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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28288 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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[EDIT: At 24 hrs after my initial post I'll collect all the responses and decide what I want to do with them]

This is a poll question. The idea is to get and understand the people reading this, their takes.

In the optimal scenario, answers wouldn't contaminate the others' responses or reference others' definitions and understanding.

The question: In sociopolitical contexts, what is your personal, off-the-cuff definition or interpretation of the term NPC? Again, I'm not looking for any other thinker's or pundit's definitions of the term, but you, the commenter who responds to me. I already know the concept has already been discussed and mentioned, at length, elsewhere.

If you've never heard the term before, give me a guess of what you would think the term means and what information you pull from. Ideally, answers would be spoilered using the double-pipe notation, IE wrapping the answer with a pair of: || around their responses, without referring to anyone else's response.

To avoid contamination, I'll post my own definition as a response to this comment later.

Someone whom the speaker believes subhuman - in particular in the moral sense of "if you harm or kill this person, it is less bad than normal".

"if you harm or kill this person, it is less bad than normal".

This is true for people who don't have to even be NPCs. Killing David Reich is a crime against humanity in a way that even killing one of his graduate students would not be. I wouldn't consider Reich or anyone good enough to work in his lab to be an NPC.

Where did you get that definition?!

It's what you'd expect -- people who don't like the term or its users define it in a way that throws shade on those who use it rather than those who are referred to by it.

NPCs in video games aren't real people and you can kill them for fun.

Yeah, but who used it this way in relation to real people?

It's a figure of speech. They're NPCs, I don't respect them.

That's a decade old now, so predating the NPC label, but expressing a similar sentiment as the OR.

I mean, if I ever call someone an NPC in earnest, that is an intended connotation. I don't think I've ever done so, though I have made the "do not give rights to this thing" argument in the case of misaligned AI.

I'll admit that reading the bit after the dash into other people's use is uncharitable, but given the original meaning is literally "a character in a game that's not controlled by a real human" I don't think "subhuman" is at all a reach.

I'll admit that reading the bit after the dash into other people's use is uncharitable, but given the original meaning is literally "a character in a game that's not controlled by a real human" I don't think "subhuman" is at all a reach.

Given that when someone labels someone else as an NPC, it's generally to contrast them with others - such as themselves in their eyes - who are Playable Characters (PCs), I don't think this really tracks. PCs are just as subhuman as NPCs, in that they're both equally electronic fictions concocted by humans for entertainment, they're just subhuman arrangements of pixels/bits/whatever abstraction of computer code you want to go with being controlled by humans, in contrast to NPCs that follow programmed routines.

but given the original meaning is literally "a character in a game that's not controlled by a real human" I don't think "subhuman" is at all a reach.

Sure it is. There's no reason to assume this meaning over the alternatives, and given how extreme that position would be, it is quite a reach.

The impression I get is less that users of the term want to machine gun people they call NPCs and more that they feel if someone else did so nothing of value would be lost.

As opposed to words like “orks”, “scum”, and “vermin” where I 100% believe the speaker would rampage if they had an opportunity.

Mmm, "would rampage if he/she had an opportunity and no better options existed" would be much closer to correct. Checking back through some of the various times I've earnestly called people scum, most of them fall into "plan A is removing these people from power, plan B for things that don't need power is throwing them in jail, but if I only have the options of killing them or letting them keep ruining everything then killing them is the less-bad option".

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