Hardly Working

“Hardly Working” sheds a limelight on the very characters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player characters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper, and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labor routines and activity patterns, as well as bugs and malfunctions, paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.