From the New York Times, a somewhat surreal short film using RDR2 NPCs!
In this short documentary, a laundress, a stablehand, a street sweeper and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are nonplayer characters, or NPCs, in the blockbuster Wild West-themed video game Red Dead Redemption 2, and many of them are trapped in work.
Here, we reflect on the question of work and what’s supposed to be normal. Despite the game’s turn-of-the-century setting, the labor routines, activity patterns — as well as bugs and malfunctions — paint a vivid analogy for how workers today toil under capitalism.
Can we, the nonplayer characters of a political economy that controls, exploits and alienates us, find a way to rebel against the absurdity of our own activities?