Background, Action!
Film Extras and Simulated Crowds[This essay is grounded in my work with out-of-bounds spaces in video games and my experience working as a film extra across multiple productions.] Page with related video work is here.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world role-playing game set in the corporate megacity of a near-future dystopia. It promised a living world with complex NPC routines and reactive crowds. However, the game launched in a visibly compromised state. The city arrived near-empty, its crowd behaviour glitchy and minimal. Subsequent patches rebuilt much of what was promised, but the gap between the density the marketing sold and the density the engine could sustain persists. Players still mod the game to increase it[1] or measure its NPC behaviour against competitors[2]. Background NPCs in open-world video games are frequently compared to film extras because each supplies its medium’s version of crowd density. At that point, world-building becomes labour management, with bodies counted and arranged so that emptiness can pass as life.
Examining these bodies requires a way of seeing past the game's surface. Cyberpunk 2077's photo mode includes a collision-off feature, a boundary-breaking technique built in for better in-game photography. It allows the camera to pass through walls and floors, and incidentally to examine those figures up close. The central fiction concerns a protagonist whose body is failing from within while glitching toward digital erasure. The shipped game suffered a structural version of the same condition, a world that broke under the weight of its promises. Its repair produced a tool that exceeds its purpose: an aesthetic feature that becomes a method for reading infrastructure it was not meant to make legible.
Beyond the boundaries of the rendered Night City, pedestrians and vehicles continue moving within a digital void. Deprived of architectural context and narrative purpose, their activity appears as pure kinetic filler. They circulate beyond the urban world they are meant to simulate as a reserve supply of bodies kept ready to fill the visible streets when required. These figures are a fundamentally different class of entity from named NPCs. They are interchangeable crowd agents at the lowest tier of the LOD (Level of Detail) chain[3], sometimes three or four base meshes with texture swaps. They have no face detail (because no camera is supposed to see them), no pathfinding agency, and a single looping animation state: walk. Their spawn/despawn radius slightly exceeds the visible radius, so that when the player turns, the population is already there, not popping in. The breach makes visible a labouring mass just below the threshold of representation, cycling endlessly for nobody.
Figure 1. LOD crowd and traffic figures. Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red). Photograph by Natalie Maximova, 2026.
The out-of-bounds exploration community sustains a rich vernacular culture, in which practitioners deliberately cross game boundaries to uncover hidden geometry and unfinished assets embedded in inaccessible spaces. Yet within this otherwise exhaustive informal archive, circulating widely across YouTube, Reddit, and similar platforms, the ambient algorithmic crowd figure remains conspicuously unremarked. It is too generic and too obviously functional to register as discovery, even when directly encountered (except in moments of glitch or breakdown). A comparable erasure marks the vernacular record of film extras[4], whose labour circulates largely in anonymity, as public disclosure risks immediate replacement and exclusion from the industry.
My own experience of working as a film extra revealed a paradox at the centre of background performance. One is required to be present without appearing as an individual. The extra's labour is often invisible in the finished film, yet essential to the construction of a believable social world. Marx called this abstract labour, a reduction in which the worker's particular gestures matter less than their conversion into a general input within production.[5] The LOD figure carries the same condition into algorithmic form, where particularity is eliminated by design rather than suppressed through economic pressure.
The passerby loop is where the background crowd and the digital crowd most clearly converge. Their entire function is to move through the frame. The extra follows marks in the same way that the NPC loops between waypoints. When Cyberpunk 2077's photo mode stops time, most of the game's systems suspend with it, but the LOD human figures don't. They reduce to their minimum state, walking on the spot, untouched by the pause command. Once an extra is called from holding and positioned, the surface must be maintained even between takes, and waiting has to look like purpose.
Continuous motion comes with another demand. Extras are evaluated for how successfully they suppress any trace of individuality, and can be easily replaced by anyone matching the parameters. These are never merely numerical. Casting calls sort background bodies by age, gender, race, class, and period plausibility among other variables. The costume department dresses a hundred extras to look near-identical, so none of them draws the eye, just as crowd systems distribute limited variation through preselected meshes and texture swaps. In both registers, Marx's reserve army logic[6] governs as a surplus population held at minimum cost so that density can be produced on demand, whether through the agency contracts and holding areas of the film set or the spawn parameters and instance pools of the engine.
The instancing also extends to social relations. Within the hierarchy of the set, the extra does not exist to the principal actors, who move through the crowd as if through human props. Any unscripted interaction with the main cast risks immediate erasure, whether fired on set or banned from future productions. The player occupies the same protected position. Even when the out-of-bounds camera makes the digital crowd visible, their behaviour does not change in response to being seen. They were built for a world organised around a different gaze, positioned elsewhere. The extra, however, must perform whether or not the camera is pointing at them, without any guarantee of capture. Benjamin observed that the film actor performs not for a live audience but for an apparatus (a camera, an edit, or a future viewer), severing performance from presence.[7] The extra’s condition sharpens this separation, since they perform for an apparatus that may not even be pointing at them, in takes that might never be used, or for no viewer at all. The LOD figure operates as apparatus-output, with no subject left to alienate.
