First things first: Is It Supposed to Look Like That? has a brand new logo thanks to the incredible designer/my great pal/number 1 Milwaukee Bucks fan Matt Wenger. I love the little eyeballs so much!
The current phenomenon of folks live-streaming themselves acting like NPCs is funny to me because people are either:
Intimately familiar with what an NPC is and are more wondering why someone would want to do that.
Have no idea what an NPC is and are also wondering why someone would want to do that.
It would be almost impossible to get the second group up to speed without collapsing into self-referential logic, which is what makes this topic so interesting to me. It’s sort of a two-tiered cultural separation: to actually understand what the hell is going on you need to be familiar with both video games and the freaky side of the internet. That isn’t a very common dual-citizenship in the wider population, but in New York media it’s effectively endemic. The weird shit happening on Twitter and TikTok is cultural currency here.
I know most of the people who are reading (at least the people who reading past the subject line) know what an NPC is, but just so we have a commons set of definitions: NPC are “non-player characters” in video games. The innkeeper you talk to in Zelda is an NPC (I guess Zelda herself is technically an NPC as well. O_o), as are any of the townspeople you harass in Diablo. NPCs have rote, often looped responses any time a player interacts with them. For my non-gamer readers, think of the minor players in Westworld and you’ll get the picture.
NPCs came into the cultural frame a few months ago when Fedha Sinon, better know by her nom du stream PinkyDoll, somehow started showing up in everyone’s algorithm. (I assume this was some malign action on the part of Tencent to drive Americans insane.) The NYT ran a decent explainer on her so I won’t go into the whole thing, but, honestly, seeing Sinon totally committed to shedding her humanity and becoming this character defined by their lack of agency and thinking was fascinating. She would sit there staring at the camera, hair straightener in hand, popping single popcorn kernels while she uttered phrases with all the emotion of a cursed windup doll.
So why are people like Sinon doing this? There are two answers to that question. First, as with most things, there’s the money. Viewers give NPC streamers digital gifts in order to order to “activate” certain phrases, which, yes, is a totally deranged sentence. Sinon says she makes $2000-$3000 for every livestream, and even accounting for the extremely volatile creator economy that’s a decent amount of money to bank for when your celebrity eventually runs dry and we move onto the next weird viral thing.
The more existential “why” is harder to parse. You can find a lot of NPC streamers doing their schtick in SoHo now, setting up shop in front of Bloomingdale’s and Aritzia as if they’re street performers. There’s an irony there, of course, as they’re using the bustling street scene behind them as a backdrop for digital donors rather than trying to get the people walking by them in the real world to Venmo them a dollar.
That’s a very real separation point, and one that maybe splits the seam in how people experience reality. The perceptive knots get really hard to untie as you get further down: These are (real) people pretending to be (fake) people in (real) places for (digital) audiences. It’s a funhouse mirror version of what we were expecting the promises of virtual and augmented reality to be. Instead of a wonderland of sensory overload, all we get is this bootleg simulacrum filled with folks trying to make a living in an increasingly grim economy. I guess it’s the future we deserve.
Some music
Friend of the letter Peter C. Baker says he loves “how expensive” Romy’s new record sounds and I have to agree. It’s so wonderfully glittery and fun. Also, go buy Peter’s novel Planes.
Some clothes
Yes, we’re doing more chore jackets but it’s mostly because I got a lovely compliment from a stranger on this Drake’s denim jawn that I bought after I wrote a piece for them about Little Tokyo. I highly recommend getting paid in store credit for your favorite brands!
Love the new logo! 👁️👁️
Welp, this just validates my long-held belief that I am the main character in the longest slice of life video game ever