Major publications including the New York Times discovered in July this year a trend that has been going on for quite a while on TikTok – content creators impersonating non playable characters (NPCs), that is those secondary characters you see in video games that can't be controlled by a human player.
NPCs usually have robotic movements and are destined to repeat the same sentence or a set of options, dictated by the game’s Artificial Intelligence. Quite often their dialogues with the protagonist of the video game is not even instrumental for the narrative. NPCs are represented like this because it would be extremely expensive to implement their dialogues, especially when there are too many of them (think about having to write the script, adding voice actors, directors for performance coaching, doing script changes or reshoots, dubbing, localization and so on).
Early examples of people playing at being NPCs on TikTok gave you an "uncanny valley" vibe and were more focused on basic actions, showing for example a young woman walking, running or eating ice cream in Venice. But the trend has grown and there are users now, often young women, who stream to their followers in real time, pretending to be just that, NPCs from well-known games with limited and repetitive movements and sentences, accompanied by static facial expressions.
Yes, we do have a human mimicking the behavior of a secondary video game character and livestreaming it on TikTok. The livestream consists only in that, with the same catchphrases and gestures repeatedly in an unending loop.
Despite its repetitive nature, there is a lucrative aspect to NPC streaming: users purchase virtual coins with real money, using these coins to obtain gift tokens like digital ice-cream cones, roses, doughnuts, and hearts, appearing as cartoon graphics on the screen. During live streams, these tokens are sent to the content creator, allowing viewers to exert a certain level of influence over the streamer. Different gift tokens trigger indeed specific gestures or lines of dialogue, turning viewers into virtual players who control the actions of the NPC-like character.
The creators have the option to exchange these received gifts for real money. The process involves converting the gifts into gift coins, which are further transformed into virtual diamonds, and finally redeemed for cash. The value of each individual gift can vary from a cent to a few dollars.
The fascination with this mesmerizing yet bizarre content astonishes those of us with regular (underpaid) jobs who find it shocking that such content creators can make money from it. The New York Times recently did a feature about NPCs streaming that featured Montreal-based TikTok creator Fedha Sinon, known as Pinkydoll, who became the face of a trend (and a meme...) for repeatedly uttering "ice-cream so good" in response to viewers' gifts of ice-cream tokens or "gang gang" every time someone paid for a "GG", while popping corn kernels one at a time with a hot-hair flat iron.
Pinkydoll financial success appears extraordinary and evokes a mix of jealousy and happiness among onlookers: she indeed claims she earns up approximately $2,000 to $3,000 per stream, while her daily earnings combining TikTok, Instagram and OnlyFans, can hit $7,000 in a single day, Unperturbed by other peopel's opinions, she confidently told the New York Times that she is the one winning out of this situation.
Dissenting is hard, even though the phenomenon is intriguing enough to warrant lengthy essays, as it represents a unique blend of gaming culture and sexualized content (just like ASMR videos could be seen as a combination of cam girl aesthetics and geekiness for sound and audio devices).
While not explicitly sexual, Pinkydoll's playful gestures and her habit of sticking out her tongue to pretend she is licking an ice cream cone, add to the appeal and turn the NPC streaming into a fetish per se or in a sort of sanitised repackaged erotic content.
After all, there is a weird dynamic between users and streamers in these cases as the line between active and passive content creator is blurred. Users send indeed "gifts" while streamers respond to an order to thank them, raising questions about the degree of control viewers have over the streamer.
It is interesting to note how during the Trump presidency, the term "NPCs" was used in a derogative way to describe liberals repeating certain concepts and ideas, so, from a right-wing Internet meme and a term popular among believers in the theory that we're all living inside a simulation (last December Elon Musk, tweeted: "If you don't think there's at least a tiny chance you're an NPC...you're an NPC"), the term mutated to indicate something else.
Yet streamers aren’t promoting any political message or conspiracy theory in these cases, they are just there to make money (consider also that some content creators who are into NPCs such as Pinkydoll and Cherry Crush, also operate OnlyFans accounts with more explicit content). At the same time, do not think that this is an easy job or a get-rich-quick scheme that empowers women: while streaming such contents as a woman may avoid direct physical harassment, you still need to have a thick skin to be able to take in all the negative comments of the haters. Besides, most women streaming as NPCs still align with specific beauty canons that appeal to men. Last but not least, playing at being an NPC requires talent to immediately react to all the gifts while ignoring nasty comments.
Definitely insane and mesmerizing, this trend offers an absurd reflection of the bizarre times we are living in. That said, the question is how long will it last? Yes, because this trend is based on NPCs characters being caught up in an endless cycle, performing the same actions or repeating the same words. But, with Artificial Intelligence things are changing also for NPCs characters.
In the last few months there have been indeed a few attempts at turning AI NPCs' conversation into more engaging dialogues with ChatGPT plugins.
In May Japanese free game development team Kotonoha experimented on two levels with the conversation app "AI say hello," where you can talk with AI, and with the ChatGPT_APIMZ plugin for RPG Maker MZ, that explores how two AI NPCs interact in a conversation.
