The NPCs Edition

On RPGs, culture, and glitches

Ted (T.M.) Brown is a writer in Brooklyn for the New York Times, the New Yorker, and other places. He writes the weekly substack on visual culture Is It Supposed to Look Like That?

Ted here. You might have seen a young Quebecois woman saying “ice cream so good” over and over into a livestream camera this summer and went “huh.” Fedha Sinon—better known by her nom du stream PinkyDoll—is a non-player character (NPC) streamer, and their ranks are growing.

Why is this interesting?

The phenomenon pretty quickly separates audiences into two very different camps: those who innately understand what the hell is going on and those who never will because it weaves together too many disparate cultural threads. 

For those who need some context, NPCs are a vital part of role-playing games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons or the Final Fantasy video game series. A shopkeeper who sells you potions and weapons is an NPC, as in a townsperson you harass for information. Basically any character you can’t control—or take the “role” of—is an NPC, so they’re a ubiquitous presence in these games.

To get into the nitty gritty of why a sentient being would want to imitate rote, looped responses like a minor character in Westworld requires that you be familiar with both gamer culture and the freaky side of the internet.

PinkyDoll started showing up in everyone’s algorithm this past summer and people were totally captivated. The New York Times ran a decent explainer on her so I won’t go into the whole thing, but, honestly, seeing Sinon totally committed to shedding her humanity and becoming this character defined by their lack of agency and thinking was fascinating. She would sit there staring at the camera, hair straightener in hand, popping single popcorn kernels while she uttered phrases with all the emotion of a cursed windup doll.

So why are people like Sinon doing this? There are two answers to that question. First, as with most things, there’s the money. Viewers give NPC streamers digital gifts in order to “activate” certain phrases, which, yes, is a totally deranged sentence. Sinon says she makes $2000-$3000 for every livestream, and even accounting for the extremely volatile creator economy that’s a decent amount of money to bank for when your celebrity eventually runs dry and we move onto the next weird viral thing.

The more existential “why” is harder to parse. You can find a lot of NPC streamers doing their schtick in downtown Manhattan now, setting up shop in front of Bloomingdale’s and Aritzia as if they’re street performers. There’s an irony there, of course, as they’re using the bustling street scene behind them as a backdrop for digital donors rather than trying to get the people walking by them in the real world to Venmo them a dollar.

That’s a very real separation point, and one that maybe splits the seam in how people experience reality. The perceptive knots get really hard to untie as you get further down: These are (real) people pretending to be (fake) people in (real) places for (digital) audiences. It’s a funhouse mirror version of what we were expecting the promises of virtual and augmented reality to be. Instead of a wonderland of sensory overload, all we get is this bootleg simulacrum filled with folks trying to make a living in an increasingly grim economy. 

I don’t think NPC streaming has much in the way of staying power since there’s a huge first-mover bonus in the oddball corners of the digital economy and then the diminishing returns crater pretty quickly. But live-streaming isn’t going anywhere, and it’s sure to be a source of weirdness to come. (T.M.)

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Ted (T.M.)

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