High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A non-player character (NPC), sometimes known as a non-person character or non-playable character, in a game is any fictional character not controlled by a player. In electronic games, this usually means a character controlled by the computer through artificial intelligence. In traditional tabletop role-playing games, the term applies to characters controlled by the gamemaster. (Though they are a participant in the game, a gamemaster is usually not referred to by the technical term "player".)