If Franz Kafka had lived to give notes on Playing Kafka, a new video game adaptation of his work, a big one might have been: where’s the sex? What this interactive version of The Trial has in branching narrative, it lacks in sexuality: one can imagine the author-cum-playtester apoplectic at the absence of sadomasochism and lust. Overall, the choices made in this literal and lightly interactive adaptation seem calibrated to what is appropriate to leave running on a museum iPad. Simple binary choices and touchscreen controls set the bar to entry low, and there is no imagery to scandalise a visiting classroom.
Playing Kafka, released just weeks before the centenary of Kafka’s death, is a collaboration between the Goethe-Institut and the developer Charles Games (a studio, not a person). It adapts Kafka’s unfinished and posthumously assembled novels The Trial and The Castle, along with a long, critical letter from Kafka to his father about their relationship.
