Non-Playable Characters IRL
Paris book launch event, shipping update, and more
Non-Playable Characters was never conceived as a definitive statement. From day one, it was imagined as a probe into a cultural condition that feels increasingly familiar, but still difficult to name. NPCs circulate everywhere lately: in games, in memes, in livestreams, in platform economies, and in the ways language, emotion, and behavior are automated online. Non-Playable Characters emerged from the desire to pick apart and analyse this particular culture as a lens through which to read networked life.
Today, a year after we first conceived of Non-Playable Characters, we’re ready to share the next two phases in the life of the project: a physical book launch in Paris, and the moment the book begins to travel towards the readers who supported it early on. <3
Paris book launch 📚
Paris friends,
We’re happy to announce the launch event of Non-Playable Characters next Friday, 13th February, at After 8 Books, starting at 7pm.
For the evening, we will be joined by Morgane Billuart (Becoming the Product), artist, researcher, and contributor to the book, who will perform a reading of her text. The reading will be followed by an informal talk with Vienna Kim, co-editor of Non-Playable Characters and 1/2 of LAN Party.
The book will be available to purchase on site during the event.
On this occasion, we will open up a space to reflect on NPC culture, scripted identities, internet mythologies, and the ways agency is negotiated within algorithmic systems. If you’re in Paris, we hope to see you there!
📍 After 8 Books, 7 rue Jarry 75010 Paris
🗓 Friday, February 13
🕖 7pm
Books are now shipping! 📦✨
To everyone who pre-ordered Non-Playable Characters, thank you again for your trust and support.
We’re happy to share that orders will begin shipping in the coming days. After months of work, it feels meaningful to finally send the book out into the world, beyond screens and files, and into physical hands.
For readers based in the United States, a brief update: due to ongoing tariffs and shipping restrictions affecting goods sent from France to the US, we are currently finalising the most reliable solution to dispatch your copies. At this stage, we estimate that US orders will ship toward the end of February. We will keep you informed if anything changes, and we sincerely thank you for your patience and understanding.
Once the book reaches you, feel free to post it on your socials. This makes a real difference for independent publishing projects like this one. You can tag @bennakim, @benoit.tokyo, and even @metalabel__ on Instagram. We’ll happily repost!
What comes next 🌐➡️
The release of Non-Playable Characters is not an endpoint. We see the book as one expression of a broader, ongoing research and curatorial project within LAN Party, which continues to explore internet subcultures, online mythologies, and the systems that influence digital life.
In the coming months, we’ll be sharing more updates around the book, and we’re hoping to extend the project through additional exchanges, readings, and events in different contexts and cities. The book is meant to circulate, to be discussed, and to live on through these moments.
If the project resonates with you, helping to share it goes a long way. Passing it on, mentioning it, or inviting it into other spaces, whether bookstores, libraries, institutions, or informal gatherings, helps keep the conversation alive. If you have any interesting connections or event opportunities for us, comment on this post or send us a message to let us know!
Thank you for being part of this first chapter. More soon.
Vienna & Benoit
LAN Party
About Non-Playable Characters ⚔️
Non-Playable Characters is a book that brings together the contributions of eight theorists, curators, artists, journalists and game modders, each offering a distinct lens on what it means to be a ‘non-playable character’ (NPC) in today’s networked society.
At the core of this collection lies a deeper inquiry into NPCs and AI, agency vs. servitude, NPC-ification, surveillance capitalism, and the emotion economy. It examines how automated roles and behaviours are embedded in our digital environments, and how they shape our affective, cultural and political realities.
Non-Playable Characters is one of the first efforts at assembling disparate ideas and explorations of what the NPC is, what it does, and how it might even speak back. Through it, we explore what the NPC phenomenon reveals about our own humanness in the age of Big Tech and AI accelerationism.
You can order your copy via Metalabel.
This project would not exist without the incredible work and trust of our contributors.
Contributions from:
Kyle Chayka
Günseli Yalcinkaya
2girls1comp (Marco De Mutiis & Alexandra Pfammatter)
Nora O’Murchú
Morgane Billuart
Angela Washko
Alex Quicho
Design and artwork by:
Ruby Bailey (L00bi)
Special thanks to:
Danielle Paterson and Molly Soda at Metalabel.
Love how this project reframes NPCs from video game concept into lens for understanding automated behaviour online. The shift from treating it as definitive statement to ongoing probe is smart, especially when the boundaries between agency and script blur more everyday in algorithmic feeds.