Gamifying Franz Kafka
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
>As much as I enjoyed my time with “Metamorphosis,” I should note that its stiff character animations make the human characters look like eerie-looking puppets.
The only thing remotely Kafkaesque about the whole game, it sounds like.
Would it even be possible to make a truly Kafkaesque game? The primary elements of Kafka are all directly opposed to an enjoyable experience, if done right. The only way I think you could do it would be to focus on some minor quirk in Kafka's writings which doesn't directly lead to soul-sucking anguish. I think the best such quirk would be the tendency for rooms to be dominated by beds. So maybe make it a game like Katamari Damacy except instead of a katamari ball, your character is bed-stricken and is moving the bed around by wildly jerking their body, and their bed consumes things and grows like a katamari ball, eventually dominating the whole room, after which point the character's jerking movements cause the whole room to move around, to suck up things from the surrounding town and allow the room to grow bigger while the bed inside it also grows too. Until the character is barely even visible on their giant overgrown bed, which they are still somehow causing to move around with difficult jerky motions.
Isn't that true for any horror game, though? And yet people play them.
And the Stanley Parable has some similar feelings of helplessness, buried under the humor.
But I can't think of any games that have nailed the feeling - though I'm sure there are some indie art games that get close.
Dwarf fortress.
1. Everything to do with the user experience, but if you want specific examples, minecarts, "uniforms", task priorities in the main ui without mods
2. How you actually get to the point where you play the game is Kafkaesque in and of itself (eg the whole starter pack thing)
3. The mind-boggling complexity of everything
4. How banal the game seems much of the time if things are going well
5. How utterly benign things can lead to utter degredation and destruction. (Case in point, I had a happy fortress, one of my guys went out fishing, got caught in the rain, started a murderous rampage that ended up with half the fortress killing each other. During the fight one of my female dwarves put her baby down somewhere, couldn't find it and even though she survived the fight, went into a spiral of despair from which she never recovered)
6. There is no such thing as success. All games end in failure