The Generalist Relaunched as The Player Character

A word of explanation about the new Substack title

Hey Everyone,

Welcome to the The Player Character, my relaunched Substack. I started publishing The Generalist as a means to restart my writing practice, with the idea that it was a good title to describe a blog by someone with many different interests publishing about many different things. But there’s already a The Generalist Substack, with over 100,000 subscribers, and besides, I wanted to put more energy into a topic dearer to my heart: the issue of climate change, and some ideas I have for how to change our priorities to make more progress on it.

So why title it The Player Character of all things? I go into depth about this in my new About page, but basically, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Gen Z notion of the NPC, or non-player character. In role-playing and video games, an NPC is a fictional character controlled by a gamemaster or the AI, that does very scripted and predictable things. Gen Z has expanded this to refer to people who act the same way in order to conform to the expectations of whatever tribe they happen to belong to. Gurwinder has a pretty great post about different types of NPCs.

For about eight years, I was a bit of an NPC myself. My day job consisted of literally bullshitting all day. I would find myself on Zoom calls, using marketing jargon and dropping acronyms like a pro, while small slices of my soul died. I was doing what the corporate world expected me to do, subsuming my personality and belief systems for an admittedly large paycheck, at the cost of being an actual player. Antonio Melonio has a great piece about the experience, should you be interested in both the pain and the privilege of corporate marketing jobs at tech firms.

I’m out now, though, and excited that I can play an independent hero, instead of a corporate tool…all of which leads me to the second reason I’m calling my Substack, The Player Character.

Because it’s being written by one.

Let me explain.

I’ve been working on a game concept called 10 for Tomorrow, in which players create a character, and then go out into the world and perform real-life climate actions as that character. The idea being that climate action sometimes feels futile, and by being part of a gaming group, and going on quests, and getting experience points, and killing monsters, we had some extrinsic motivation to doing climate work. I based the concept on many things—my own constant failures at climate activism, RPGs, LARPs, and even sports psychology.

CF1, the in-game character I created for myself for 10 for Tomorrow, is now the author of my Substack. He’s braver than I am, more focused on climate action, more of an optimist, and more willing to say things that I might not say for fear of hurting people’s feelings. He’s also, well, fictional, which means, theoretically, he can’t be jailed by fascists for mouthing off.

So what is CF1 going to write about, you may ask? Well, on Tuesdays, he’s going to talk about the work he’s doing on his card-based system that gamifies climate action, while on Thursdays, he plans to write about the forces that are making climate action difficult. And in between, he might let me get in a word or two.

Either way, I hope you come along for the ride. If nothing else, this will be different from everything being generated by the NPCs of the world.