A Brush With the Law

PinkyDoll is at the vanguard of the ‘NPC’ trend that has captured the attention of TikTok users, in which content creators mimic the repetitive actions of a non-playable character (NPC) in a video game. PinkyDoll has said she’s inspired by the background characters that inhabit the world of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. Also called “idle animations” video game developers code in these background characters to create the effect of a bustling world.
The ‘NPC’ livestream TikTok trend helping creators earn cash

“Knoll’s Law of Media Accuracy,” typically understood to be “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge,” strikes again. Except that this time it's a web page, and my knowledge is second-hand, since I’m not a video game animator.

“Knoll’s Law” is a more interesting phenomenon than it’s given credit for, I think. It can be taken as a knock on journalists, or journalism more broadly, but it’s really simply a proof that they have the same problem the rest of us do; namely, that it’s often difficult to learn new things and get all of the details correct out of the gate. “Idle animations” in video games are not those animations given to the non-player characters (commonly known as “NPCs,” a term borrowed from tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons) to make the world seem more full. (Due to the computing power than NPCs tend to need, many games seem to have many fewer background characters than one might expect.) Rather it’s player characters (the characters directly controlled by the player, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Geralt of Rivia, Cloud Strife or Mario) who have idle animations, which kick in at a point after the player stops inputting commands to the game. The startup intervals and duration vary, but their purpose is to impart some movement to what could otherwise become a static scene and personality to the character. These can be quite sophisticated, responding to context and elements of the portrayed environment. It’s also worth pointing out that NPCs are not simply background characters; they are all characters in a game who are not controlled by a player; including primary allies and the story’s antagonist[s].

Journalistic misses like this one, which are evident to people with a passing familiarity with the subject at hand, are an indicator of the lack of resources that newsrooms currently have. Because it seems that, in an organization like the BBC, there should have been someone with enough knowledge of the videogame industry to catch that. It could have been that there was a rush to get the article posted, given that there have been other stories about the NPC phenomenon. Quite a number of them, in fact. Because as trivial as they may seem, stories about the newest viral trends on TikTok bring in clicks, and thus advertising money. It’s the meta of the Internet economy, monetizing attention to (and/or judgement of) what people are paying attention to online. But whether rush to publication or lack of resourcing, newsrooms are starting to have noticeable difficulties in avoiding what come across as basic errors in their stories.

The degree to which this may be a problem is unknown. While my understanding of “Knoll’s Law” prompts me to understand that the media may not be a reliable source of information on many subjects where the journalists writing the stories have at little firsthand knowledge of the topic as I do. Of course, the only time that I can know that a journalist lacks knowledge of a topic is when they say something that contradicts what I already know about it. And this means than I am often left to simply realize that I can read an article or two on something, and still be uninformed about it. I expect, however, that there are people who take their own brushes with “Knoll’s Law” to be evidence of media bias and/or dishonesty. In that regard, it has the potential to become a vicious cycle, as inaccuracies lead to reduced readership, which leads to lower staffing levels, which can create more openings for inaccuracies to creep in.