All the World's a Game
On NPCs, climbing the ladder, and crossing moral lines
I’ve been a calculative person for my entire life. I’d like to say “not in the bad way,” but that wouldn’t be fully honest. While maturation and exposure to my own capacity for harm chipped away at my most self-interested parts, I cannot remember a time when I was not methodical, overly metacognitive, and goal-oriented. As a child, I delighted in how a well-timed “it’s okay, I’m fine,” could draw out tenderness from adults and rage from my sister simultaneously. I craved the heady sense of security I felt when my words elicited the exact reaction I wanted. Maybe all children possess this quality to some degree, but I had it in spades; I tried to please teachers, amuse parents, withhold and share strategically, and generally make all the right sounds and faces to get whatever I wanted. It was a rush.
This isn’t a fun thing to know about yourself. I wish I could say I was one of those sensitive, sweet, soft-natured kids that parents dream of, but even as a girl, I was too aware of my own vulnerability not to realize that to cut through the world, you have to be sharp. Youth is so terrifying and helpless, and I was not going to tackle it unarmed. The problem was that I wasn’t cuter, or sweeter, or more athletic than the other kids; I was only quicker-witted. So small social manipulations were my weapons of choice.
In theory, being a calculative little girl could make you seem cunning and clever to others, but that wasn’t my experience. Mostly, it made me self-conscious about my ability to arouse an instinctive suspicion in others that I was secretive and cold. I always managed to have friends growing up, but there’s a thin layer of frost that coats any relationships where one person’s trying to win a game the other person doesn’t know they’re playing. Even when I wasn’t being manipulative, I couldn’t seem to thaw that feeling for the life of me, and when I get married at the end of this summer, only two friends I made before the age of twenty-five will attend.
It’s also worth noting that in my late adolescence, I experimented with being highly passive, and I have nothing good to show for that either. Whether this was a resignation from being calculating or my ultimate commitment to it is hard to say, but from the moment I entered high school debate, I seized the opportunity to become someone new and found myself inhabiting the personality of someone sweeter, less selfish, and more docile than I am by nature. I went so far as to wear bows in my hair every day to visibly signal that I was metamorphosing: I was becoming a Sweet Girl.
That multi-year stunt landed me an outrageously popular boyfriend, unintentional membership in a social echelon I had no right to be in, and the adoration of younger girls who wanted to be me (I wish I wasn’t overstating that part, but being young is weird).
But I paid a steep price for my attempt at meekness. People took advantage of me, in what I now know are horrifying ways, and I let them because I was young, lonely, and resolute that I would never be a sharp, calculating little bitch ever again. I didn’t want to be cunning and sharp, something no one seemed to like; I wanted to be so soft that someone else would feel compelled to keep me safe. “Sweet” girls don’t need to be constantly plotting their next moves, I reasoned, because when you’re beloved, someone does that for you. That was the logic, at least. But it was not my experience.
All of this is just to say, I spent many years figuring out how to be a person whose first-line defense mechanism is to treat life like a game of social chess. I’ve lived and paid rent on both sides of the very thin line that divides self-advocacy from selfishness, generosity from self-evisceration, and strategy from callousness. I’ve felt the sting of being perceived as cold, and I also still carry the bruises of being passive in the name of being likable. I know the ups and downs, nooks and crannies, and all the contours of being a calculating person.
So when I entered the workforce and found an adultscape riddled with girlbosses and an imperative to “play the corporate game,” you cannot imagine the sense of relief that flooded me. Okay, I thought hesitantly but gleefully as I geared up to be a savvy, strategic, take-no-shit, working girl who would not manipulate others for personal gain, let’s try this again.
