NPCs Don’t Suffer
Late at night, dark trailers were placed across a highway in Germany. No lights. No warning. A truck driver barely stopped in time and warned others. Police treated it as attempted murder. Dozens of people could have been killed:
Families returning from a trip. Parents with children asleep in the back seat. Night workers driving home. People with no political power, no role in the conflict, no awareness that they had been drafted into it. One delayed reaction, one second less, and the road would have turned into a mass grave.
Days earlier, critical power infrastructure was sabotaged in Berlin’s winter grid. Tens of thousands of households were affected for a week.
In many high-rise buildings, elderly people were trapped in cold apartments without functioning heaters or stoves. Elevators stopped running. Some could not leave their homes. Hospitals were affected. Lives were put at risk, quietly and unevenly, behind closed doors.
All of this for a "political" cause.
What connects these events is not ideology.
The people who carried out these senseless acts did not experience themselves as hurting anyone. There were no faces, no voices, no bodies. Just effects radiating outward. In their internal model, nothing fully human was touched. Only background.
This is not a metaphor, it is a simulation mindset.
In video games, non-player characters are objects. They can be blocked, delayed, sacrificed. Their distress is cosmetic. Their deaths reversible. The player’s intention matters. The NPC’s outcome does not.
That logic has leaked into real-world action.
Road blockades. Infrastructure sabotage. Tactical escalation on city streets between activists and law enforcement, where the absence of real-world feedback can suddenly snap into lethal force when bodies and guns collide.
Inside the actor’s frame, this does not register as harm.
They do not see shared reality.
They see a map.
And a map is not the territory.
On a map, a highway is a line.
A power grid is a node.
A police perimeter is a symbol.
When action is trained on maps alone, feedback disappears. Inside closed bubbles, every move is applauded, every escalation reframed as courage, every consequence reassigned elsewhere.
So the first real feedback arrives all at once.
Not disagreement.
Not criticism.
But physics.
From zero feedback to one hundred. Sometimes lethal.
This is not childish naivety. It is adult abstraction carried too far.
Today’s activists often act as if they are escalating inside a padded system. They assume the worst possible outcome is optics. Arrest, release, lawsuit, maybe a fine an NGO eventually pays. Escalation feels procedural, symbolic, managed.
So when escalation suddenly turns physical, the reaction is not ideological.
It is ontological.
It is a category error: applying the rules of one domain to another where they do not belong, like treating a game as if it were reality.
This is where it breaks.
Somewhere along the way, the actor stopped believing that the opposing side was operating under the same reality conditions. They expected protocol, negotiation, maybe even understanding. They expected escalation to remain symbolic.
Past political militants never had that illusion.
Groups like the Red Army Faction or Action Directe assumed from the outset that the state would respond with lethal seriousness. They planned under that assumption. They were wrong about their ethics, their analysis, and their justification, but not about the stakes. They knew they were dealing with territory, not a map.
That is the uncomfortable inversion.
Today’s activists are often convinced of their moral purity but dangerously wrong about the stakes. And that is why this moment is unstable.
Systems become targets. Disruption becomes a move. Impact is measured in visibility, not injury. Responsibility diffuses across abstractions until it vanishes. Danger is outsourced to probability. The actor remains psychologically untouched by what follows.
Earlier militants justified violence.
Today’s activists deny the category altogether.
That denial is not moral progress.
It is insulation.
This is not empathy gone wrong.
It is empathy disabled.
The people affected are not imagined as night workers, parents, elderly neighbors, or people trying to get home. They become obstacles. And obstacles, by definition, are meant to be overcome.
Once human beings become categories, anything can be done to them for a higher cause.
The uncomfortable truth is that this is often not ignorance. Many know exactly what they are doing and have decided it is acceptable.
Because inside the simulation, intention erases outcome.
But we are not living in a game.
There is no respawn. No reset. No harmless disruption. When you block a road, someone real is behind that wheel. When you cut power in winter, someone real is shivering in a cold apartment. When you escalate against uniformed officers, bodies and bullets are sudden reality.
The real world does not care what you intended.
It responds mechanically. Relentlessly. With consequences.
And the longer people insist on acting as if reality were a simulation, the harsher the correction will be.
NPCs don’t suffer.
Real people do.