
Gamifying Franz Kafka - mitchbob
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/reviews/kafka-video-game-metamorphosis/
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xamuel
Video game advertisement disguised as hacker news post.

>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.

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seanhunter
> Would it even be possible to make a truly Kafkaesque game?

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

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xamuel
Now that I think about it, one Kafka environment which does indeed fit the
Dwarf Fortress description really well would be the hotel in "Amerika",
especially when Karl works as an elevator attendant there. It's exactly the
sort of thing you'd expect to happen to an elevator attendant in DF (maybe
except for the lack of disastrous magma leakage or things like that).

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Loughla
I can't put my finger on it, but this really upsets me for some reason. I
think, maybe, it's because any game that purports to be Kafkaesque should be
unwinnable?

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nihil75
I'll just put a link to this 1996 game - Bad Mojo

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/255960/Bad_Mojo_Redux/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/255960/Bad_Mojo_Redux/)

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jccalhoun
It sounds like they only took the premise of The Metamorphosis and didn't try
to apply the themes to the gameplay.

