THEY THINK OF US AS NON-PLAYER CHARACTERS

A Wired Magazine article today did something interesting. It started with a tech premise, that the important work in tech in the AI era is deciding how to use code, not in doing the coding itself, and then bridged from that to admiration for humans who act in an “agentic” fashion. Here is how one of the tech bros they quoted described the new worldview: “…you genuinely, unironically believe there are two kinds of people in the world: the NPCs and the main characters, and you’re one of the main characters.”

My objection: this attitude isn’t new. I grew up with it. My peers in high school largely shared the stance that our role in the world would be to make a significant difference.

I don’t see it as much with today’s youth, facing the reality of low-wage service sector jobs or precarious existences where everything they strived for can be wiped out with the next change in headline story.

The agentic attitude also pervades traditional genre fiction. Many editors tasked with acquiring stories still look for a protagonist with a clear goal who acts to solve a problem. At its worst, we have the “white savior” story or colonialist fiction: swashbuckling explorers who adventured in deepest, darkest Africa in 1930s fiction, in space in 1950s fiction, on the internet in 1980s fiction. The private investigator or cop who solves the crime by their singular genius. The soldier who wins the battle against the aliens. The entrepreneur who fixes the climate by stepping in where governments hesitate to tread.

The “main characters” making the news as named protagonists in our emerging system of oligarchical fascism cite this sort of fiction with disturbing regularity.

More recently, the passive protagonist who reacts to world changing events by surviving or banding together with found family had a heyday. Solarpunk set stories within a sustainable future, most often with no indication of how society traversed the dystopic present. In what has been derided as “squeecore,” the reader rejoices in being seen because the characters are like them—in race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or what have you. As the world grew to resemble 1980s cyberpunk, with most people barely surviving and unable to affect the material condition of their existence, such escapism appealed.

But isn’t that giving up? Narcotizing the disempowered with stories that make them feel good?

The novelette I published as a standalone last year with Rampant Loon Publications, “The Day We Said Goodbye to the Birds,” focuses on a broken protagonist, one who had once viewed himself as agentic but now struggles to make sense of his role in the world. By the conclusion, he’s hit a middle ground: striving to make a difference but not needing the spotlight on himself. Not so much “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more” or one who has “greatness thrust upon ‘em”; instead, one who recognizes that, maybe, if he “cannot do great things, [he] can do small things in a great way.”

I just managed to quote Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Martin Luther King in the same sentence. Should I get an award for pedantry? “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair,” indeed.

Regardless, that may be the message from the world in the age of the Minneapolis rebellion: resistance is difficult, but if we wish to remain human, what choice do we have?

That’s certainly the tack I have taken with some of the next stories I have coming out. Watch my socials for news about “The Eliminator” (a standalone to be published in paperback and digitally with Water Dragon Publications) and “Salvation Seller’s Last Customer” (to be reprinted in Stupefying Stories 28, the long-delayed Cyberpunk 2.0 issue).

Still, taking the occasional potshot at those who think of us as non-player characters might help with maintaining motivation, as the fight must continue. (My most recent effort on that front is here. Free click, folks.)

I’ll attempt to summon the energy for a volley.