On set, the background crowd often mimes actions such as dancing in a nightclub, conversing over dinner or cheering in a fight scene while pounding fists just above the table. The goal is to create a realistic atmosphere without making any noise that would interfere with dialogue recorded by the main actors. The words used to imitate conversation are simply phoneme patterns that form legible mouth shapes rather than speech: rhubarb, watermelon, babbling bananas, peas and carrots. For Agamben, gesture is action without end, the body exhibiting itself as pure mediation. Mime filler becomes gesture, reducing communication to its empty form for an apparatus that cannot tell the difference.[8] Where the LOD figure produces the sign of life automatically, with nothing alive behind it, the extra must build the same effect through excessive labour while hiding the effort it takes.
One of the most unsettling experiences on set is photogrammetric scanning. On every large production I worked on, extras were required to submit their bodies to full three-dimensional capture for a minimum flat fee, signing over usage rights to their likeness under a contract whose length and complexity made meaningful informed consent effectively impossible.[9] Unlike traditional background performance, scanning extracts bodily form itself, not merely labour time. It converts the body into a reusable asset that can be deployed indefinitely, without the original person being present at all. Living labour is transformed into dead labour: a crystallised form that continues to generate value while the worker is absent. Once scanned, the body becomes structurally indistinguishable from an NPC asset, governed by the requirements of the rendering system.
The LOD figure at the edge of the game world is not necessarily produced from such a scan, but it makes visible the endpoint toward which the pipeline tends. Marx argues that the worker owns nothing but their capacity to work, which they sell as labour-power. The extra sells something even more specific: their body as a set-dressing element. Here, the means of production is the body itself — hired, positioned, dressed, and rendered at the required resolution, but never owned. The NPC has no such problem. Its body is fully alienable, owned by the studio, instanced and deleted whenever needed. The extra is the imperfect version, a body that inconveniently comes with a person attached.
After the scan, the relation shifts from directors, crews, and rooms of hired extras to rendering systems and digital assets. The crowd becomes less a representation of collective life than an infrastructural component of image production, a hierarchy where the lowest tier supports everything above it. This abstracts labour and time along with it. The extra's body accumulates fatigue across hours of the same action, yet production counts only the day rate and discards the rest. The LOD figure has only the loop, with no body that tires and no time that counts as labour.
Automation does more than replace human workers with efficient systems. It changes what human presence is worth in image production. The extra's body remains useful precisely where the algorithm cannot yet replace it convincingly: in close-ups or in complex interactions. But the margin is narrowing, and the photogrammetry pipeline ensures that even where the living body is still required, it has already been scanned and made available as dead labour for a future in which it is no longer needed. Unlike the NPC, the extra still suffers fatigue, replaceability, the labour of miming, and the indignity of being scanned. For the player, this infrastructure appears as generosity, offering richer environments and more convincing worlds. But the labour that sustains the illusion has no share in what it produces.
The breach alters the figure's visibility, but not its condition. Somewhere on a server, a mesh built from a body that went home continues to move through a city it was never meant to inhabit as itself. These figures have no cultural afterlife in the conventional sense. They are not archived or credited; they despawn when the player moves on. Nothing accumulates. Yet the worlds they maintain do have an afterlife as the impression of life, experienced in every scene watched and every city navigated. The visible world is built from the labour of figures it cannot afford to see. What vanishes is not the crowd, but the obligation to treat it as one.
NOTES
[1] Cyberpunk 2077 population density mod (Superpopulation / Crowds & Traffic), Nexus Mods, [https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/7905]. Accessed April 17, 2026.
[2] Cyberpunk 2077 vs. GTA V NPC comparison, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjntgOWYb1M]. Accessed April 17, 2026.
[3] LOD, or Level of Detail, refers to a
rendering technique in which detailed models are replaced by simpler versions
as distance from the camera increases, preserving the impression of visual
density while reducing computational cost.
[4] The industry has largely replaced 'extra'
with 'supporting artist' (SA), a rebranding that softens the expendability the older term makes explicit. This essay retains 'extra' because its bluntness
better describes the structural condition under analysis.
[5] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990 [1867]), Part One,
Chapter 1, Section 2, "The Dual Character of the Labour Embodied in
Commodities," pp. 131–137.
[6] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990 [1867]), Part
Seven, Chapter 25, Section 3, "The Progressive Production of a Relative
Surplus Population or Industrial Reserve Army," pp. 781–794.
[7] Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (second version), trans.
Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume
3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 2002 [1935]), pp. 101–133.
[8] Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on
Gesture," in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti
and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000 [1996]),
pp. 49–60.
[9] The conditions described here, particularly
the capture and reuse of performers' likenesses, were among the central issues
in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, which secured new contractual protections around
digital replicas. The fact that these protections had to be fought
for confirms the structural vulnerability this essay describes.The UK position remains less settled; performers often rely on individual contracts, making consent and future reuse heavily dependent on the release signed at the point of work.
2026