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?

Its no excuse, since kids in other countries seem to be better at this, but... "kids will be mean"

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."

I've often heard that the term NPC is one of the primary causes of slippery-slope fallacy.

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.