«[…] slang used by millenials to denote people who act as if they are being told by someone to act in a specific manner, although that may not be the case. Using this abbreviation, the commentator or the creator is poking fun at the other person for acting in a certain manner.»
Right word, wrong meaning. In the result you quoted, a person's intelligence is being compared to that of a NPC, implying that the person can't think for themselves and does whatever they're told like how NPCs in games act. The gp seems to imply a slightly different meaning, where a person is thought of as being not being a real person, and is only someone you go to for transactional work related stuff.
Whichever meaning, NPC is a recent insidious method of dehumanizing people that ranks right up there with labels like "pigs," "rats," and "cockroaches."
This tactic is essentially a first prerequisite for mass violence. It's sure to increase incidences of mentally ill shooters viewing everyone around them as bots in a video game. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/26330024209169...
I was extremely disheartened to hear my son describe someone as an NPC the other day. It really only functions to belittle and negatively categorize people. Worse still is that if someone truly does lack cognitive ability such that they do “follow the script”, the last thing they need is someone perhaps only marginally more intelligent to identify and discriminate their deficits.
It’s just a miserable lens to view others through. It’s quite popular with the kids, though.
Perhaps it’s better than what I grew up with, which was calling anything you didn’t like “gay” or “faggy”. Ugh. Sometimes we set a low bar.
It is really popular, and when I point out the problems with it, they say I'm overreacting and that they obviously don't mean it in a dehumanising way, but then lo and behold immediately after someone will come and say they actually do believe that some people are robots or somehow less human than others, confirming my suspicion that this is a genuine problem
It's also one of the things, along with other things, that signals to me that intelligence and specifically mental health ableism are going to be the huge dividing problem coming up. Specifically, do we know how to function as a society without being able to discriminate based on mental qualities?
Do you see the irony in having the meaning of words being completely preprogrammed by what someone else want you to think and feel in a discussion about the word NPC? You know, context matters.
NPC has always meant a non-human in a video game. What's new is applying it to people in the real world; it's textbook dehumanization. This is literally how many people use the word, as another commenter below experienced multiple times. It serves zero purpose for me to go around thinking "NPC means X", when everyone else is "NPC means Y."
My first instinct was to say this seems like an overreaction to a joke, but this is a meme that originated from 4chan and the worst parts of reddit, so you might not be far off, given the track records for violence there.
Whenever I say it's a problem people are there to say I'm overreacting, but literally every time someone pops up out of the woodwork and confirms that they genuinely believe that some people are really NPCs, i.e. that they have no "soul" or self and are internally autonomous, like a computer.
Origin predates computer RPG's. It's from tabletop role playing games, and stands for "non player characters".
NPCs are the characters that the Dungeon Master (DM) creates to guide and influence the story, but the player characters (PCs) are the focus of the story. It's collaborative storytelling about the PCs adventure. An NPC is, by definition, not the hero.
Another meaning that has started to become prevalent is the conspiracy theory that some people don't experience qualia and have no internal "souls", i.e. they don't actually exist they are just robots. See twitter every time someone points out that some people don't have an internal voice or can't see images in their mind. There will be a chorus of people who are genuinely horrified and claim that this means that the person is not a real human but actually a robot. It sounds dramatic and I think people might even downvote me for this comment, but I've seen it quite a lot and increasingly often
NPC has, for some, become a term to completely dehumanise, in an almost moral panic kind of way. In a way that's like "what if the people I know are actually NPCs?"
NPC as in someone who is unremarkable, is basic and the same as everyone else, hence the name a non-playable character (moreso referring to a background characater).
One of the first search results reads:
«[…] slang used by millenials to denote people who act as if they are being told by someone to act in a specific manner, although that may not be the case. Using this abbreviation, the commentator or the creator is poking fun at the other person for acting in a certain manner.»