High Value Females, NPCs, and Other Problematic Ways We Value Human Lives
Last week a friend used the phrase “high value female” in conversation. I hated it immediately, before I could explain why.
A few days later my son called someone an NPC.
That was two phrases in one week, from two different people. I have not been able to stop thinking about the pair.
What both terms do
“High value female” sorts people on a scale. Sexual desirability, utility, worth as a partner, an asset. It imports market logic into the description of a person and pretends that is just honest talk.
My son is reading The Handmaid’s Tale for school right now. The novel classifies women by function: Handmaid, Wife, Martha, Unwoman. “High value female” uses the same logic with better clothes and fewer categories.
Some people reach for “high value male” and assume the symmetry cleans it up. It does not. The logic of ranking a person by income, status, fitness, and dominance is the problem, not the gender of the person being ranked. Using the phrase for men spreads the commodifying frame rather than neutralizing it.
NPC does something different. It does not rank, it erases. The people around you are background characters in your game, not protagonists of their own lives. The term comes from video games, where non-player characters exist to give quests, sell potions, or stand in the way of the hero.
The mechanics differ. The move is the same. Both decide, quickly and cheaply, who counts.
My trade is valuation
Here is the uncomfortable part for an evaluator, an economist, or a sociologist. These careers all ascribe value to human lives, though in different ways, with different assumptions, and for different reasons.
Evaluation has the word value in it. Many of us in the field are uncomfortable with the word. The idea is that we are assigning worth to programs, interventions, outcomes, and sometimes to lives. That is the work I trained in.
I admit I am in the camp that thinks it may be better to find a different descriptor for what we actually do, because ultimately the point is improvement. We use the tools of assigning numbers in service of making something better than it was.
I have written reports that reduced human experiences to a rate, a number, a ratio, a score. I have done it carefully. I have done it with caveats and footnotes. I have still done it.
The phrases that made me flinch this week are crude versions of frameworks I use professionally, only with the assumptions and calculations obscured. The vocabulary is cruder. The logic is not alien.
How we value lives, officially
We value human lives in more ways than most people realize, and the ways contradict each other. Ultimately all of these methods exist to help us make choices about finite resources.
Statistical value of a life estimates what society will pay to reduce the risk of a death, and regulators use the number to justify safety rules and environmental protections. A dollar figure stands in for a person. The method sounds cold until you realize the alternative is not valuing the life at all, which is what the EPA did this spring when it set the value to zero in pollution rulemaking. The method also has a quieter problem. Willingness to pay correlates with income, so the math can encode, without saying so, that richer lives are more worth protecting than poorer ones.
QALYs and DALYs adjust years of life by quality or disability, which lets analysts compare one health intervention against another. The math is useful, though it is an abstraction, of course. The premise that a year can be weighted and summed across people is a premise, not a fact. Disability-rights scholars have argued for decades that these metrics can systematically undervalue lives with disabilities, because the weighting often reflects how non-disabled people imagine disability feels rather than what disabled people actually report. Early DALY calculations went further and weighted working-age years more heavily than childhood or old age. That assumption has been softened, but the instinct behind it, that productive years count for more, never fully left.
Human capital approaches value a life by projected future earnings. They are used in wrongful-death lawsuits, insurance settlements, and cost-benefit analyses of premature mortality. They consistently rank unpaid caregivers, retirees, and disabled people as worth less. Marilyn Waring dismantled the underlying logic in If Women Counted decades ago, showing how national accounting treats oil spills and wars as contributions to growth while rendering the labor that sustains everyday life invisible. We still have not fixed it.
Rights frameworks reject ranking altogether and assert equal, inherent worth. They are harder to operationalize, and no less real for that.
Indigenous relational ontologies locate personhood in kinship and reciprocity rather than in individual utility. Nicole Bowman and others have been clear that this is a methodology, not a metaphor, and it produces different questions, different data, and different ideas of what a good outcome looks like.
Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness framework decenters GDP and measures psychological well-being, community vitality, ecological health, and cultural continuity across nine domains. Countries that copy the headline miss the philosophy underneath it.
Rosenberg and Prilleltensky’s work on mattering asks a different question entirely. Does a person feel they are significant to others, and are they treated as significant in return? Mattering is not a score. It is a condition.
Each of these is a framework. Each is a decision about what counts. None is neutral.
The crude terms come from somewhere
“High value female” sits downstream of human capital logic and the “sexual market value” frame that moved from pickup-artist forums into the wider manosphere. That frame ranks women by youth, appearance, and perceived loyalty, and ranks men by status, income, and dominance. It imports market language into mate selection without embarrassment.
“Sexual market value” is, underneath, a back-of-the-envelope human capital calculation for the dating market. You could formalize it the way economists formalized wrongful-death valuations. Survey a sample of single people, ask them to weight the attributes they look for in a partner, aggregate the responses, and produce a score for any given person. That exercise sounds crass. It is also roughly what dating apps already run. Algorithms assign desirability scores to users based on who swipes on whom, and match accordingly. “High value female” is the vernacular translation of a calculation the apps perform silently on everyone who signs up.
NPC sits downstream of game design and a gamer worldview, with a dose of online contempt for people perceived as following scripts rather than thinking.
Neither term invented its underlying logic. Each inherited an older frame and pushed it one honest step further.
What the crude terms do differently is drop the veil. The respectable frames keep their ranking logic politely abstracted. “Customer lifetime value” does the same sorting work as “high value female,” only inside a spreadsheet, with better grammar and a quarterly review. A recommendation algorithm treats most users the way NPC treats most people, only with better manners. The crude words say the quiet part. The respectable frames murmur it.
That is what made me flinch. The teenager is naming, a little too accurately, what the systems around him already do. He does not realize he has done this.
The systems are already sorting
This is not a fringe vocabulary describing a fringe practice. Algorithms rank people by predicted value at scale every day. A job applicant is scored and filtered before a human sees the file. A patient is flagged for adherence risk, a driver for fraud risk, a user for engagement potential. Credit models decide who gets a loan and at what rate. Customer lifetime value decides who gets the support line that actually picks up. Content moderation queues and targeted advertising both run on inferred worth to someone.
The infrastructure for sorting humans by estimated value is built, deployed, and mostly invisible to the people being sorted. The crude words are the surface version of a practice that has become much more sophisticated in polite company. When my son calls someone an NPC, he is not describing a novel move. He is describing, in plain English, what the systems around him do constantly, more thoroughly and less visibly.
If the vocabulary feels new and ugly, the logic it names is older and better dressed.
Valuable to whom, for what purpose
In this work I return to one question: valuable to whom, and for what purpose? The question does not dissolve the problem. It names it. Every valuation has a perspective baked in, and pretending otherwise is how we got here.
Some answers do not resolve to a score. Whether a person matters, whether a child is treated as real, whether a woman is seen as a whole person rather than ranked on a scale: these are not measurement problems. They are moral stances that measurement can serve or distort, but cannot replace.
What I did not say well
I do not know that I corrected my son well. I am a slow processor, and I often need to wait for my thoughts and feelings about a conversation to emerge. I said something about the people he was calling NPCs being as real as he is, as fully occupied with their own lives as he is with his. He nodded the way teenagers nod. It may or may not have landed.
I do not know that I told my friend anything useful either. I made a face. I made a small comment about how I do not love that term. I changed the subject. Neither of us came out of it thinking harder.
That is partly why I am writing this. The frameworks I flinched at this week are not fringe. They are the vernacular version of infrastructure I participate in. Calling the vocabulary ugly is easy. Interrupting the logic upstream is the work.
Anthralytic is a strategy and evaluation studio helping mission-driven organizations clarify and amplify their impact. We work on the question of what counts, and for whom, without pretending the answer is obvious.
