Teen Dox

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. Usually these digital extras play no major role in the story of the game, but in this film a laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper and a carpenter are the four main characters. With ethnographic precision, the film observes their daily work: a rhythm composed of loops that makes them work daily and tirelessly. Their work neither results in a product, nor does it change anything about their status quo. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.