Out of the loop
A community that helps people stay up to date with things going on.
Since this community has been pretty inactive I just gotta say, this is the perfect question for this place, imo. Ask more! I only knew about these weirdo NPCs from a random podcast that happened to mention it. Otherwise I would have never known about this dystopian cash disposal system.
In video games, NPC characters have pre-canned responses to stimulus. If you say something, they do a specific thing. If you walk past, they do a specific thing. They're like robots. They're programmed with a small set of responses.
On tiktok, these creators pretend they're NPCs with precanned responses. Give them an ice cream gift, they pretend to eat it. Give them a rose gift, they pretend to smell it. And those gifts make them money.
Why do people enjoy it? I have no idea. Some control kink? Some weird fetish? No clue.
To be fair, there's one guy on TikTok who does the NPC gimmick, but he's an actual blacksmith pretending to be a Skyrim blacksmith. He responds with Skyrim quotes and everything. That's moderately entertaining.