The working world is a sharp-edged place. Sometimes that gets played up in stereotypes and media representations of fields like finance, sales, and law, but the private sector really does have a time-honed reward system in place for people who know how to “play the game.” Of course, they’d never explain it this way, but almost all companies covet “high EQ” employees who can “manage stakeholders,” “influence without authority,” and “read a room.” That makes a lot of sense: companies are giant social organisms, and for many, the easy part of being a company is figuring out what to do, and the hard part is getting people to do it. Compelling people to do what you want (even when it’s not what they want) is arguably the central skill of leadership.
But strip back the sanitizing language of Soft Skills™, and, in the crudest terms, the working world is tailor-made for calculating people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and play some human chess.
I have always felt at home in the working world, and I’ve often wondered if, in some deep part of me, this is the true reason why. I’d like to think it’s because building a career is effortful and intellectually stimulating, but it’s more than that. I am awkward in most social settings, but I am never awkward at work. “You’re so outgoing and comfortable with coworkers,” my fiancé once noted when I was curled up in a ball on our couch after a single hour of having to interact with people in a group.
But friend groups are horrifying — so many emotional dynamics to track and manage (!) — and work is simple: it’s a dog-eat-dog world where everyone’s trying to get ahead, so everyone expects you to be a little bit calculating and show your teeth. At work, being a constantly-strategizing little monster is a good thing.
Form strategic alliances, campaign for your next promotion, make sure you’re the exact right amount of visible, impress the right people, avoid the wrong people, be intentional with your messaging, nurture your personal brand—I’d spent my whole life shamefully battling the compulsion to do these things in these terms, but the workplace is still the only space I’ve ever occupied where all of it is encouraged.
It’s comforting seeing the world like this, one large game of tactics and fellow tacticians. It provides so much certainty because if life is a strategy game, it means there are good moves and bad moves; costs, benefits, and probabilities. Yes, there are real human beings on the other end of all those things, but what of it? We’re all here by contract, not goodness of heart. They’re playing the game too.
And that is the crux of it, isn’t it? The logic we use to render the working world — maybe the whole world — a strategic battlefield in the first place? We must be calculating and self-interested because others will be too, and we’re at risk of being left behind. You play for survival, not joy, because if you don’t, you’ll get left behind.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Over the past two years of writing this newsletter, I’ve dedicated a lot of words to telling people “you need to be more strategic and tactical about how you… speak, socialize, work, live, breathe,” and in the process of writing that advice, I’ve also gotten a lot of the things I wanted by following it. I love the type of work I do, and I do it from wherever in the world I want to. I own my own home. I’m productive without being compulsive. And when I look back at the work that makes up my career, I can truthfully say that I’m still proud of most of it.
But it is not lost on me that, after years of personally grappling with how Machiavellian is too Machiavellian, the advice I (and other career internet-talking types) tend to give leans heavily “strategic.” Treat your influence like a renewable resource, network, self-assess, and self-brand intentionally, sacrifice in “efficient currencies.” I stand by every single one of those takes, but I also feel increasingly wary of offering up more of them. A lot of career advice demands that, to follow it, you treat life like a game to be won and a career as something to be conquered. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing to do — I do it autonomically and reap the rewards.
But as we navigate this ever-changing workforce and economy, it feels important to say, even if just once: it is a perilous and lonely thing to look at your life and only see maneuvers, objectives, and obstacles. And I’m hard-pressed to believe that if we reduce it to those things, it will turn out any better for us as a collective than it did for childhood me.
One of the less charming ideas to catch traction with the Silicon Valley oligarchy class lately is the concept of an NPC, or “non-playable character.” The phrase is lifted from the gaming world, where NPC is used quite literally and neutrally to describe characters who exist only as ambient features of their digital worlds. They speak in scripts and have no stake in the outcome of the game. They’re just… non-playable characters.
Coming from the mouths (and more often, fingertips) of today’s tech and internet types, the term’s connotation is more sinister. People who fancy themselves active players in the economy describe their less fortunate, less ambitious, less “agentic” counterparts as NPCs to suggest that there is some sort of inherent inferiority in simply following life’s scripts. Loud and proud social strategists make no effort to soften their disdain for people who naively believe in rules and follow them. What fools, they act as if the world isn’t, fundamentally, a contest with winners and losers.
