Will the Real NPCs Please Stand Up?

Yesterday morning I took a walk with Patti Labelle and an evening stroll with Georgia Ann and Rick Fox. Then, I watched a simulation of Facetime with my favorite influencer (Malik) before shopping with my fellow “Trader Hoes” (Steezus and Lavelle) at Trader Joe’s. All of these things happened from the comfort of my iPhone. Because one of my favorite past-times is watching videos and listening to audio of what other people do in their homes. How other people decorate, how they clean, how they work, walk, and watch tv.

Humans, they’re just like me, is what I think.

In these mundane moments, life becomes an art form, and every person we see online becomes the artist detailing what it looks like to live well and perform human-beingness with creativity and comedy. Most of these people have become so good at performing life for the entertainment of others that we wish to imitate them. We work to pretend that our lives are like theirs. We consume the content they produce and buy the things they buy. We clap for their accomplishments and cry at their failures, and through them, we can clap and cry for ourselves because we are them, and they are us.

They influence us into being a better version of ourselves, a more human and humane life form.

Yet, with each new algorithm and iteration of artificial intelligence, we are becoming less unique individuals. Whatever small quirk or personality trait you thought was yours can be easily replicated and performed on a screen by someone else. Someone who can seem completely unlike you. So, what makes us unique human beings when it becomes so easy to replicate the performance of human life?

Black Barbies in the Valley of AI Dolls

Recently, these questions have been on my mind in light of several new marketing and money-making trends on TikTok. First is the constant content stream advertising the new “Barbie” movie. Soon to premiere at the end of the month, this latest film from the mind of Greta Gerwig has a star-studded cast, including Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken, as well as features from people like Issa Rae, Will Ferrel, and Simu Liu. Even when you Google the film, the entire screen erupts into pink flashes, showing how much marketing money is behind this full-length feature film.

And, despite many cultural controversies, most millennials were heavily influenced by Barbie (and there is a reason why one of our most-talked-about colors is Millenial Pink, and Nicki Minaj fans will forever be known as “The Barbs”). As a child, I was obsessed with “Fashion Ave Barbie,” which I now know was a series of dolls produced from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s. This Barbie was like a character from Sex and the City (without the sex). She had all the jobs and outfits that exemplified what it meant to be young and hip. Therefore, I imagined my Fashion Avenue Barbie as a Cruella De-Ville-like character, working as the editor of an incredibly culturally relevant magazine in the city, after which she would commute to her pink mansion in the suburbs.

I will also note here that I grew up in the era of multicultural Barbies, and while the blonde doll was still the focus of commercials and other marketing campaigns, most of my Barbies were Black. In response to the doll experiments of the 1940s, girls of my era were encouraged to embrace Barbie as a potential representation of their future self, a positive role model encased in plastic. Consequently, you wanted a doll that in some way looked like you. But, the experience of playing with dolls, and the performative nature of that play, takes on new meaning in our most recent years.

In concert with the rise of marketing for the “Barbie” movie and numerous other consumer goods, a new money-making scheme is brewing on video-sharing platforms. On TikTok, in particular, the Live feature is pushing content from a young woman, Pinky Doll, who has cornered the market on an unusual performance art form. Specifically, Pinky Doll has become known for making money on TikTok Lives by pretending to be a cross between a human-like AI, an animatronic robot, and pay for play sex doll. Her name also alludes to female rappers and performers known for their femininity and sexuality. And while this style of performance is interesting in and of itself, what is even more interesting about her content is how it has caught on amongst Black female creators from across the clock app.

The 123’s of NPCs: Gaming, Animatronics, and the AI Era

But first, let’s talk about the performance. Like many TikTok users, I encountered this performance style via TikTok Lives. And, as I have written in the past, the TikTok Live content is one of the only places on the platform that does not seem to reflect an individual user’s interests directly. Generally, Lives represent the trends in content on the app at any given time and the type of content that users are paying to watch. Additionally, many creators that garner financial success via TikTok Live do so through the performance of sexual innuendo and kinks or fetishes that fly under the radar of the censorship algorithms that control the content that users see on TikTok’s For You Page or homepage/newsfeed.

Most recently, these Lives have included a new genre gaining popularity within the app, NPC content. NPC, a term which means Non-Player Character, are characters in video games that you encounter who do not have any meaningful purpose in the game but serve as the extras on set in the video game environment. These characters usually have a pre-programmed set of phrases, gestures, and emotions that they can exhibit in the game, which do not change over time. Therefore, whenever the player approaches the NPC, they will perform many of the same activities, like an animatronic doll or puppet without any known origin.

