The NPC meme actually reminds me a lot about the 90s when all my friends and I were playing World of Darkness games about supernatural beings secretly controlling the world. While it cut across demographic and class divides, that appealed the most to kids from fairly well-off bougie families, and they carried that stuff with them as they got older. There was an incredible amount of anti-normie snobbery in that scene since it was where the weird kids got together to brainstorm their own weird-kid chauvinism, and I can think of a couple specific cases where people latched onto this in a really similar way to how the “NPC” thing harkens back to a gamer childhood.

The most obvious match to the NPC thing came from Changeling: the Dreaming, which was a game about playing fae who had access to a secret world of wonder and the imagination and were struggling against the bleakness of the world. It was sort of a metaphor for being young and weird and trying to figure out your life without selling out, so it’s directly analogous. Anyhow, Changeling had these super-normie antagonists called Autumn People who were basically just squares who were so lame and boring that they made the world worse for everyone by being there. But you could turn into an Autumn Person if you sold out to the Man and gave up on your dreams and shit! So this was a powerful image for messed-up kids trying to cope with the expectations of growing up, and to this day I have a friend I speak to infrequently who expresses to me his fears of aging into a life of comfortable futility by asking, “am I an Autumn Person?”

But Changeling was very Theatre Kid, and it wasn’t hugely popular. The game that’s more interesting to me is Mage: the Ascension, which was about occult masters who saw the true nature of reality and gained supernatural powers from their insight and wisdom. Before the Matrix, Mage was where you went for pop cultural “gnostic revenge of the nerds” metaphors. Anyway, in Mage, people who didn’t understand the Cosmic True Nature of Reality were called “Sleepers” and were unable to use magic. Mage had a reputation for being popular among people who felt they were much smarter than everybody else – okay, it was hugely popular, so the playerbase was quite varied, but it especially attracted the same kind of people who liked to imagine living in Galt’s Gulch, for the same reasons. Anyway, what’s fascinating to me is that a lot of these people did grow up to be aristocrats, because I’ve seen many references to Bay Area rationalists and other SoCal technocrats using Mage as a metaphor to describe their own place in society. (For what it’s worth, the guy who’s uneasy about being an Autumn Person is also making something like 180k/y in the Bay Area, in between his midlife crisis gap years to find himself.) Nobody has really talked about this much as far as I can tell, and it’s fascinating to me because with the benefit of hindsight, the stereotype of “Mage fans” – who had a distinct reputation even within WoD players – perfectly prefigured all this subsequent stuff. 

The 90s were the last time tabletop RPGs were really big. After that, they were displaced by online gaming. So I can totally believe that the next wave will draw on that metaphor instead.