These people and their worldview haunt me violently. It is at once so familiar and so divorced from the moral dilemma that has always made me feel shameful and rotten about being a calculative person at heart. The nauseating part of seeing the world as a strategy game is how it colors your view of people. A lot of the time, they look like players, other contenders with goals and dreams, and the ability to affect the world. But sometimes, when you’re scared, deep in it, and governed by scarcity instead of compassion, other human beings stop looking like players in the game and start looking an awful lot like pieces.
The moral line that separates savvy girlbosses from Sun Tzu may be thin and worn, but even in my calculating mind, the paint has always been clear here: if you’re going to approach life like it’s a game to be won, you have to treat people like players, not pieces. Maybe not players of equal skill, but always of equal worth. You have to recognize everyone as someone who can suffer and inflict suffering right back. Even people who drew terrible hands are still thinking, feeling, playing characters in the game. You never treat them like pieces.
I’m sure that the first time someone used the phrase NPC as a pejorative, they felt awfully clever. It is clever — it’s a very succinct way of describing why some people never win because they internalize the false belief that their script was already handed to them, and their character just wasn’t made for success. But I fear that the proliferation of the NPC idea, and, more importantly, the underlying logic that makes it resonate with people, illustrates how far we’ve collectively drifted from our moral center. We’ve upheld our commitment to hate the game but spare its players. But the NPCs—they’re fair game.
Recently, I found myself up late at night reading about the ruling in K.G.M. vs. Meta et al., the first-ever social media addiction court case to reach a jury in the U.S. The plaintiff was a young woman whose family sued TikTok, Google (YouTube), and Meta for “intentionally” making their daughter addicted to social media. They argued that features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithm-based recommenders were designed to hook young people’s attention in a way that causes anxiety, depression, and, in this girl’s case, body dysmorphia. This March, the court found Meta and Google liable for designing their platforms to cause addiction, and the family was awarded $6 million in damages.
Landmark decision and all its implications aside, the evidence from the case tells a harrowing tale of what it means to see people as pieces. Internal Meta documents lay out years of meticulous tracking in which Meta monitored the behavior of 11-year-olds to establish that they’re uniquely likely to be repeat Instagram users (never mind that the platform’s own minimum age for use is 13). One executive memo read, “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.” A federal court also found that Meta’s lawyers had explicitly advised employees to remove internal research documenting harm to teenage girls’ mental health. Maybe those lawyers hesitated to give that advice, but maybe they just thought that if they didn’t say it, someone else would. Don’t hate the lawyer, hate the game.
In different quarters of the tech kingdom, a Human Rights Watch report came out last year documenting how Uber and DoorDash systematically misclassify workers as independent contractors to intentionally deny them basic labor protections and use opaque algorithms to assign pay that often falls below local minimum wages. While three-quarters of gig workers report being unable to afford housing, Uber posted $9.8 billion in net income last year and has nothing public to say about drivers who depend on the platform for their income being removed erratically and inexplicably, with nowhere to appeal. Tough draw on that character script.
And, of course, there is the AI of it all, because what else is there these days? Most of the major AI labs have publicly stated that they anticipate hordes of NPCs are at risk of losing their jobs in the coming years. Those same labs are pressing on, accelerating the development of technology that would cause that displacement. Fear not, OpenAI walked back their claim right before filing for a trillion-dollar IPO.
These are awfully large and extreme examples of what happens when we render the people of the world into game pieces. I know that. I also know that it is easy to be a woman with a Substack and a sense of moral superiority.
But what feels easier, as someone whose mind is wired for strategy games, is to give in to the logic that we’ve entered an era of winners and NPCs and now is the moment to finally commit to trying to win the game.
