Total Refusal’s masterful video essay Hardly Working is now accessible on demand on the Locarno Film Festival’s website.
This monumental game video essay spotlights digital gaming’s unsung background performers — the rote routines of NPCs (non-player characters). Populating worlds solely to represent banality and engage in trivial pursuits, this supporting cast of a laundress, stable boy, street sweeper and carpenter now occupy center stage. Captured through an ethnographic lens, their repetitive labor cycles, programmed patterns, and periodic bugs form a potent analog to modern working life under capitalism – an endless hamster wheel of menial, thankless tasks. Like Sisyphus sentenced to perpetually roll his boulder in futility, these NPCs epitomize the toil intrinsic to system dynamics tilted starkly against them by coded design. Their endless drudgery upholds the stage so that gamers can play.
In June 2023, the machinima has been featured on the New York Times as well in their “Op-Docs” section.
Hardly Working has been screened at the 2023 Milan Machinima Festival.
The artist, researcher and filmmaker collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal appropriates contemporary video games and writes about games and politics. They upcycle the resources of mainstream video games, creating political narrations in the form of videos, interventions, live performances, lectures and workshops. Since its foundation in 2018, their work has been awarded with more than 50 awards and honorary mentions - like the European Film Award or the Best Short Direction Award at the Locarno Film Festival. The current members of Total Refusal are:Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner & Michael Stumpf
