In the Land of Non-Playing Characters

During June it felt as if our apartment complex was emptying out. Moving trucks arrived to take people away, but no one moved in to replace them. We had begun to wonder if something weird was going on. We live in one of the pricier complexes in North Scottsdale, so we thought perhaps it was related to the shutdown. The management had begun sending out email notices reminding all of us of the rent deadlines. They had not done this before. At first I took it personally, until I realized it was part of the new normal.

In the last week, however, there have been two new occupancies in our building, including the unit directly below us.  J just met our new downstairs neighbor, a young woman. J had gone to her office to see a patient, and when she returned she found the new resident had parked in our space, so as to allow the moving van to use her own space. J insisted on making her move her car, in a friendly way. The young woman has a vanity license plate on our car that suggests she graduated from a Big Ten university and was a swimmer.

They had a short chat. J introduced herself and the young woman replied with her own name.

"And she didn't say anything else, did she?" I asked J.

"No."

"The conversation lasted exactly as long as you asked questions, and she answered your question without giving any further information, right?"

"Exactly."

We both laughed at that, because we had discussed this a couple weeks back. I had noticed this phenomenon I just described. Over many months we've spent here since moving in, I had done my usual thing of being friendly and striking up conversations with people as I met them.

People were always friendly back to me, at least on the surface, but they never once introduced themselves unless I took the initiative. This applied even to one's direct neighbors---people across the hallway---and to people I saw almost every day as I came and went from the building.

It applied to people of both sexes, and to couples with children. Age didn't matter. It applied to everyone below fifty years of age, including the guy with the BMW in the garage next to ours. He looked to be a few years younger than me. During the shutdown I had set up a work space in the garage which I used before it got too hot in June. As such this guy I mentioned walked in front of the open garage door every day while I was there, sometimes multiple times.

We conversed, but it was always at my instigation He was affable and smiling. He waved at me like an old friend if one gazes met. But he never spoke to me unless I spoke to him. I learned a lot about him from him by asking him questions over the weeks, dribbling them out little by little, building on the knowledge I'd gained thus far. I learned that he was born in Germany and came to the United States as a child. I had once been to his hometown in Bavaria years ago. The most surprising thing about him to me was that despite being German by birth, and still knowing how to speak German, he had never heard of Goethe. He didn't even recognize the name when I told him.

In each case, when I spoke to him, after a few questions on my part, I had the feeling I was detaining him. He never once asked me questions about myself. Never once did he ask me anything about my own background, or what I did for a living, or anything like that.

Likewise I found the same situation with others, including the young couple with their infant daughter. They lived in the unit directly across from ours, that faces our balcony directly. I saw them nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day, as they seemed to be constantly taking their daughter out in their stroller. They too were extremely affable whenever I saw them. They would wave to me with friendly recognition---provided that I waved to them first. Otherwise they ignored me.

One time I saw them with their garage door open. I called over to them, using their names. They never used my name back to me. I assume it had never registered with them when we introduced ourselves. 

"Oh, Illinois license plate?" I said, seeing the back of their car.

"Yes," the young woman replied. It was almost always she who talked to me---her husband mostly stood around as an accessory.

"You're from Illinois?"

"Yes we are."

"Oh. I used to live in Illinois briefly," I said. They looked at me without saying anything, as if we were all in suspended animation.

I took me a moment to remember the name of the town where I had lived, as an intern during college doing physics work at a government lab. 

"Downer's Grove," I said, recalling the place name I hadn't thought of in many years.

"Oh yes" she said, smiling in instantly recognition of the place. Her husband made a gesture of recognition as well.

Then silence. 

"Well great to see you again!" I said, after an awkward pause.

"Yes, bye!"

I never learned where in Illinois they lived, or anything else about them. I never learned why they had moved here. I think they moved back to Illinois when they left. I could have asked them as they were moving out, but by then it had begun to feel weird, to ask anybody any kind of question like that. 

There have been no exceptions to this rule of one-way conversation in the time I've lived here. It used to weird me out. I still does. but now I expect it.

I'm tempted to think is related to the nature of Scottsdale, and the transitory nature of residence here. But I think it goes deeper. It seems too universal for that.

After a while I began to joke that everyone here was in the witness protection program. I thought it might be about me somehow, but it just happened to J as well. It went exactly according to the script I knew. It was relief to hear her describe her interaction.

I hate to say this, but it reminds me of the trope of the Non-Playing Character (NPC) which is a widespread meme on the Internet. The idea of the NPC comes from interactive computer video games, the type where you play as a character and move throughout a world on some kind of story-quest. In these games, certain characters are programmed to provide simple interactions with your character, that supply the you with specific information and nothing else beyond that. If you try to talk to them within the game, they just tell you the same things over and over, or issue a set of simple phrases generated by the artificial intelligence of the game program.

I hesitate to use this term, as I said, as the term Non-Playing Character has become a dehumanizing insult in online culture. I know these people are other human beings, made in the image of God Almighty as we all are, and deserving of that respect. Yet this is actually how it feels while interacting with people around here--that I've found myself in a world of NPCs. It feels downright creepy.

I keep wondering how this all came to be, and if it has always been this way. Maybe I just never noticed.  Maybe I just have a different level of discernment now. Or maybe it is something new and horrible in civilization. 

The weirdest aspect of this is that it does not make feel lonely. Instead it seems to clear up the loneliness I might feel. Loneliness is something one feels around other people, when one feels the absence of connections that one wishes to exist. Now that I no longer expect such human connections with people---because such interaction seem impossible---I do not feel the lack. In a strange way it is liberating.

There are a few older residents here---people at least seventy and older. I see them from time to time from a distance. I haven't had a chance to talk to them, but I imagine that if I did speak to them I might have real human interactions. I still want to believe that.