# Non-Player Players

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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I did mention when I began this section that although the main virtual worlds were populated by characters, NPCs, and monsters, there was a fourth possibility: nonplayer players. These are the customer service representatives, techies, designers, and other members of the live team who need access to the virtual world but don’t want to play it as regular players. They generally need supra-world powers in order to help people, to test the world, to fix problems, and so on. How should the game fiction account for this?

The simplest answer is “it shouldn’t.” If you can’t ever hope to slip it unnoticed into the fiction why bother? Put non-player players in a uniform so that everyone else knows to expect odd goings-on when they’re around, and leave it at that.

The second-simplest answer is also “it shouldn’t.” Hands-on event co-ordinators, as I mentioned earlier, can merge in to the player base and appear to be regular players while actually having irregular powers at their disposal. This is fine for them, but it doesn’t work for programmers trying to track down bugs or for customer service representatives showing the human face of the live team.

The more traditional approach, at least in Fantasy worlds, is to have a formal hierarchy of gods/immortals/wizzes. In other words, find some in-context powerful beings and associate the non-player players with these. This may be unavoidable anyway in some virtual worlds—for example—it’s hard to conceive that an Ancient Greece world would work without any gods. Your main problem here is likely to be that the non-player players believe the labels and start acting like deities instead of programmers or whatever. A superior character doesn’t imply a superior human being.

There is also a danger that through their actions (or players’ beliefs of their actions), non-player players may inadvertently extend a virtual world’s fiction. If Thor shows up just as a character gets a lucky hit and kills a giant, that character may think Thor is responsible. Before you know it, web sites will be proclaiming that praying to Thor will help in battle, and unless this misconception is nipped in the bud it could become so widespread a belief that complaints from confused newbies occupy more community management time than the programmer time it would take to implement the idea.