Endless Thread - NPC Streams! So Good! Mmm, So Good!

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Earlier this year, TikTok livestreamers began mimicking lifeless "nonplayable characters," or NPCs, by repeating motions and phrases like in a video game. Then, people started paying them to keep doing it. Like the show? Help us out! Donate at https://wbur.org/podpower. Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson are the co-hosts. (Photo: TikTok/@ishowspeed/@natuecoco/@cherrycrushtv)

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, did you play a video game a lot? What's a video game you played? You know, the only video game I think I've ever played in my life was a bug's life when that movie came out. There was a video game for a bug's life, and I just happened to be good friends with people who had video games and they had a bug's life. Do you remember any of the characters that you weren't really allowed to play?

Like you couldn't be that character? There were a lot of bugs. I can tell you that. Ants, worms, beetles. I have no other memory of that. I couldn't even tell you what a bug's life is about other than a bug's life. So I did not play a bug's life the game, but I did look it up. And there do seem to be a good amount of other insects and bugs.

like Slim, the very not slim caterpillar. So, Amory, that would be called a non-playable character or NPC, which is an idea that originally comes from Dungeons and Dragons, but really took off in video games. Nerd. Correct. And when I think about NPCs, I think about a lot of classic video game characters. The first ever Zelda game had this old man and this old woman that you would meet in caves in the game.

I know that's... sound. I recognize that. That's the sound when you go into the cave and you talk to the old woman. Of course. You could have dialogue with these Zelda old woman and old man characters. You could buy stuff from them, which in a way made them kind of more interesting than the other video game characters, most of whom were like just always trying to kill you. Weren't there some like mushrooms or something in Mario? Are those NPCs? I had the same question. That's actually kind of interesting to be because there's kind of some argument about whether enemies are NPCs or not.

This is Carly. My name's Carly Kisurik and I live in Chicago where I teach in the game design and experiential media program at Illinois Tech. That seems like a cool job. It is a cool job. It is a cool job. Most of the time, yeah. Except when she has to define basic video game terminology for someone like you or me.

Hey, we're just getting warmed up over here. just like the concept of NPCs, which Carly says has really been around for decades, ever since computer games or video games were just words on screens. Even if you think about early text adventures, right, like, you're a character in that world, but there's lots of other characters in that world that are only being controlled kind of by the programming of the game. Over time as computing power grows, so does the ability to not just have kind of simple main characters and enemies, but a whole host of different kinds of kinds of games.

characters in a game. So those worms and beetles and, you know, those bugs that you remember, video games start to kind of swarm with NPCs around the time of, say, The Sims. I watched people play The Sims, which is almost as boring as playing the Sims. Oh, man. You're saying so many controversial things right now, we're going to get letters. It's going to be great. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. For me, it was a really specific game that I started to be hyper aware of non-playable characters in. And which game was that? Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

Woo! Oh, boy. Hey, lady, you know what I'm going to do? Something like this. Isn't that the kind of raunchy one? Yeah. Dudes being dudes? I think it does have that aspect to it, you know, if we are going to gender it.

It is very, like, has some nihilistic, chaos boy energy in it where you know you can go on missions and there is a storyline of drug dealing and cop stuff but there's also this world full of NPCs that you can mess with. Don't be a hero y'all. And you know, not unlike the Sims, you're almost encouraged to mess with them. You can like pull them out of cars at stoplights and carjack them. You can get into fist fights with pedestrians. Yo, what's up?

Yeah, you want to fight yuppie? Watch it, Bobet. Get out of my face. So these characters are just programmed to say a certain number of things, and this becomes like the soundtrack to your life or these voices repeating things over and over again. Yeah, and if you play the heck out of Grand Theft Auto, you basically hear this stuff in your sleep. You know, repeating phrases over and over. They would also often have like a set physicality to them too, right?

Like they'd stand and bounce or bounce. Bob in this kind of like looping way. They would walk certain ways or run a certain way. And I think we sort of got used to NBC's around this time in the early 2000s. One of the most famous memes when I started looking at Reddit every day was the took an arrow to the knee meme. I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee. Is that familiar to you at all?

No. I used to be an adventurer like you. And I took an arrow in the knee. Okay. Without going too deep into it, this is actually a phrase repeated by NPCs in Skyrim, like an Elder Scrolls game. I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee. MPCs often are like really repetitive because while they're NPCs, right, they don't need that much programming.

You're not playing them. They serve like one or two functions as characters delivering information or color in a game. I used to be an adventurer like you. and I took an arrow in the knee. But repetition can breed fondness, Amory. Mm-hmm. People like Carly can now describe their favorite video game NPCs. I did just play Pentiment, and I really love, like, all the villagers are really richly rendered.

