An NPC’s Guide to a TAMU football game
Congratulations. You have decided to attend a Texas A&M University football game.
You probably thought you were going to watch football. How presumptuous.
This isn’t a simple sporting event. It’s an eight-hour campus role-playing experience where you will be expected to know 47 traditions, 12 chants and why everyone is referring to the football team as “we.” The football is somewhere in there, too.
The experience begins several days before kickoff when you have to pull your ticket. Unlike our ancestors’ archaic methods, the process is now entirely online. You will attempt to form a group with your friends and then spend the next several hours wondering whether you actually got a ticket or if your friends accidentally formed a group without you.
Eventually, you will arrive at Kyle Field and attempt to find a seat. Your ticket will tell you where you’re supposed to be, but this is more of a suggestion than a guarantee. Someone will inevitably claim that the spot you’re standing in is their seat. You will both compare tickets. Neither of you will fully understand what’s happening. Meanwhile, several more people will attempt to squeeze into the row because they are all sitting together now. Eventually, you will find one human-sized portion of a seat and decide it’s close enough.
Before long, the Yells will begin. You’ll have actually learned these once during your New Student Conference and have been expected to remember them since. Nobody will teach them again. Nobody will review them. At some point the Aggie War Hymn will start playing. Everyone around you knows the words by heart. You, however, will mumble most of the words and hope that nobody calls you out.
Eventually the actual Football starts. You will spend the first few minutes trying to figure out what is happening. Someone near you will yell at the quarterback. Someone else will yell at the referee. You don’t know what happened. Neither does he. This will not stop him from explaining it to you.
Eventually, the game ends. This is when you will face the most difficult part of the entire experience: leaving. Tens of thousands of people will simultaneously attempt to exit Kyle Field through four doors that suddenly seem completely inadequate. You take six steps. Stop. Take three steps. Stop. Someone will stop directly in front of you and will not move. You will not know why.
Nobody knows why. You are simply part of the migration now.
Your legs hurt. Your voice is gone. Someone three floors above you bangs on the railings in a pattern. You have no idea what actually happened today.
But you eventually remembered most of the Yells, saw Rev on the big screen and learned how to get angry when the people around you got angry.
You have now completed the Aggie football experience.
Well, not until you experience an 8-4 season.
— The 12th NPC
12th NPC is the kind of character everybody and nobody recognizes– the extra in every video game with the same face as a dozen others. At any time of day, you can find 12th NPC either walking around town, sitting on a bench, or selling items, going day-by-day on a loop of pre-determined actions, only deviating when the main character happens to pass by. It’s actually this very forgettability that makes them so powerful. With the ability to slip into any room unnoticed, 12th NPC can linger on the edge of every conversation, and witness any and all private decisions without any consequences. There are on-going debates at The Mugdown on whether or not this writer even exists, or if it’s a shared mass delusion as articles written by 12th NPC just appear on the website sporadically, with no warning or pattern, just a presence that no one can confirm or deny.