Total Refusal Hardly Working

Hardly Working is one of the most striking essays by Total Refusal, a pseudo-Marxist media partisan group specializing in producing videos based on popular video games.

The video is based on the ultra-successful western game Red Dead Redemption 2, beloved by gamers for its dramatic story and charismatic characters. Total Refusal shifts the focus from the central characters to stats, so-called NPCs (non-playable characters) whose behavior is entirely determined by the software and is usually limited to simple functions. Their purpose is to create a background for the main character’s adventures. They work, loiter, have fun or move from place to place to make the game world seem realistic.

The researchers at Total Refusal break the game’s routine slightly by contemplating these background characters for longer than they should, suggesting that viewers spend a few minutes of real time with them rather than just a few seconds. And while RDR2 is renowned for its attention to detail and elaborate life simulation, this tiny shift in focus is enough to reveal the tragicomic absurdity of the lives of digital laborers. The way they perform a limited set of actions in a circle, the way they hammer nails into the same board with studied enthusiasm, can be viewed both as a Kafkaesque comedy and as a mirror of the modern digital society, whose inhabitants also spend their days in endless clicking on links and browser tabs, thus ensuring someone’s profit. Which provokes the inevitable question: who is an NPC in the real world?

In recent years, this convergence of video essayism and game design has become increasingly visible and is proceeding on several fronts. Firstly, a number of artists have emerged who create machinima, original works directed with the help of video game graphics engines. Secondly, media scholars and critics have begun to use game logic to illustrate their theses and to express and play out their key concepts and ideas through gameplay. And thirdly, the use of essayistic commentary can increasingly be found in the works of game designers themselves, for example, the title of the collection of games by the Spanish studio Deconstructeam, Essays on Empathy, is typical.