You might refer to your latest dull-eyed monosyllabic hinge date as an NPC, or enjoy Pinky Doll “Ice cream so good” streams, but right now we are actually talking about the original Non Playable Characters, whose sole purpose is to prop up the simulacrum of reality that the video game industry relies on to enhance the fantasy of their product. 

Winner of the 2023 European Film Award, Total Refusal’s Hardly Working is a meditation on the Non Playable characters that populate the 2018 Western game Red Dead Redemption 2. Here is a carpenter, a stablehand, a laundress and a streetsweeper. The sweeper sweeps but the sidewalk remains full of dust and dried mud. The stablehand pours water into a trough that never gets filled. With no possibility of deviating from their set routine, they remain stuck, their efforts are for naught. But while NPC may be an insult, Total Refusal suggests that it is in the moments of malfunction, or bugs, in the NPC’s monotonous gestures that an escape from the oppression of the contemporary work regime may be found. Do the NPC’s we deride dream of something other than labor? Do you?