I loved Isbister’s section on Non-player characters, as it was one of the topics I discussed in my midterm paper. She believes, as I do, that NPCs provide character and are “living, breathing others” within the game world. These characters provide weight to the player’s actions, and even provide a real sense of social interaction. NPCs can turn a single player experience into something far from isolating, and can teach valuable lessons in real world social skills.
In my research paper, I talked about how EarthBound has many NPCs that do next to nothing in terms of driving the main plot of the story forward. Not only that, many of those do nothing to point the player in the right direction, nor do they provide any tangible in game benefit, like an item or other usable thing. Instead, these NPCs provide a sense that Eagleland, the setting of EarthBound, is a real, breathing world. In the real world you have simple, small conversations with plenty of people all the time. They may not do anything to progress your overall story — they may not be giving you life changing advice or giving you anything tangible, but its these small human interactions that teach you how to “be a person,” for lack of a better phrase. Humans are social animals; they need social interaction to survive. That games recognize this and implement it into their games not only acts to their benefit, but acts to the benefit of anyone who plays them, too.