The hard, and probably imprudent, thing to do is to resist the desire to play entirely. Go analog, fight the power, never use AI. There are people who can do that, and I salute them. Worry for them… but salute. However, as someone who expends an awful lot of energy battling the instinct to just succumb to the callousness, what I am reminding myself is this: the players end up lonely and sleepless too.
When I was in high school, there was a girl I was friends with who was smart, but not smarter than me. As an adult, that sort of thing doesn’t matter, but as a kid, you’ll clutch at anything that helps you understand who you are and if you’re worth anything. This girl was bright, and she’s gone on to live a good life (which I regularly check up on via social media), but one day she said something mean and embarrassed me, and I couldn’t stop the impulse to hurt her back. I mean really hurt. It was just that I could feel the intention behind her words. Takes one to know one, I suppose, but I’ve always had a good sense for when someone’s treating you like you’re a piece in their personal game of life. Their voices get softer and more imploring. Even when — especially when — they mean you harm. They jab at you, but only in front of an audience. Everyone working an angle has tells.
This girl’s words stung, but imagining her smug satisfaction at having gotten a few social points at my expense made me see red. Fine, I thought. If she wants to play, let’s play.
I took the embarrassment in stride, smiled, and didn’t respond. Over the next week, I discreetly crawled to every single boy she’d ever wanted to impress to disclose how hurt I was from the interaction. “I guess that’s what I get for trusting her,” I sighed, verbally squeezing my wounds to make the blood run publicly. When our mutual peers started calling her a fake bitch behind her back, I reveled in the sense of victory and relief. She wasn’t fake. She was also quite nice, for the record. But she started it. I just did what all wounded, scared, calculating people do best: drag her into a game she couldn’t win because she wasn’t even clever enough to play.
There’s karmic justice in reliving these memories in a mind no longer addled with the pain of being seventeen (and unmedicated). I physically recoil from the person I was then. Causing that hurt, knowing I’d won, made me feel so secure and capable of protecting myself at that time. She’s going to think about this feeling for the rest of her life, I genuinely remember thinking. The fear that your “friends” are saying cruel things about you behind your back was one I knew painfully well. It’s going to follow her forever. That was the victory. Pain will follow her just like it follows me.
I’ll never know if she ever thought about my feat of social engineering again. It’s possible, but if I were a betting woman, I’d say it’s more likely that she hasn’t.
The only person we know for sure is still tormented by that interaction is me.
I spent the better part of my childhood longing for a place where everyone thought like me. If I’d known that what I was actually yearning for was just the middle rungs of the corporate ladder, perhaps it would have lost some of its luster, but even today, the workplace makes me feel at home in a way no one else does because it’s designed for “strategic thinkers.” There are narratives to be crafted and change to be meticulously managed, and while everyone loathes an eight-year-old who compulsively influences without authority, in a good old open-plan office, you can influence to your heart’s content.
So when I say I understand the people who look out at our volatile world and see only a game to be won, I mean that from the deepest, truest part of my heart. I also mean it just as much when I say I think you should play too. The world is sharp, and if your cunning feels like the only thing keeping you safe, you are not wrong to reach for it.
But the line between gunning for a promotion and finding yourself burying legal evidence--the line that divides the players from the pieces--is alarmingly thin, and it’s easy to miss when you’re crossing it. If anything, it’s more like grooves in the road, invisible but violent, so that for anyone who isn’t an honest-to-god sociopath, when you drift over the line, at the very least, you feel it.
I’ve spent my whole life feeling around for that line and landing dangerously far from it — in both directions. All I’ve learned in the process is that all the world’s a game, even if only because that’s what we’ve willed it to be. If you play well, you will likely find yourself drifting over the line that stands between treating people like pieces and treating them like people. It doesn’t make you a monster if you do. Doing it in the name of the game doesn’t absolve you.
Carefully, keep playing. Just keep feeling for the line.
Thanks—always—for reading. Talk soon.