# Does capitalism make ‘non-playable characters’ of us all? An uncanny exploration

Source: https://aeon.co/videos/does-capitalism-make-non-playable-characters-of-us-all-an-uncanny-exploration
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Does-capitalism-make-non-playable-characters-of-us-all-An-uncanny-exploration?index=0x65e3d1c16bd9d3d353fb5349694b2e702546ed228ff584893794954f55263bc9b96085ad
Submitted by misha on 2024-03-03 UTC, 4 upvotes, 3 comments

## Summary

The Austrian art collective Total Refusal makes short films using visuals taken entirely from popular video games, and its film Hardly Working focuses on non-playable characters in Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). The film centers on background figures such as carpenters, laundresses, stable boys and street sweepers, whose repetitive tasks barely leave a mark on the game world. Its narrator invites viewers to consider the "infinite loop of labour performance" under capitalism, and the mood shifts from dryly humorous to disquieting as it goes on.

## Article

‘There will never be enough nails in the wood.’

The ‘pseudo-Marxist’ Austrian art collective Total Refusal creates short films with visuals generated entirely from within popular video games. In Hardly Working, they train their focus on just a few of the hundreds of non-playable characters who populate the background in the western action-adventure game Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). These often-seen, rarely scrutinised carpenters, laundresses, stable boys and street sweepers occupy a circular, uncanny reality centred on the repetitive tasks that hardly make a mark on the world around them. At first dryly humorous, the proceedings grow disquieting as the narrator prods the viewer to consider the ‘infinite loop of labour performance’ of life within a capitalist system.

Directors: Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf

Website: Total Refusal

## Comments

**rvolz.eth**: Excellent idea! Giving NPCs more agency and making them thus more interesting has been the goal for many game designers and coders. AI and blockchain are regarded as tools that could help reaching this goal and could even promote the NPCs to agents (economic agency) who would work tirelessly to help their humans.

Whether the "‘infinite loop of labour performance’ of life within a capitalist system" will still exist, for humans, in post-labour scenarios remains to be seen. But intelligent agents could take a look at this video and get doubts about their exploitative owners.

**misha**: Yes, it’s a well made video and an interesting perspective. I think they should have hired Werner Herzog to do the voice-over ;)

**tim**: lol this is such a cool idea for a documentary!!!