I tripped over the term NPC, quite literally, on my way to an event the other night. Rushing to get there, I fell right in front of the venue. Embarrassed by how many people had just watched me eat concrete, I texted my friend Claire.

“They’re just NPCs,” she wrote back instantly. “Who cares what they think?”

NPC, the acronym for “non-player character,” is a gamer concept that’s been around for 50 years now. Often thought of as a background character—a villager, a barkeep, a shop owner—who helps to flesh out the world around the protagonist, it can refer to anyone in a game who is not controllable by a human player.

But the way Claire used it speaks to a modern trend: referring to real-life people as NPCs.

It’s no surprise that the concept has taken off today. At a time when chatbots are doing everything from helping you buy a pair of jeans online to answering insurance questions, the idea of interacting with someone who turns out not to be, well, human, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It’s likely one of the reasons that NPC has been gaining prominence, with “non-player character” even making it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary last year.

As the term enters our everyday speech, though, it’s worth asking what we’re actually saying when we call someone an NPC. Already people have weaponized the concept, seized on the NPC label as a means of distinguishing “free thinkers” (themselves) from people whose thoughts and actions are, supposedly, pre-programmed (pretty much everyone else).

But to understand the history of the term NPC is to recognize that this kind of dehumanizing discourse hijacks its original conceit.

Born out of early tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), NPCs were never intended to erase anyone’s personhood or to imply actual humans were mindless automatons. Rather game-builders developed NPCs to do the very opposite: help RPG moderators build a world of possibilities for players.

The term NPC was first popularized by Dungeons & Dragons, created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. The genre-defining collaborative storytelling game allowed you to play as your alter ego in an imaginary world brimming with adventure. You could be a fighter, magic-user, cleric, or chief; a human, dwarf, half-elf, or hobbit; as well as lawful, neutral, or chaotic. A designated Dungeon Master (DM) facilitated the game, developing and fleshing out the campaigns you embarked on, and serving as referee and judge when necessary.

Anything (really, anything, the game stressed) could happen. That’s how non-player characters took off; DMs leaned on NPCs to broaden and further story arcs. The original D&D rulebook even included a section dedicated to the “non-player character,” which touched on basic rules of engagement, like what happens when you hire the services of an NPC (they could help if they “receive their pay regularly, are treated fairly, and are not continually exposed to extra-hazardous duty, and receive bonuses when they are taking part in some dangerous venture”).

Signifying the importance of NPCs, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons released “Non-Player Character Records” in 1979. The booklet of blank character sheets helped formalize the concept, allowing DMs to keep track of the abilities, combat skills, descriptions, possessions, and backgrounds of the characters. “No longer will the DM need to worry about lack of continuity or lost records on non-player characters, for these sheets provide the DM with easy-to-store records of the many non-player personalities which populate his or her campaign,” the introductory text promised.

D&D is generally credited by game scholars as the first commercial tabletop RPG. As the genre grew in the late 1970s and ’80s and from there started expanding beyond kitchen tables onto computers and video games, conventions from D&D, including NPCs, followed suit. On screen, these characters could be especially comical, limited by computer programs’ rudimentary movement algorithms and scripted responses. That’s how NPCs gained a reputation for being goofy and robotic. Think of the tavern owner in a video game who never moves from behind the bar, or the stranger on a road who can only repeat canned lines, like, “Hello, fellow traveler, have you heard about the werewolf destroying the crops?”

People have had fun with these characters over the years, dressing up as them and channeling their jerky movements and clunky expressions. Today there’s enough of a niche audience for this kind of content that influencers even imitate NPCs for money.

An anonymous poster on 4chan was likely drawing on this clunky version of the NPC concept in 2016, when they shared a “theory” about a fixed number of souls on Earth, designating non-player characters as “the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us.” Pro-Trump supporters seized on this depiction of the NPC as a means of denigrating liberal activists.

What makes the slur more loaded than, say, “sheeple”—surprisingly not internet-speak but a term that dates back to at least the 1940s—was that NPC implies that the person you’re in ideological disagreement with is not just wrong, but incapable of independent thought and action. This distinction meant that a “mass outcry against, say, serial harassers, racial injustice, or Trumpian ideas,” could be “dismissed as not just inherently uncritical but prima facie evidence of a lack of human consciousness,” wrote journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio in 2018, as an NPC meme featuring Wojak (a blank-faced cartoon character recycled from an earlier 2010 meme) gained prominence.

Far-right watchers have since characterized NPC as a fascist “dog whistle” and a way to dehumanize people. They’ve noted that it’s part of a broader kind of rhetoric that’s leading to extremist violence around the world.

This use of NPC could have a natural expiration date IRL, as the in-game characters themselves evolve. A longtime goal of game designers and programmers has been to make NPCs more believable, and they’re getting closer. Take the simulation game Animal Crossing, which took off during COVID lockdowns; its anthropomorphic villagers are capable of doing most of the same things that playable characters can, and even are assigned specific personality types, like lazy, cranky, sisterly, and smug. While we’re still far from seeing the kind of NPC character promised by “Project Milo,” the graveyarded Microsoft Xbox 360 venture that claimed to have invented an “emotional AI” more than a decade ago, new technological advancements promise to continue to stretch the idea of what an NPC can look like.

