How to be a battlefield deserter in a computer war-game: Total Refusal and their "digital disarmament movement"

There’s a huge constituency that regularly plays computer games (37 million in the UK in 2020). They’ve come into relief during the pandemic, with articles on how “online gaming has become a social lifeline”. Their influence on the wider culture and society is severely underestimated - how it is shaping our emotions, our sense of social bonds, our styles of action and agency?

Which is why the videos above and below are so fascinating - because they combined the need for critical discussion about the effects of video games, by means of the extraordinary visuals and interactions that the most advanced games themselves provide.

They’re made by the artist collective Total Refusal, led by Leonhard Müllner. The video above, How To Disappear, is a eerie and beautiful treatise on how difficult, indeed automatically lethal, it is to be a “deserter” in war games like Battlefield. And how computer games’ algorithms could be much more open to that kind of pacifist behaviour.

Müllner explains what Total Refusal are trying to do, in their “Digital Disarmament Movement”:

The vast majority of contemporary video games is characterized by combative gameplay. This seems especially remarkable now that video games have long arrived in the entertainment mainstream and have managed to drop the boy’s room stigmata.

With gaming becoming both commercially and culturally more and more relevant, 
the question arises how artists can modify and make use of this media for their own 
purposes.

In “Total Refusal”, artists Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf  aim to peacefully appropriate the existing mechanics of digital gaming media in order to find new use for their virtual combat zones. As such, “Total Refusal” is a pacifistic statement, realized in digital space.

More here. Below are a few more examples of their “peaceful appropriations” of the latest games: