“We want to hijack mass media in order to radicalize people politically. Videogames have an enormous potential to question ideology and they don’t fulfil this potential at all.”
– Austrian machinima collective
Total Refusal, on what drives their videogame appropriations. In the film
Hardly Working (2022), for example, they cast NPC workers in critique of contemporary labour. “Videogame narratives are very obedient to authority,” the collective says, “but there’s no reason that they have to be.” [quotes edited]
