NPCs in the Slop Mines

Don't replace complex realities with simplistic ones

Refusing to wait in long lines is a good rule of thumb, especially if it’s a rule you’re willing to selectively break. In the post-pandemic era, the lines seem to have gotten longer and more prevalent, in tandem with other inflationary, tech-enabled phenomena like instantly sold-out merchandise drops and restaurant reservation scarcity. But a long line does not just represent a supply/demand imbalance or an operational bottleneck—it’s also that my rule is being flouted: The lines proliferate because people are more willing to wait in them. We all know the cynical theory that certain businesses engineer long lines as a marketing tactic but, regardless, the customers are ultimately to blame, inverting the logic that repels me from a queue snaking out of a store entrance and down the street. People seem to see the line and instinctively want to get in it, maybe before even knowing what it’s for. Internet virality and its accompanying mentality of constant FOMO are powerful drivers of this; small businesses market themselves on those same social media channels and doing so is often effective enough to flood them with a surplus of customers. An unexplained line wrapping around the block is usually the tip of the iceberg, indicating a much larger mass of digital activity that generated it.

I’ve been refining my theory of the urban NPC over the last year or two. Waiting in these long lines—for restaurant pop-ups or retail drops or regular baked goods—is a pillar of NPCism, which I defined last year as “a predictable pattern of public space usage” (I’ll note here that this definition isn’t inherently pejorative—being a regular customer somewhere or just hanging out consistently in the same place is an example of what I’d consider desirable NPCism). In video games, an NPC or non-player character is one whose essential quality is predictability, their behavior scripted or crudely randomized, responding to external cues in deterministic ways. In digital space, NPC behavior flourishes not just in games but in gamified environments like social media, where legible incentives shape users’ already-constrained behavior. Offline, it’s a bit more complex: Meatspace has its own set of incentives, which are less legible, but IRL behavior is increasingly mediated by digital forces: algorithms, interface design, networked sociality. Your appetite is physically embodied but the TikTok or Instagram content that informed you of a specific restaurant is not; the interaction of the two is what gets you queued up for limited-edition tacos or whatever. Responsiveness to marketing is a core NPC behavior and the marketing is getting more sophisticated—so deeply embedded in online logic that it’s often not even considered marketing at all.

We are all creatures of habit, of course. At a certain resolution, each of us is an NPC in someone else’s eyes, going about our consistent daily routine. To call someone else an NPC too readily is a sign of solipsism. Sarah Schulman bemoaned the “replacement of complex realities with simplistic ones” and for many of us—certainly for myself—so-called NPC behavior represents a distaste for this oversimplified reality. I’ve been thinking about this lately amid the ongoing AI discourse, which has recently focused on the concept of “slop,” the unwanted content that AI churns out en masse, polluting the social internet. In digital space—gaming and otherwise—AI should also give us more sophisticated NPCs, whose behavior is more human-like and less predictable, perhaps to such a degree that we wouldn’t even use the the term “NPC” to describe them, or even know they weren’t real people. Every piece I read about AI slop, however, reminds me of the elephant in the room: Humans on the internet are still churning out similar slop at an alarming rate, and AI’s willingness to do it for us seems unlikely to slow us down. One of the major criticisms of AI’s deployment in art is that it only synthesizes existing data, inherently producing unsurprising mediocrity. In cities, we resent NPCs because they are also unsurprising, consuming without enhancing the public realm in return. Of its many applications, AI is already useful as a bar that we should be trying to clear just to assert our own humanity, an implicit Turing test that we pass or fail every time we post. “How will AI affect cities?” feels like the kind of poorly-framed prompt you would feed into ChatGPT, but if I had to venture my own answer, I’d say: showing us what slop looks like and challenging us not to export it offline.

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Reads:

• Owen Hatherley on Britain’s ‘60s- and ‘70s-era shopping centres, for Vittles. “The moment a mall comes alive often arrives, ironically, when it is deemed a commercial failure: when landlords can’t command premium rent, they are then often happy to let the space go fallow until the property developers move in. When capital (and with it the tight ‘curation’, to which businesses have access) retreats, then people who live locally can participate in determining the use of a mall.”

• How everyone got lost in Netflix’s endless library. “A $115 million movie budget is hard for Netflix to justify at almost any level of viewership, given that at the end of the day it supplies just two hours of content for a subscriber base that’s paying for a sense of infinity.”

• This robot is an unintentional reminder that bartending is less susceptible to automation than almost any other job.