So there's, like, the baker and his wife and their daughter, right? And I think that game actually does a really beautiful job because almost all the information you get about the world, you get from NPCs. Over time, NPCs, became our friends, or at least familiars. We've had fun messing with them, but we have always been the main characters, and the NPCs have always been in the computer.

Until last summer, when some of us stopped being the main characters and started being NPCs. Mmm, ice feel so good. Mm, ice cream so good. Br-dra. Meow.

Anivaliz. It's the pizza, mamma-mia. It's a pizza, mamma-mea. So cute, jikis. Thank you, awaken, jinkies. What do you think, Amory? What? These are people just playing the role of the NPCs.

A whole bunch of people started live streaming themselves, repeating the physical and vocal ticks of NPCs. They were doing this on TikTok and some on Twitch. And a whole bunch of people started paying those people to do it. What? Well, my first question was, to be why and then if they're being paid to do it now i just think we have a we're we're broken we need to turn ourselves off and back on it reboot mm endless threat episodes so good gang gang

coming to you from wb u r boston's npr station today's episode npc stream so good hmm so good so good now for the record i'm going to say that there was some resistance to tackling this topic in our show. I'm not naming names, but I want you to click on our endless thread subreddit posts that I've given you here, Amory. Okie-doke. Subject line post title, I would die for an endless thread on NPC influencers. Die. Don't die. Please. Okay. We got to give the people what they want. I'm not going to argue with that. Frolicking fawn. What a what a username, says there's a huge trend right now on TikTok of NPC live streams where streamers take on an NPC persona and repeat lines over and over again ad nauseum.

I'm equally weirded out and completely fascinated by this trend to the point where I find myself having to stop and watch them for a bit when they come up for the sheer strangeness of it. This person wants to know where the trend started, what fuels it, how it is monetized, and who is doing it. Are you ready, Amory? Hell, yes, I am ready. So we should start with who's doing it.

The most famous NPC streamer right now is probably Pinky Doll, who last summer Amory became popular enough to catch the attention of Logan Paul. This chick's making banked $7,000 a day. I do not know who Logan Paul is, but that's a lot of money. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I am a Martian. Well, I'll tell you, you may not know who Logan Paul is, but I can tell you he is a man who probably should not be judging anyone

for using the internet to make money. I promise you that. Pinky Doll is a Canadian TikToker. She started NPC live streaming way back in January. Apparently she was inspired by shocker, Grand Theft Auto, but she developed a personality

all her own. Ooh, ice be so good. Pinky Doll is apparently famous for a few things, including causing some controversy when she first appeared in person for the streamies. An unfortunately named award ceremony, if you happen to have just drank a bunch of water.

Yes, and when Pinky Doll showed up, people said that she had been wearing makeup in her online videos that made her look a lot more light-skinned than she apparently is in real life. She says she just gets darker when she spends time in the sun. Leave her alone, even if I do hate watching the same thing over and over and over. Yes, popcorn, yes, popcorn, yes, yes, yes. Yes, she does break characters sometimes, by the way, seemingly to yell at her kid who messes with the dog off camera.

Did it dance, stop it. So is she like the, she is the star of NPC streamers, or are there others who are doing this just as professionally? So she's far from the only one, but at least here in the U.S. is the OG if there can be such a thing in ephemeral internet trends. Here's Washington Post technology columnist Taylor Lorenz. Pinky Doll was sort of like the original viral star. And then everybody started doing it. And then it became kind of a meme.

And then people started doing it in even more obscure places like that guy in Soho that streams in, you know, all day in New York. Wait, there is a guy who sits in the city and just, live streams himself repeating NPC lines? Yeah, he is an NPC streamer, so he's like acting like a non-playable character, and he is like doing this out in, like, on the streets of Soho, which are very busy and full. And so some people actually try to like, when they see him streaming, they go and like, try to photo bomb his stream.

But yeah, there's a growing number of people that are doing this. And what is interesting to me here is that NPC streaming seems to almost be the, like, latest development and an evolution of how humans are emulating video games. You know what cosplay is, right? Uh-huh. So cosplay characters, when you're, you know, a cosplay character in a video game or, you know,

the character that the cosplay came from in some cases, they kind of like bounce and pose and move in a certain way, just like NPCs. And we do that when we cosplay. at conferences. I mean, not specifically you and me, because I don't think either of us are cosplayers, but, you know, they behave in that way. And Emery,

it's even kind of gone full circle here to its Dungeons and Dragons' Roots, even though the vast majority of MPC streamers who seem to be successful are women, which we will get back to. I saw a video on Reddit earlier this month that was joking about

how people in the 13th century would have been as streamers, and sure enough, Cheese in my tummy. Cheese in my tummy. Cedric of Canterbury. What are the moves tonight? We're headed to the tavern.

