Words Worth Knowing: NPC
Words Worth Knowing was a vertical I wrote weekly explaining key pieces of gaming jargon to parents, guardians and teachers, as part of the larger overall GameHub outreach effort. The column ran for nearly two years and resulted in around 60 WWK articles. GameHubHQ.com closed in late 2017. This piece originally appeared on Jul 27, 2015.
For our second word, we are going to look at an acronym unique to gaming. What is an NPC, what do you need to know and why do you need to care?
What It Is: NPC = Non-Playable Character
What It Means: All the characters that occur in the game that the player cannot directly control. This includes pedestrians and passers-by in large open-world games, other racers in driving games, and, in games where the player is part of a group, their character's friends, companions or gang.
Why You Care: Non-playable characters make up all the other people in a game world aside from the player. The NPCs are controlled by the computer. They may interact with the player in a meaningful way, as friends, team members or lovers, or they may be unimportant passers-by, enemy soldiers or simply members of a crowd. The ways in which the game allows the player to interact with NPCs may affect how you perceive the game's content. For example, some games punish or prohibit the player from killing "innocent bystander" NPCs, whilst other actively encourage the player to terrorise a game's inhabitants. A game may allow a player to have sexual relationships with one of their NPC companions, or allow the player to pick up NPC prostitutes for sex. How a game allows the player to interact with its digital citizens will depend broadly on it's genre, but with a thousand subtle differences from title to individual title.
