Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

- STEVEN POOLE

Asked to nominate one public figure who has contributed most to the wider understanding of videogame terminology, you might not immediately think of Dominic Cummings, the former aide to Boris Johnson who took a jaunt to Barnard Castle to, er, check his eyesight during the pandemic. But credit where it is due – he has almost single-handedly imported into political language the derogatory reference to other humans in the real world as ‘NPCs’.

A ‘non-player character’ was originally a character in tabletop RPGs of the 1970s, such as Dungeons & Dragons, whose behaviour is described by the DM, with whom players could have some defined interactions, such as buying or selling items. More work remains to be done to trace the term’s exact origin: it is not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary, while Merriam-Webster traces it back only to 1991, but Google Books has a reference in a 1979 issue of Games & Puzzles magazine.