Hardly Working sheds a limelight on the very char- acters that normally remain in the background of video games: NPCs. They are non-player char- acters that populate the digital world as extras to create the appearance of normality. A laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper, and a carpenter are observed with ethnographic precision. They are Sisyphus machines, whose labour routines, activ- ity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for working conditions of capitalism.