It’s clear we’ve still got a lot of learning to do these viral livestreams.

POV writer Aria Vega unpacks the rise of NPC livestreams and what it says about our current cultural, social, and economic state. 

What the NPC Livesteam Trend Reveals About the Rest of Us | Lustery POV

What the NPC Livestream Trend Reveals About the Rest of Us

If you glance around the internet, it can seem like gamer culture has thoroughly infiltrated the mainstream. Nowadays we’ve got multimillion-dollar Twitch sponsorships, tech titans like Meta betting the house on VR headsets, and most recently, the exploding popularity of NPC livestreams. You’ve likely been seeing one such streamer called 

 since the summer, when clips of her signature set abruptly went viral.

Here’s a better question: Why does NPC streaming make some of us so uncomfortable, anyway?

The answers have to do with how this trend sits at the confluence of so many hot-button social issues: the impact of influencers on kids, women using the internet to monetize their own beauty, the reminder of young people’s general economic precarity, the awkwardness of something this kinky becoming part of the news cycle. There’s a lot to unpack, but if it can help more of us confront some of these misplaced anxieties about sex and 

Love it or hate it, NPC livestreams (as in “non-playable character,” or the background figures in a video game who only speak when you prompt them) really are pretty mesmerizing. After emerging from the fringes of gamer culture in recent years, NPC content creation has found a natural habitat on TikTok, where shorts like 

 are the perfect fodder for building an overnight following. But the NPC trend really took off when it met the pandemic-era OnlyFans boom, when influencing and content creation were suddenly a safer alternative to in-person work, or a backup plan post-layoff.

, these creators essentially turned the meme phrase “no thoughts, head empty” into an embodied experience, complete with vacant expressions and robotic gestures. But it’s not just the streamers turning off their internal monologue for an hour— that sense of oblivion is a big draw for onlookers as well, eager as they are for a break from yet another Zoom call or doom-scrolling in our increasingly troubled times.

"NPC livestreamers, whether or not they also make explicit content elsewhere, are just entertainers."

It reminds me of ASMR, that other enchanting form of content creating enjoyed widely across the internet. ASMR practitioners create particular sounds to try and “hack” your nervous system into a calmer state for you. It’s easy to add an erotic charge with aesthetic choices like dirty talk, nudity, and strategic tool selection (a vibrator’s gentle buzzing would definitely chill me out!) But even if an ASMR video isn’t a true piece of “

”, it’s still an intimate performance designed to reach the viewer through sensuality.

It’s easy to see why the denizens and media outlets of the Western world would jump to 

 over a public and wildly popular display of women’s erotic labor being both monetized and gamified. That’s a whole lot of sexual and societal taboo wrapped up in a single TikTok trend! It might be naive, but it’s still shocking how obtuse that otherwise progressive people can be about things like sex work and kink, over a decade after

 became a bestseller and sex educators took over social media (hi there!)

But maybe that’s the problem: we’ll never be able to entertain ourselves into a collectively enlightened concept of sexuality. Sadly, living in a “

” world full of brazenly horny blockbusters like this year’s 

 hasn’t magically made us all smarter about sex and relationships. It certainly hasn’t made us any more respectful of sex workers’ boundaries, as evidenced by the 

 of Pinkydoll’s paywalled content after she went viral. It’s almost like when it comes to sex work, our collective understanding is limited to the most sanitized portrayals of privileged subjects (think 

But the bottom line is, NPC livestreamers, whether or not they also make explicit content elsewhere, are just entertainers. With new digital tools always comes new forms of creativity, and NPC streaming is just the latest of a million clever ways to make money on the internet, a prospect that single mothers like Pinkydoll are naturally drawn to. In an 

, the NPC It Girl revealed that she began her NPC livestream after her cleaning business collapsed while she was away for a funeral, and she just needed a way to feed her kid.

It’s been a wild ride that spiraled into 

. And Pinkydoll isn’t showing any signs of slowing down: in addition to her now-famous livestreams, she also posts clips of her in NPC mode as the “

” page, incorporating her whole body into the act. This type of NPC post is 

, as dancers and other somatic artists find a unique and potentially lucrative creative outlet in it.

Whether it’s a passing fad or a window into the future, NPC livestreaming is undoubtedly a curious window into the cultural, social, and economic headwinds of the present. May we always remember it as a breath of fresh air just as the social media landscape was fading.