It’s not what you do for your work but the way you play that discloses who you are. Total Refusal is an Austrian based pacifist art collective that infiltrates popular video games to analyze the nonessential marginalia that exist outside of the intended game routes. In Operation Jane Walk, player avatars take viewers on a digital walk around the post-apocalyptic Manhattan of Tom Clancy’s The Division. Jane Walks are neighborhood walking tours led by community members and named after urban activist Jane Jacobs, who correctly predicted that an over-dependence on cars would fray the social fabric of American cities. In Hardly Working, we are invited to muse on how the faulty mechanics of the NPC’s in Red Dead Redemption 2 both reveal and challenge the paradigms of capitalist society. Finally, in How to Disappear, a Battlefield gaming session is turned against itself––watch to find out how.
We are inside Tom Clancy’s The Division multiplayer game. Follow us on an architecture tour that uncovers the hypocrisies behind the making of the New York landscape.
