There’s a moment in every video game when it clicks.
You’re dropped into the world, given a character, handed a set of objectives, and suddenly you’re it. The protagonist. The one who matters. Every NPC (non-playable character) you encounter exists to serve your story in some capacity—the blacksmith who sells you weapons, the villager who delivers the quest, the random wanderer who fills out the world and makes it feel alive. They have names sometimes, maybe a few lines of dialogue, but their function is clear: background. Texture. Support cast for your journey.
We’ve all played that game. And somewhere along the way, without really noticing it, we started playing it in real life too.
Think about how you move through the world on any given day. You wake up with your own internal monologue running, your own set of worries and ambitions and unresolved storylines. The person who cuts you off in traffic is a minor antagonist. The barista who gets your order right is a brief moment of warmth. The colleague who seems perpetually distracted is just a flat character you haven’t figured out yet. Everyone else is furniture, more or less, arranged around the central drama of your experience.
The thing is, and this is what stops me when I really sit with it, every one of those people is doing the exact same thing. The driver who cut you off has a storyline too. The barista has a whole interior life running parallel to the two minutes you spent at her counter. The distracted colleague is carrying something you can’t see. They are all the first person in their own narrative.
And to them, you’re the NPC.
In gaming terms, this creates a strange loop. The entire premise of the first-person perspective is that it centers you. The camera lives behind your eyes. The world responds to your inputs. Your choices shape the outcome. That isn’t incidental to the experience; it is the experience. But first-person mode doesn’t only make you feel central. It also makes you feel correct. What you see feels like what is there. What you know feels like what is true. The view from behind your own eyes doesn’t feel like one perspective among many. It feels like reality itself.
The philosopher Iris Murdoch had a phrase for this: “the fat relentless ego.” The self is constantly working, constantly interpreting events through the lens of its own desires and anxieties and narratives. It isn’t malicious. It is simply what consciousness does. It makes everything about itself because it doesn’t know how to begin anywhere else.
Your suffering is vivid. Other people’s suffering is abstract. Your victories feel earned. Other people’s victories can feel threatening. Your motives are complicated; theirs seem obvious. This isn’t a character flaw so much as the default setting.
The question is whether we stay on default.
The more sophisticated video games become, the more they play with the idea of the unreliable narrator. At first, you assume your character’s perspective is accurate. What you see is what happened. What you know is what is true. But eventually the game begins to reveal the limits of that view. Your character’s understanding may be shaped by their background, their loyalties, their wounds, or simply by the information available to them. Another character could look at the same event and describe it completely differently. Neither version is necessarily false, but neither is complete.
This is just how perception works. We don’t experience reality in full. We experience a model of it, constructed in real time and filtered through everything we have ever lived through. Which means the first-person perspective, for all its immersiveness, is also the most limited vantage point available. You can only see what you can see from where you are standing.
The problem begins when we forget that where we are standing is not the whole world.
I think about this most in the context of conflict. Most interpersonal conflict—at the level of relationships, teams, families, communities—isn’t really one person seeing reality and another refusing to. It is two first-person narratives colliding. Person A has their story. Person B has theirs. Both stories are internally coherent. Both stories feel absolutely real to the person living them. And from the outside, the whole thing can look like two people stubbornly refusing to see what is obvious.
Because from each person’s first-person view, it is obvious. That’s the bind.
Resolution rarely comes from establishing which narrative is objectively correct. It begins when one or both people can genuinely perceive the other as a first-person character rather than an NPC. When they stop experiencing the other person as an obstacle, an antagonist, or a plot device, and begin experiencing them as someone with their own coherent, legitimate, deeply felt story that happens to be in tension with theirs.
Psychologists call this perspective-taking (empathy if we were to use a more common term). It is more than feeling sorry for someone, or acknowledging that they are having a hard time. It is the cognitive act of placing yourself inside someone else’s experience and temporarily operating from their coordinates: their history, their constraints, their fears, their version of events. Not to abandon your own perspective or decide that theirs must be right, but to understand what the situation looks like from where they are standing.
It sounds simple, but the first-person view is sticky. The game doesn’t want you to leave your character. Your own explanation is always easier to access, your own pain more immediate, your own intentions more obvious. But the ability to exit that view, even briefly and imperfectly, may be one of the most useful skills a person can develop. It is where most of the real work gets done—in relationships, in organizations, in anything involving more than one human being trying to get somewhere together.
The more I turn this idea over, the more it seems like one of the central tensions of being a person. You have no choice but to be the protagonist of your own experience. Consciousness is first-person by design. And yet you are surrounded by billions of other protagonists, all equally invested in their own storylines, all experiencing their lives with the same vividness and certainty that you experience yours.
The answer isn’t to erase yourself or pretend that your story doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. The point is to hold it a little more loosely. To remember that your experience, as real and pressing as it is, is still an experience. A camera angle. One of several billion running concurrently.
That awareness quietly dismantles a particular kind of arrogance. Not the loud, obvious kind, but the structural arrogance that comes from assuming your experience is more legible than everyone else’s. That your struggles are more real. That your dreams are more justified. That when the world fails to accommodate you, it is a meaningful injustice, while its failure to accommodate someone else is simply circumstance.
There is a small practice I keep coming back to whenever I catch myself treating someone like an NPC—flattening them into their function, their inconvenience, or their role in my day.
I try to remember that somewhere, in some room I will never enter, this person is the first person. They have a morning routine and an old injury and someone they are hoping to hear from. They have a thing they are quietly afraid of. They have a version of this week that I have no access to.
It is a small thought. It takes about two seconds. It doesn’t resolve every conflict or dissolve every frustration, but it creates a pause between what someone has done and the role you immediately assign them. It changes the texture of how you move through the world. It makes you a little more curious and a little less certain.
The goal isn’t to leave first-person mode. You can’t.
It is to remember that it is a mode.
Everyone is the first person. The game is real, the stakes are real, and the camera is always on. Just not always on you.