Tuesday, May 20, 2003

The NPC Theory

I've plugged my friend Eric aka Phlegmatic's blog The 4th Humour before for its lurid and fantastically detailed dream diary. In general, his blog has a very high SNR of creative content and what I like to think of as "geek" philosophy - which is no less robust and rigorous as Matthew Yglesias' more traditional brand.



Now, however, Eric has finally decided to commit his "NPC Theory" to writing - which essentially states that most of the people you meet are "non-player characters" (NPC's) - programmed automatons with a finite set of responses to stimuli from the context of your perspective. This is subtler than the brute-force "free will is illusion" concept because the same person may be an NPC to you but a PC to me.



I like making the analogy to the Blogsphere - how many blogs are essentially recycled content from the A-list linkers? and how many are massive tomes iof fresh and original content? Looking at my own blogroll, I realise that I've heavily filtered it to emphasise those bloggers who are PCs from my perspective.



Anyway - do check out Eric's blog, the two entries on NPC Theory thus far are the Introduction and the Modified Turing Test for Character. I'm waiting for more!

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