– Austrian collective Total Refusal play with sports video games to uncover social tensions in their latest machinima short animation
Does a video game stop when we put down the controller? Total Refusal’s latest animation, screened at Ljubljana’s Animateka, begins at the uncanny moment when the player’s controlling will leaves the game behind. A one-man soccer team cannot find its opponent in the World Cup finals; a golfer is unable to take his shot; a rally-driver deliberately leaves the track during a test run.
Upcycling footage from FIFA 23, PGA Tour 2K21 and DiRT Rally 2.0, the self-defined “pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla” group (here the filmmakers are Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim and Jona Kleinlein) manipulates escapist stress-relief games to expose collective social anxieties. While continuously reinventing the rules by denying the driving principle of victory, World at Stake’s most piercing question remains the false engagement of spectatorship.
“You are alone, but you are free”, the commentator encourages the virtual player stepping onto the stadium field. He truly is alone – unless we count his clone-like multiples. He is also free, apart from infinite eyes watching his every move. By accentuating out-of-control glitches, World at Stake cleverly uses unsettling humour to highlight the eerie aspects of these otherwise hyperrealistic universes. Perhaps the most disturbing element is that, between pre-programmed reactions and self-generated imagery, hesitation remains the sole human trait.
The creators walk a fine line, shifting the game’s malfunctions from amusing surrealism to alarming reality. Surrounded by a crowd unable to act, indifferent to the absurdities in front of them, the film’s scenes leave viewers with a false sense of contribution. In this social passivity, political powerlessness is felt most acutely when catastrophe looms. Deprived of the ability to reflect, spectators remain doomed to watch – even when circumstances make that nearly impossible and the playing field itself seems to slowly disappear.
The continuous, calm voiceover of World at Stake’s commentator reinforces the illusion that, despite the anomalies, everything is under control – when in fact it is not. Without drawing sweeping conclusions, the twenty-minute animation succeeds in putting pressure on its audience. One might argue that in such video games, nothing is truly at stake. But Flock, Haim and Kleinlein convincingly demonstrate that their choice of title is fully justified.