Yeah, tavern tonight. But what you're saying is that when these people are making money, they're making money because people are watching them repeat things like cheese in my tummy or popcorn, whatever she said about popcorn. They've chosen to spend their one precious life watching other people repeat things in a loop. Yeah, and pay them for it. And how do they pay them? How does that work?

So it's almost like microtransactions. Like if you remember the blogosphere, Emory, we, you know, we used to be able to, like, send a little tip to a blogger, a couple of bucks, whatever. In the video game world, you might buy an accessory also, like, and send it to the character or, like, put it on the character, who then, like, kind of acknowledges that you've given them an accessory by, like, moving a certain way or saying something. So Taylor says, in this way, the real-life non-playable character thing is, is, kind of the same. You, you know, are on your app and you buy a emoji or like a little

graphic icon that will appear on screen. Each one of those is worth a certain amount of money and you can send it to the streamer that you like. Okay, which is why Pinky Doll is saying we make her feel like a cowgirl because we're buying a hat that TikTok places on her head or we're buying her like an ice cream emoji. So good. So good. Yeah. And the augmented reality aspect of this can, can, like, really be good now where, like, again, yes, you would buy Pinky Doll a hat. And she's immediately wearing the hat in her own stream. And part of what is so good... Ooh, ice is so good.

Mm, ice is so good. Is that the streamer and the platform both get a cut of the money the viewer is spending on them. You're giving them a little bit of money for them to do something. And that is a huge amount of TikTok live streaming is basically just that. It's paying somebody to interact. Amory Taylor makes this point that in some ways, this is another example of a creator economy that is really liberating and democratizing. She says, you know, easy for trends like this to pop up and to get really frothy really quick

because people can actually really make money easily. But there's got to be a downside of some sort of. here, right? For sure. These platforms can change their algorithms at any time, and it can be really hard on the content creators that make content for those platforms or streamers who are live streaming on those platforms. Today you're making $7,000 a day saying the same thing over and over and popping fake bubbles. Tomorrow, you're washing dishes again with the rest of us.

Or maybe you go back to making adult-only content, Amory, which Pinky Doll apparently also does or did before she found out that NPC streaming was going to be more lucrative. I mean, like a lot of weird things you see on the internet, it's a lot of it's ultimately about a kink. Okay. You do you. Apparently, she also raps, wants to someday do a collaboration with Ice Spice.

She has a song. Everything's making less sense as we go on. Not more. Well, you're not alone. A lot of people, including, ironically enough, some of the Twitter users that ultimately made Pinky Doll MPC streaming videos famous last summer and launched a whole legion of similar MPC streamer wannabes in her wake, they felt the same way. Well, folks, if you ever been on the fence about whether we're witnessing the fall of humanity, get a load of this. But Taylor disagrees with this takeaway. There's something about this trend that makes people feel dystopian, but it's not very dystopian. It's the same. same as everything else.

It seems weird. I get it, but it's not that weird. Taylor's point is that at its core, MPC streaming, Amory, is a pretty familiar concept on the internet. You're paying money to have somebody on screen do something. Carly, our game designer, might go a little bit further into the offline world

with this analogy. I was thinking a lot about human statue performers, which are always like super, cool. I'm like, that's so hard, like, to be that still, and it's also, like, uncanny and wild. And I actually find the NPC streamers, like, I have a very similar reaction where I'm like, this is, like, really uncanny and strange, but also, like, compelling. I think I find people's fascination with it fascinating. You know, I don't, I, I'm, I'm not going to yuck anyone's yum. If you, if this, if watching this makes world, the world and, and life richer for you,

Who am I to say, no, you're wrong, that's dumb. But I can say that from where I sit, I don't currently get it. I certainly want to know what people find fascinating. I did ask Carly what she thought about this. I think it's a pretty funny way to riff on kind of pop culture that's around us, where, like, what if someone was like literally an NPC? Like, that's absurd, right? Yeah.

