The Kafkaesque Beginner's Guide
*Huge spoilers for Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide (2015) and also a lot of Kafka stories (but, come on, it's been like a hundred years, you've had time to read those)*
As several other commenters have noted, the shape of The Beginner's Guide maps well to the biographical details of Franz Kafka's life, death, and afterlife. Kafka, born Jewish in Prague in 1883, spent his working years as a law clerk with a writing habit. During his lifetime, he published very little of what we now know to be his output ("Metamorphosis" was the rather rare exception, published in 1915). As he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1923, he begged his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn his remaining work after his death. Brod promised, then promptly published The Trial in 1925, soon followed by The Castle, Amerika, and his entire swath of short stories. This has generally been considered a good move.
In Davey Wreden's game, the narrator introduces himself as "Davey Wreden" and explains that the following piece is an exploration of all the games made by his friend, Coda. Davey says that Coda has incomprehensibly stopped making games (seemingly out of depression), and the popularity of this collection could perhaps draw him out of self-imposed retirement. Codas games are complex, abstract, and sometimes unplayable. Wreden's voiceover maintains a friendly narration throughout—respectfully introducing the mini-games, explaining what they mean, and tinkering with the code sometimes if Coda has produced something unplayable or just unpalatable (in one game, for example, the player is locked in a jail cell which, Wreden says, originally stayed locked for an hour. But he kindly opens it for us immediately, with a wink and a nod).
As the games get weirder and sadder, Wreden starts to worry audibly about his friend. Coda doesn't seem to be enjoying himself anymore and seems to be losing all sense of human connection. This is why, Wreden says, he sent out the games to some designer colleagues, to give Coda a bit of feedback and reassurance.
But Coda then sends Davey one final, unplayable game that ends with a short text on a wall: "Dear Davey, Thank you for your interest in my games. I need to ask you not to speak to me anymore." And on another wall: "Would you stop taking my games and showing them to people against my wishes? Giving them something that is not yours to give? Violating the one boundary that keeps me safe?" And another: "Would you stop changing my games? Stop adding lamposts to them?" In other words, stop giving them endings, breakpoints, moments of (apparently false) closure. The lamposts throughout the game have been one of our few constants, and apparently they were all added by Davey.
The player realizes at this point, to their horror, that they have been complicit in playing Coda's games against their creator's will. Led along by Davey's charming voiceover, the player feels retroactively a little terrible that they enjoyed something not just non-consensually, but something originally complex and odd that has been packaged for easy consumption. Like a truly strange culinary experiment domesticated into a nice burger and fries.
So this resonance with Kafka exists not just on the biographical level, with Wreden playing Brod and Coda playing Kafka. In the introduction to Deleuze & Guattari's Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Réda Bensmaïa notes that critics from Walter Benjamin onward recognize how "Kafka's work does not lend itself to domestication." Not that a critic can't analyze Kafka; lord knows people do. But attempts to explain his work through mythology, or Freud, or any clear and simple heuristic, fundamentally misunderstand that a clear explanation is anathema to the work. Arguably, this is true for a lot of great artists, but it's particularly true for Kafka.
Knowing things is much more comfortable than not knowing things. Being able to say "Ah yes, "Metamorphosis," what a great story about being Jewish in Prague in 1915" takes that utterly disturbing story and tames it nicely. Of course, "Metamorphosis" *is* kindof about that, and also kindof about families and humans and food and animality and capitalism, and it's also about delivering an uncanny, surreal, resonant confusion that the reader doesn't really know what to do with.
Coda's games are like that too, but ludologically. If a game trapped you in a jail cell for an hour, it might be hard to know what to make of that, or you might have some theories, but either way, it would be damn uncomfortable. Wreden's narrator softens that experience into something commercial, consumable, and literally playable (some of the mini-games are actually impossible, like the penultimate chapter ("The Tower") in which Wreden constructs a bridge over an invisible electric maze). Unlike a game like The Franz Kafka Videogame, The Beginner's Guide gamifies Kafka at the core, by offering total unplayability and incomprehensibility and then poking at our urge to make it playable and comprehensible.
The Beginner's Guide also does make a lot of overt or implicit references to Kafka characters and stories. The "Theater" and "Lecture" chapters both have the feel of "A Report to the Academy," in which an ape produces a speech to a group of learned gentlemen about how his education has 'civilized' him; "Lecture" features a professor-type uttering a lot of motivational platitudes, but when the camera pans to their perspective, we see that the back of the lecture hall actually contains a vast, eye-of-sauron, gaping-maw-of-the-universe type of view.
The short, abstract nature of certain mini-games (like "Entering" and "Exiting") reminded me of parables like "Kleine Fabel" or "Gib's Auf." Coda's focus throughout on mazes, prisons, performance anxiety, unsettlingly simple puzzles, and the combo of amorphous threat+pressure to complete a task—these themes felt like callbacks to The Trial, "A Hunger Artist," "The Burrow," and The Castle. In one chapter, you're stuck in a recurring disaster in which a massive door flies towards your spaceship and destroys it over and over, until you find the cube-headed character Truth and admit that you're entirely out of ideas.
