What Does “NPC” Mean?

An NPC is a non-player character run by the game’s organisers; online, calling a person an NPC means they seem to act without independent thought.

Part of speech

noun, occasionally a verb

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

In a game the word covers everything in the fiction that is not somebody’s own player character: the ferryman, the sergeant, the thing in the treeline, the clerk who will not stamp your writ. Detail varies enormously, from a figure who exists for one line to one with a name, a history and full statistics behind it.

Staffing is what makes the live version different from the tabletop one. At a table the game master voices every NPC in the setting personally. At a live-action game each one tends to be a separate body in separate kit, which is why events recruit crew as well as players, and why crew get briefed on far more of the world than the players do. Somebody cut down as a bandit before lunch walks back out at dusk as a magistrate.

The other sense points at a real person, and it is never a compliment. Calling someone an NPC claims their opinions came pre-installed and that they are reciting rather than thinking. Merriam-Webster’s slang entry puts it as someone with no capacity for original thought. Reference works call the label dehumanizing, since the move is to deny the target an inside. The best-documented pattern of use is conservative accounts applying it to liberals, with rarer variants running the other way. Aimed at a character it is a job description; aimed at a person it is an insult, and the sentence it sits in makes clear which.

Where it comes from

The gaming sense came out of tabletop role-playing, where a character handled by the referee rather than by a player needed a name of its own. Merriam-Webster gives the first known use as 1977, a date on which the abbreviation was already in print rather than a coinage: no source names who said it first. Text-based multiplayer games left a cousin behind: a word for self-moving objects became the label for a wandering NPC, then got clipped in code to “mob”.

The insult has a shorter and better-documented trail. A blank-faced cartoon figure, adapted from an older image-board character, appeared on 4chan in 2016, and the label broke into wider use in October 2018 around the United States midterm elections, when accounts posing as NPCs were suspended over misleading election content. Nothing about it came from live-action gaming; it took a gaming word somewhere else entirely.

Examples

• The whole village was four NPCs and one of them was a goat, which turned out to be a crew member in a coat, committing.
• I crewed the last event, so my weekend was mostly dying as one NPC and jogging back to the tent to be issued another.
• He answered that everyone who disagreed with him was an NPC, which closed the thread without addressing a word of it.

How it connects to larpmaxxing

The two senses meet on the same feeds, pointing opposite ways. A larpmaxxing persona is a character somebody picked and keeps running, with the audience invited to spot the seams. NPC is the charge that there is no character in there at all. That is why it surfaces in the same arguments as clout chasing, and why the two are worth keeping apart: one is a bit being performed on purpose, the other is said about a person who never signed up to be in anybody’s game.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.