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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28385 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.

We've had some excellent responses, and most everyone seems to have gravitated toward a similar definition!

At 24 hrs from the time of my post or so depending on how buys I am, I'll post a more full examination of my comment and from where I picked up my definition. Obviously, I had far more time to think about my answer before I made this comment.

My Definition: when I think of the term NPC, I think of a person who explicitly has no (or low) moral worth. It is a pejorative, if perhaps, one of the strongest-grade pejoratives I can sling. NPCs are to be used for benefit of the player character, otherwise able to be ignored.

NPCs are not just predictable. Adding randomness to an npc doesn't make it any more interesting or agentic. They pick up an exact script- not just regurgitating the arguments given to them by others/the gods/more agentic, but the very conversations you can have with an NPC are limited to what the script allows. The things they say, the way they say them, and the things the NPC does are all limited to what the script allows the NPC to talk about. You may talk to them, and they may only have the same things to talk about as anyone else or it might be unique. But come back in a month and they'll still be talking about the same things. Therefore, people who cannot escape NPC-hood are people who get magnetized on to certain topics, and can only talk about things within the script's allowed overton window.

I think you’re spending too many words to say it, but I agree that one of the key ones is pejorative. The main reason to use the term is to convey that the subject is Bad; the specifics are secondary.

After the 2nd sentence of my definition, the rest is just additional flavor and contextualizing details, yeah.

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