However, even though NPCs are background characters, regular players of games like Grand Theft Auto and The Sims have turned NPCs’ performance (and even the side-quests where you tend to meet these characters) into a point of interest when playing. NPCs and side-quests are so popular now that these terms have migrated from the video-game world into real life, with any person that acts more like a robot than a person earning the label, NPC, and any deviation from your perceived life’s purpose deemed a “side-quest” instead of a detour. So, it makes sense that NPCs and side-quests would also make their way into performance art.

In the case of Pinky Doll, we see her use the NPC trend as a means of enticing TikTok users, who probably did not come on the app to watch a woman pretend to be an artificially generated character, to go on a side-quest by entering her Live. With long blonde hair and a revolving door of aesthetically pleasing outfits, her presentation is also reminiscent of the Barbies of my youth and the campaigns that TikTok is promoting. Once you click on her Live, there is no break in the NPC performance, as Pinky Doll slurps, giggles, and repeats her catch-phrases to an audience of fans and haters that are waiting to see what she will do next and when she will slip out of this carefully constructed character. Viewers can also pay to dress her up like a doll in virtual costumes that disappear almost immediately after purchase while she uses a flat iron to pop popcorn kernels.

In watching these videos, her character is not only similar to Barbie or Nicki Minaj fans but also the NPCs in video games and the life-like animatronic dolls that are common within amusement parks like Disneyland or even the street performers in cities like New York, where human beings pretend to be statues until a quarter in the hat turns them into a dancer or comedian. Additionally, her performance plays on racial stereotypes, and many TikTok users assume that her content must imitate Asian users, similar to the migration of Mukbangs from South Korea to America. And while I have not seen any evidence that the trend has migrated from Asia, this assertion speaks to how American audiences engage in the tropes of Techno-Orientalism, associating humanoid robots and unusual content with the continent and its creators.

In many ways, I believe fewer people would be talking about her content if she was not a woman of a certain color (although her accent makes it difficult for me to state her racial/ethnic identity). And fewer people would also hate the content. Displaying the reverse of the uncanny valley, a concept that implies that human beings tend to have a negative response to AI that seem too human, Pinky Doll’s performance also bothers many viewers because she is a human that appears too AI, too animatronic, and too robotic. Once again demonstrating that while certain groups of people fit perfectly into our image of the technological future, others appear out of place in our understanding of what that future might look like. In many ways, Pinky Doll’s appearance asks, Are there Barbs in Space and Black girl robots in the future?

To Create is Human, and to Be Black is Divine

Yet, even as Pinky Doll’s haters rise, so do her imitators. In the past week alone, I have seen several Black women on TikTok doing their own NPC-style performance, with many crediting Pinky Doll for inspiring them. This is because Pinky Doll recently shared that her Lives garnered thousands of dollars as viewers bought her items to wear and comment on. And what I appreciate about these new performances is that they also work to construct a virtual reality in which Barbs and Black robots not only exist, but they speak in a way that reflects Black language and culture. Unlike Siri, Alexa, and other virtual assistants, these women’s characters utilize familiar catchphrases and gestures instead of the neutral tones of pre-programmed AI and NPCs we usually see online.

And although everything isn’t about Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism, this particular trend is another example of how these forms influence the type of art being created at this time. While watching a video on why science fiction is so radical for Black people, author Nalo Hopkinson states that one of the outcomes of creating future-focused art is that it gives the world a way to see and recognize Black people as human beings. Similarly, I have been drawn in by Black women performing as NPCs and AI dolls because it exposes how human we are because only a human would (or even could) imitate an AI.

This becomes even more apparent because these Pinky Doll imitators could produce this content better. Many end up falling in and out of character while laughing at themselves and how ridiculous and unnatural the trend feels. But from the perspective of afrosurrealism, the imperfections of this content make it even more authentic. And I applaud these women, even as their haters hate them because they are intent on laughing all the way to the bank.

They also expose the deception behind content creation, the game of playing at being human that we have all come to accept as an accurate reflection of our own lived realities. Instead, these NPC performances expose and mock how many people are cosplaying as their best selves online to garner likes, views, and other monetary benefits. As well as demonstrating how easy it is to make money, both online and offline, when you look and act like a human doll.

But overall, I am excited to see how the trend develops and where it goes next. Because content creation is fast becoming the space to watch new forms of creativity and performance art generate online. With each digital trend and talking point, new themes to review and thoughts to ponder are taking us all into a much brighter and more brilliant future. And with this being my 100th Medium post, many more observations will come!