Maybe in time, this will push the concept of NPCs in the culture, too, returning it closer to its foundational definition—not someone without free will, but a player like any other in this world we build together. One who, I’d hope, still wouldn’t care about an errant sidewalk stumble.

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The creation story is laced with persistence, creative brilliance, and an almost patriotic presentation of work ethic.

The problem is—it isn’t exactly true. What’s more, Monopoly’s origin story teaches us that innovation can be a complicated affair and that the “lightbulb” moment of how things get made is, in fact, sometimes a myth. (The scale of Thomas Edison’s own contributions to the invention so associated with his name, fittingly, is now debated.) In the case of Monopoly, the journey of American invention was less a linear path and more a messy room shared by several people. The game was, in fact, created in 1903—long before Darrow’s mythical basement revelation—by Elizabeth Magie, the daughter of an abolitionist who was herself a staunch anti-capitalist crusader. Magie created “Landlord’s Game,” the forerunner to Monopoly, not as a celebration of wealth but as a protest against the evil monopolies of the time.

Three decades before Parker Brothers and Darrow took credit for it, her game was embraced by a constellation of notable left-wing Americans of the time, as well as on various college campuses in the Northeast. ACLU chairman Ernest Angell played it, and so did Scott Nearing, a radical professor at Wharton, champion of academic freedom, and a father of the “green” movement. It flourished in Arden, Delaware, a tiny, utopian village founded by followers of popular political economist Henry George’s “single tax” theory, a belief system Magie was passionate about. Among the residents of Arden who embraced the game was Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, who corresponded with, and possibly met, Magie.

Magie’s Landlord’s Game, the forerunner to Monopoly. Image courtesy of Tom Forsyth.

In the 1920s, homemade copies of Magie’s game found their way to what was then a flourishing Quaker community in Atlantic City. Quaker teachers in Atlantic City incorporated it into their teaching—with some modifications. Dice, associated with gambling, were discordant with their religious beliefs. The Quakers, practitioners of silence, also did away with the loud auctioning associated with the game, added fixed prices to the board, and modified it to be more child-friendly.

It was a version of this game—Magie’s Landlord’s Game with some of the Atlantic City Quaker modifications—that a friend taught Darrow to play. Darrow then sold it to Parker Brothers.

Darrow and Parker Brothers made millions for “creating” Monopoly whereas Magie’s income from the game was reported to be a mere $500. She died in 1948, having outlived her husband, with no children and few knowing of her role as the true originator of the game that became Monopoly. She had worked in Washington, D.C. in relative obscurity as a secretary and her income as a maker of games, according to the 1940 U.S. Census, was “0.”

Rendition of Darrow’s version of Monopoly. Image courtesy of Tom Forsyth.

Magie’s story would have been lost if not for Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at the University of San Francisco whose legal battle over his own Anti-Monopoly board game in the 1970s unearthed the whole scandal. Anspach, today in his nineties and retired from teaching, and still selling his game, became a tireless detective of Monopoly’s origin story and spent a decade fighting for the right to talk freely about what he’d discovered. Although Magie and Anspach never met—Anspach was a child refugee of Danzig at the time Magie was close to dying—their fates became linked together unexpectedly. Anspach’s fate partially hinged on proving Magie was the inventor; Magie’s story would not have been told without a digger and advocate like him.

Over the five years it took me to research The Monopolists and in the two years since its publication, I’ve seen many a jaw drop as I told the tale of Monopoly’s lost inventor and her unlikely exhumation. The most common question is, “How did this happen?”

In Magie’s time, it was far too easy to suppress the voices of marginalized groups, including women. At the time she patented her game, she didn’t have the right to vote. The head of the U.S. Patent Office was actively discouraging women from applying for patents. Job opportunities were extremely limited and it was common in the press to talk about how “weak,” “delicate,” and “smaller-brained” women were.

The greater astonishment maybe isn’t just that Magie lived a life of a game designer and political thinker far before her time, but that any shreds of her story survived at all. In my research, I stitched together enough of Magie’s trail—newspaper articles, Census records, her own writings, photographs—to get a sense of who Magie was and what she was trying to say to the world. But it’s hard not to think of her peers in her time who left far less behind, including female branches of my own family tree. Their contributions were large, but often silent, an untold quantity of labor that helped build this country. History is full of Lizzie Magies, Quaker teachers, friends who share ideas, the kinds of people who help shape our world and go largely unnoticed for doing so.

Cover of an earlier version of Monopoly.

The “light bulb” idea, and the Darrow myth, persist, in part because we want them to. On some level we all fantasize about a lightning bolt of brilliance hitting us. The instantaneous nature of that seems particularly American: fast food, fast cars, fast road to becoming an innovative—and wealthy—genius.

Part of the reason today’s incarnation of Monopoly is so fun to play is that it was tweaked from Magie’s original design for better play. The core of the game is Magie’s, but the Atlantic City properties, the fixed prices, and the graphics all helped make it better. In today’s era of selfies, being one’s own publicist on social media, and the egotism wrapped around one’s Twitter follower count, perhaps Monopoly’s creation story reminds us that together and connected, we are better. The “light bulb” narrative of invention, by definition, largely omits much chance for collaboration, a force that can be as vital for creation as the air we breathe.

Perhaps it’s always been more than a game, after all.

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