environment that already selects for legible, interpretable performance.

Look no further than the much-documented NPC streamers whose presence peaked in the pandemic era, and whose lobotomised gaze and limited gestures spoke to an intentional evacuation of will.

The “self" is evacuated to make room for money. Successful streamers cash in bodily gestures for tokens. But one doesn’t have to be a schematised streamer to benefit from system-friendly logic: among other examples, we may count highly structured personality archetypes, from MBTI tests to OCEAN psychological frameworks, to astrological obsessives, to those who faithfully distinguish between Gen X-Y-Z-Alpha. 

Many a techno-cynical think-piece has taken down the fallacies of the “quantified self” and the aspiring NPC, separately. The former elucidates a life stripped of unpredictability and, therefore, eros; the latter a sad but expected outcome of living with automation. Both, in their behavioural appeal to computational logic, reveal how human decision-making processes make up just one aspect of the “cognitive assemblage’ of thinking technical systems, as Hayles has defined it. Closer examination reveals an age-old and unanswerable paradox: is it exerting control that overwrites our programming, or is it ceding it? 

Acting without intention, deviating from the plan, dropping out and falling off can be seen as wilful — or automatic — as life-hacking. A favourite paradox: indomitable will and automatic drives emerge as strangely similar, while automatic acts — instinct, fluency, and intuition — only further enrich a strong self-concept. Sara Ahmed’s “wilful subject” is one who is disobedient, resistant to the relentless positivity that sustains predictive regimes. “To be judged willful is to become a killjoy of the future: the one who steals the possibility of happiness,” she writes. “The one who gets in the way of a happiness assumed as on the way.”⁴ 

To be “unplayable” can also mean untouchable. To be impervious to the manipulations of others.

To “get in the way of a happiness assumed” — counteracting the relentless positivity that sculpts and drives platform dynamics towards a future where human agency is increasingly superfluous to planetary computation. How can we reconcile these two states? Consider that the fantasy of invulnerability means having no discernible “inside”. Consider that maintaining mystery is an exercise of black-boxing the self. Opting out of self-announcement — the legacy requirement of platforms, which respond well to caricatured or maximised personas that are legible to nonhuman and human agents alike — requires “non-performance,” as Fred Moten has defined it.

Exercises that seemingly work against recognition but develop a concealed agency through what the poet and theorist defines as “erotic fugitivity”: the cat-and-mouse chase through predatory infrastructures that depends on sensitivity and foreknowledge, rather than avoidance or acceptance.

A fluency in surfaces and illusions, under the sun and moon of exposure and concealment, can deepen one’s ability to evade capture, presenting a selection of decoys in the form of character representations in order to live a life less-detected. 

“The surface is not just the medium for the sign, or for representation, but that which is moving — that which is surfacing,” says Fred Moten in “A Defense of Two-Dimensionality”.⁵ Rather than fleshing yourself out in order to be better recognised as a worthy human subject, diffuse into any number of details or contradictions, countervailing energies or adversarial personalities. In a previous essay for SQD.ZIP, I wrote about how it may benefit us that we are “never deluded enough to think of [ourselves] as the directors of surveillance, instead accepting [our] role as its subject and co-creator,” producing an array of smooth and appealing surfaces that continuously shine and move that captivate predatory attention while allowing the uncapturable, unscathed.⁶

The last shred of agency might be found in the toggle between “nonplayable” character and “unplayable” mystery. Then, the only person who can play you is yourself.