https://twitter.com/TeiT3nga/status/1629380447607336960?cxt=HHwWgMDR-cu43JwtAAAA
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The topic of NPCs should be an important one. Why? I have thought for some time that that the notion of the NPC is indispensable to any understanding of the majority of the behavior, certainly the majority of behavior we have witnessed both during and after “our most recent unpleasantness” (2020-2022).
A nice summary from Google:
“An NPC (Non-Player Character) is any character in a video game or tabletop game not controlled by a player, typically governed by computer AI or a gamemaster. They populate game worlds (I would change this to “Game Environments” for the reasons below), providing quests, dialogue, and interaction, often following pre-programmed behaviors. The term has also evolved into an internet meme describing people who lack independent thought.”
In several places in his writing Walker Percy makes the distinction between living in an “Environment” and living in a “World”. The crucial difference between where one experiences one’s existence (possibly an argument for a dimensionality of some kind might be had with this distinction) has to do with whether one is a “sign-user” ( in other places in his writing he refers to human beings as “symbol-mongers”[Homo symbolificus] ). For Percy what makes human beings unique is their capacity to create, use, influence, and be influenced by symbols, language, and signs (in the C.S. Peirce sense of Sign). To oversimplify … for Percy those who are “symbol-mongers” and are able to use and manipulate Signs experience their existence in a “World” those who are unable, for various and sundry reasons to use and manipulate Signs, inhabit an “Environment”. Admittedly an oversimplification but this is to say that those who live in “Environments” experience their existence in S-R (stimulus-response) systems.
That the video game “environment” runs on dyadic logic it is by definition an S-R environment.
Might, at the end of the day, “Virtual Environments” (this is not to single out video games, there are much larger non-game bound “Virtual Environments”) serve only to condition the “players” and by doing so lure human beings out of their “Worlds” and to unknowingly live out the experience of their existence as NPCs? David’s headline should be of concern to all of us.
Hopefully, this will generate a little thought on the subject. Much, much more can be said in the context of the consideration of NPCs.
Apologies David. I meant to reply to your thread much earlier. This topic needs much more consideration that it gets.
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I had quite forgotten…there are so many of them now- and perhaps there always were…