Compare this with Kafka's journal from 1915, which I'm now going to quote at length (partly because I find it super reassuring and relatable. Remember this man literally published "Metamorphosis" the same year he wrote this):
1915
* 7 February. Complete standstill. Unending torments. At a certain point in self-knowledge, when other circumstances favouring self-security are present, it will invariable follow that you find yourself execrable.
* 22 February. Incapable in every respect, and completely so.
* 11 March. How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless. Occasionally I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me
* 3 May. Completely indifferent and apathetic. A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there. Nothing, nothing….A letter to F., all wrong, impossible to mail it. What is there to tie me to a past or a future? The present is a phantom state for me; I don’t sit at the table but hover round it. Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom, merely emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.
*7 October. Insoluble problem: Am I broken? Am I in decline? Almost all the signs speak for it (coldness, apathy, state of my nerves, distractedness, incompetence on the job, headaches, insomnia); almost nothing but hope speaks against it.
*19 November. Days passed in futility, powers wasting away in waiting, and, in spite of all this idleness, throbbing, gnawing pains in my head."
To be honest, Coda's work actually feels a lot healthier than Kafka's, perhaps because of the extra century Coda has on him. Where Kafka saw his writing as a failure, Coda sees it simply as non-commercial and recognizes that he's doing it for himself. His games please him. They don't need to please anyone else.
In chapter 4, there's a warm-colored room (which, in Coda's original, is impossible to reach) filled with one-sentence, kafkaesque game ideas. Here are a few, along with the Kafka piece I'd pair them with:
- A game where you collect items, except the game automatically quits when you collect them all. (Das Schloss)
- You play as a loud bodiless sound walking around confusing people. (Die Verwandlung)
- You run a shop inside your body, selling your organs strategically to make the most money before you die. (Ein Hungerkünstler)
- You start in a small room, until you realize you can just walk through the walls. (Kleine Fabel)
All of them feel like they could fit into the Kafka canon, even if they don't resonate with a particular work (also, I haven't read all of Kafka; for all I know, they all do connect with some piece or another).
But the most striking connection I found was in chapter 15, "Machine," which felt like an amalgamation of "A Hunger Artist," "In the Penal Colony," and "Before the Law," with a bunch of Dostoevskian "Grand Inquisitor" mixed in for good measure. The chapter begins in the dark, as the player walks up to a door containing the same simple puzzle they've solved several times before. A guard stands outside. It's very "Before the Law," the story told to Joseph K. near the end of The Trial, in which a man seeks The Law but waits outside the guarded door his entire life until, on his deathbed, the guard informs him that this door was for him and him alone.
(screenshot from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0KYfZkOe98, where you can watch the whole level if you want)
This guard, however, lets you in. They have been expecting you and inform you "We've captured the machine. It's waiting for you now. You can begin the interrogation whenever you like." Also, the guard tells you, the machine calls itself Coda. We've been hearing about this machine for several chapters; it has been named the source of Coda's inspiration, now like a well gone dry. The player opens the door, traverses a gauntlet of reporters asking questions, and reaches a dark room containing only the machine. The player than accuses the machine: "You stopped. You stopped feeding us." After a brief announcement to the assembled press, the player promises to destroy Coda's work, and a gun appears in your hand. It's very jarring, after a full walking simulator, to be suddenly dropped into a First Person Shooter. You have the choice to say "Coda, I'll make sure your work dies here!" or "Coda, I'll make sure your work is known forever!" and then you shoot blankness into the rooms where you've already been.
You shoot the rooms into nothingness until, finally, you find yourself facing the machine once more, gun in hand. But you cannot destroy it, no matter how much you shoot.
The arc of this story parallels Kafka's "In the penal colony." In that piece, an executioner explains to a foreign visitor that their colony uses a hideous torture device ("Apparat") for capital punishment. Prisoners are strapped down and their death sentence is literally carved into their flesh by the needles of the machine, which has been carefully calibrated not to kill them for hours. After enough repetitious writing, the executioner says, the prisoner *truly* understands the justice of the sentence, an awareness born of pain. When the foreign visitor expresses disgust at the practice, the executioner pronounces sentence on himself and gets strapped in. But the machine malfunctions and he dies in a quick stabbing, deprived of his moment of rapture.
In Coda's/Wreden's piece, the machine/game itself is torture apparatus and prisoner. You play the executioner, seeking a cathartic apotheosis but denied it. The gun in your hand is the Apparat's needle, carving something like justice onto the prisoner's body. It also works as a retelling of the "Grand Inquisitor," in which a Spanish Inquisition priest orders the death of Jesus after his second coming; you playing the priest, the machine playing the creative source of all ideas.