Can confirm that is an absurd idea. if we turned into NPCs. Have you ever heard of NPC being used as an insult? No. So it seems like the use of NPC as a slur in recent times, belongs almost exclusively to the political right. You mean they use it to attack people for repeating themselves? Yeah, at least the political right online,

which as so many of these things do, goes back to fortune. If it's toxic, It goes back to 4chan. Okay, so in 2016, there was a 4chan post that basically equated liberals to NPCs as characters that can't really think for themselves and are being controlled. And yes, those are two characteristics of NPCs. But, you know, eventually the term was taken back over in a non-political way. And it's been just generally used more often to mean dummy or a person who isn't thinking critically or just people. you might see on the street and not really think of as real people, I guess.

Taylor Lorenz again. It's kind of a shorthand, almost like a drone type person. Okay, that makes sense to me. Okay, but maybe there is something more here than an insult. It is part of this growing galaxy of, like, video game-inspired memes and things that we all opt into over time, the Choose Your Fighter videos from a few years back. Choose your fighter!

Did you ever see those, Amory? Yeah, or I probably saw it as a meme, but yeah. Right. Yeah, that's what it was. You know, with real people imitating battle game characters on deck for a fight. Also, you know, there's this thing where you can say F to pay your respects when someone is metaphorically killed by a vicious ribbing. And it's just like pressing the F key in a game to do the same thing. Carly thinks about this a lot.

There's something about MPC streaming that's part of art imitates life, which then imitates art, you know, it's a cycle. The Sims ready pose, right, where the Sim is just kind of like standing there doing this weird, wavy dance waiting to do things. How many of us feel like we spend huge chunks of our life, like weirdly waiting for things to happen where it's like, I'm waiting for a call, I'm waiting for the doctor's office, I'm waiting for the traffic light, I'm waiting for the mail.

And so like almost like you're in this like liminality all the time in day-to-day life because we don't have as much control over our own time as I think most of us would like. And, like, yeah, it feels like you're in, like, weird little microlimbo between activities. Oh, but this feels like we're giving into that. This feels like we're saying, oh, that's life. Let's create more of it. Well, there's one more piece to this conversation that I'd like us to tackle Amory, because even though Pinky Doll may be the most famous MPC streamer in America,

like so much a video game history, if we want to go to the real, source of all this. We got to go to Japan. TikTok Live on NBC stream on you just said the magic words

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All right. So, Amory, we've talked a lot about MPC streaming, but you can't really talk about this trend without talking to the real originator. Hello. Hello. Natshe Koko is. Hello. Hello, I'm Natsue Coco. I do TikTok live NPC streaming. My niche is mute live.

Mute live. What is that? Mute live is a silent stream, or Mugan Haishin, in Japanese. But basically, it means communicating with reactions only and not talking. We should say that this was a truly team effort, my brother, who happens to be fluent in Japanese. respect Big Bro, translated on the phone and afterwards for the call because Natsui does not speak English. The voice in English you are hearing is WBUR podcast producer Franny Monaghan. And just so you get a sense of this mute live idea, Amory,

here's one of Nutsuie's live streams on TikTok. Okay, so people are sending her emojis and she's non-verbally reacting with her expressions? Like when they send a, is that a paw? She reacts in some way. And then they send her fireworks and she reacts another way. I honestly cannot keep track of like what people are sending her and how she's reacting and why, what, like, what emoji triggers what reaction. It's either so subtle that I'm missing it or I'm just like.

Like, I feel like I'm... There's just a total disconnect from me with regards to what the hell is going on here. I mean, she's choosing to do it, but then other people dictate what she does. I don't know, man. Yeah, it's a little weird, right? Men and PC streamers, by the way,

seem way less common or at least less popular than women and PC streamers, which makes it even stranger in some ways. I had asked to Taylor Lorenz about this. Do you feel like misogyny and NPC streaming are connected? I think misogyny all over the internet is, like, pretty pervasive. I mean, the thing is, people can kind of feel like they're controlling a woman. Yeah, I feel weird about it.

Here's what Carly has to say about this. Women are subject to misogyny, whether they try to make money off of it or not. So, like, it's not like you can opt. She can't opt out, right? Like, this is going to be part of the background of her daily life no matter what. So, like, yeah, if you can shake down some money from that, like, go nuts. It's like capitalism. We all got to survive.

By the way, to this point from Carly, Natsue is getting that money. I'm able to cover all my living expenses through NPC streaming. It's just this. I also asked Natsue as the person who apparently started NPC streaming back in 2020 before anyone else. I asked her about this too. I don't see the discrimination you're referring to. I should also say that one area where I may be a little different from others

is that Natsue Coco is set up where things like age and gender don't exist. If you were to ask, what makes you an NPC? It's that an NPC isn't anything or anyone. I hear the point of like, yeah, well, People are going to do this stuff anyway, so I may as well make some money off of it. I should say that Natsuei told us, in fact, that she had never been asked about this, you know, whether the controlling aspect of NPCs, the idea that they react to input but otherwise don't really have any agency. And how that might be part of a larger culture of controlling women. The very concept of gender discrimination doesn't exist inside of me.