The ChatGPT_APIMZ plugin employs OpenAI's ChatGPT to automatically generate dialogue for NPCs in RPG games. In the first experiment they did, initially, the dialogue seemed normal, but as the conversation progressed, it took a strange turn and the AI started displaying an unusual behavior. The two AI-generated NPCs named Eleanor and Seria were indeed engaged in a seemingly normal conversation ("So many flowers have bloomed", "I love sweets!") that quickly developed into a repetitive and eerie exchange, reminiscent of the uncanny valley phenomenon.
Eventually the AI NPCs began to repeat each other's lines unnaturally and the conversation took on a detached, formal tone, losing the emotional warmth present at the beginning. Soon after that, the AI characters dropped their roles as young girls and started reporting on their tasks, suggesting a shift away from the intended conversational context (the characters bid farewell to each other, but then wondered what they should do next time).
Kotonoha explained that the video was a test to see if this AI-generated conversation could be incorporated into a social deduction game.
But there have been other experiments with users chatting with ChatGPT-driven NPCs using OpenAI's Whisper for speech-to-text, GPT3.5-Turbo for the NPC's "brains", and ElvenLabs for text-to-speech.
NetEase, a renowned Chinese developer and publisher of online games, plans to use ChatGPT in their upcoming massively multiplayer online game (MMO) Justice Online Mobile. This action-combat MMO will feature a language model AI allowing players to have unique conversations and interactions with NPCs throughout the game. They also suggest the possibility of using AI to create fully-voiced characters.
In May Replica Studios, a company providing an AI voice plugin for 3D engines, announced Smart NPC Experience, a plug-in that allows developers to integrate NPCs powered by AI language models, such as OpenAI, into their games. So NPCs can dynamically respond to players' in-game voice, changing their dialogue, emotions, and gestures accordingly. The Style Morphing update also guarantees an expanded range of emotions for NPCs.
The plug-in combines AI language model smarts with Replica's text-to-speech models, enabling real-time animations of characters to match audio streams and providing accurate lip sync. Custom animation blueprints allow NPCs to send body gesture messages during their listening, thinking, and speaking phases. The result is a natural and responsive NPC that can surprise and engage players with thoughtful, funny, and intriguing responses based on their unique contexts and voice input captured directly from their microphones.
When the Smart NPC plugin launches for Unreal Engine later this year, game developers will have the opportunity to integrate Smart NPCs into their projects, enhancing the scalability of characters in their games.
To show it, Replica introduced a modified version of The Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 demo, showcasing their Smart NPC plug-in. The demo enables players to interact with NPCs in real-time by speaking into their microphones, receiving immediate dialogue responses.
The features of the Matrix Awakens Replica Smart NPCs demo include real-time NPC responses based on player input, AI voices with varying emotions, customizable NPC backstories, and automated lip-sync and body gestures to enhance the NPCs' realism. The AI-powered NPCs intelligently converse with each other, adding depth to the game world.
As stated above, in traditional video games, NPCs have limited speech with repetitive phrases as the process of writing and recording these lines can be laborious and costly, especially for large-scale games where vast amounts of unique dialog are required. These recent experiments prove that the utilization of large language models (LLMs) in video games opens up new possibilities for realistic and immersive dialogues. By using game world-specific prompts or fine-tuning the LLM with the video game script, meaningful sentences can be generated. NPCs can then lip-sync these sentences while matching their body language, resulting in flexible and authentic dialogues and characters that may provide a more immersive and emotive experience to gamers. The potential implications for AI in gaming are unprecedented, marking an innovative experiment with AI NPCs in the gaming industry.
AI will indeed allow studios to craft more extensive and immersive stories while creating never-before-seen living-world gaming experiences that adapt to players in real-time. But also smaller studios will benefit from AI in these cases as they will be able to come up with more intricate characters even with limited resources.
As a result gamers will have more dynamic dialogues that will profoundly impact gameplay in highly adaptable game worlds (imagine being able to chat about anything in your favourite video game with an NPC, and obtaining an appropriate response).
For gamers that's good news, but when read one after the other these stories are extremely bizarre: humans are mimicking NPCs on social media, while AI is helping turning NPCs into more human characters. Which means that the fashion for impersonating an NPC may soon die.
What to do if you're a content creator impersonating an NPC on TikTok? Well, simple, make as much money as possible now, then do something clever with it, study or invest it in real estate (or ask ChatGPT to tell you what you should invest in after updating it with the latest financial news…).
Like many other jobs affected by AI, also NPC streaming will eventually get out of fashion as in 8 months' time (or even less...) NPCs performing repetitive tasks will be a distant memory and these secondary characters will be able to chat with us about more complex philosophical or existential issues.
In fact you get a feeling that, just like AI may be giving a thinking mind and a voice to NPCs changing video games, soon, in fashion, AI will bring further changes. Imagine what would happen if powerful fashion companies would launch their own AI-driven digital influencers, capable of chatting with the users, generating engaging content and multiple images, and costing a fraction of what it is spent on human influencers. So, enjoy your NPCs streaming and fashion influencer jobs while they're still here as AI's rapid progress may soon bring about significant changes in these domains.
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