EMAP-short film project Hardly Working (2021-22) by the artist, researcher and filmmaker collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal won the Best Direction Award and the Junior Jury Award at Locarno Filmfestival 2022.

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 labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.