So when it comes to my character, there could. be some misinterpretation around assumptions about discrimination. But this too is part of the social experiment of my live stream. Ooh, okay, that's interesting. Social experiment. What's the experiment, would she say? This was interesting. In some ways, when you watch Natsui's stuff, it feels very, I don't know,

like I want to say it like, it feels very Japanese. It's inspired by manga and anime. She wears these perfect outfits. She's really done up, very slick in its presentation. And she also says this was an evolution from the kind of live streaming we all know well. For a long time, I used to do a live stream where I spoke to the camera.

I got tired of talking, so I decided to give mute live performance a try. From the varied experience others had and attached to my performance, of feeling like it was NPC or like it was AI or that it was like a robot, I committed to keep doing it. She says in a way, people projected the NPC idea onto what she was doing, but soon it became an important part of her identity as a streamer.

I think it's very important that people see me as an NPC because it means that they must be the main character. After all, I'm not doing main character live. The circular experience of the audience tuning in to see a thing where the main character is by definition not the main character felt like something approaching art to me. I want to know what she gets out of it.

I mean, money is the obvious answer. But like also, I don't know, does she feel like it's time well spent? She told us she does. She really enjoys the adoration from fans and she enjoys the artistic aspect of this as she sees it. And while some people feel like this is a trend that has already peaked and broke, it does not feel that way for Natsue.

I'll do it until I die. I don't know about that, man. I don't know. I haven't heard anybody talk about NFTs in a long time. I'm not saying they're gone, but one year it's NFT, the next year it's NPC. the next year it's NBC. I don't know. I don't know. She's serious about it, obviously.

Okay. Well, to that, I would say, listeners, please enlighten me. Like, I'm really open to what this is and what I'm missing out on by not consuming this content. If you've ever bought an emoji for an MPC listeners, we'd love to hear from you. Totally, totally, because, you know, they're, you know, There are people that when television's were in every home, people said like, oh, what are we coming to? You know, and I don't, I'm not that person. I just want to understand it better. Here's an idea that we talked about a little bit on the team, Amory, that really resonates

for me. Okay. There are all these people that we see in our daily life. And in a way, they're all non-playable characters for us. But we are non-playable characters for them. So in a way, like, we are all both NPCs and main characters. Yeah, and I guess I could also see as small as this might be, that maybe as the world feels increasingly chaotic and out of our control,

as small as this is, this is like one thing that we can control. And hopefully the people who are doing it because they keep doing it are, they want that to happen because they're getting money, they're enjoying the experience of, you know, reacting on Q. I don't know, but it is like this one tiny, tiny, tiny thing that we can control until the trend is completely gone. Do you want to know where it's going? Yeah.

Taylor did mention some new kinds of trends that are happening more now. that feel like they're in some way connected to this continuum that NPC streamers are also part of? They're basically these interactive streams where you pay, and you can sort of subject the person on screen to various forms of sort of light torture. I mean, it's usually loud noises, waking them up. It'll pour water on their head, or, you know, it'll interact in those ways. It's very dark, and it always makes me sad for the people. on the stream.

Turn us off. Turn us off. Worst Black Mirror episode ever. Oh, God. Okay, E.T. homies, I have two assignments for you. Ready? Number one, interact with a real-life NPC as you go about your day sometime.

You know, don't pour water on their heads. We don't want you to get in trouble. But, you know, give a stranger a high-five. Or give them a good day to you, sir. maybe offer them an ice cream, see what their programming has them do or say back in return. And also, if you go on Apple Podcasts or Spotify podcasts and review our show, in your review, if you put an emoji or tell us the gift you're giving us,

if you do this in our next full Endless Threat episode, we will be good NPCs ourselves and react to everybody's digital gifts. it'll be great. Listen to the next full episode for our reactions to your podcast review gifts. All right, that's all for now. So good.

Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by me, Ben Brock Johnson, and Dean Russell. And it's co-hosted by Ben and me, Amory Seavertsin. Mix and sound designed by Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is, of course,

Amory Severson, Emily Jankowski, Sumitaj, Matt Reed, and Grace Tatter. additional help this week from Frannie Monaghan and my brother, Monroe Johnson. Thank you, bro. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and whatever people will stream up next. If you've got an untold history and unsolved mystery or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up.

Email Endless Thread at wbUR.org.