Kafka and... Minecraft

What if Kafka's The Castle were an open-world video game?

What if Kafka's The Castle were an open-world video game? An infinite match between bureaucracy and stone blocks. A literary Minecraft.

On the word "villager"

A few days ago I happened to see a Minecraft gameplay on TV. When they mentioned the villagers, since I was reading The Castle, I immediately associated them with the secondary characters that populate the novel. I also had the word in mind because I had seen a video discussing the spanish translation of the term Bauern, which Kafka uses in the original German to refer to the villagers.

Some spanish editions of The Castle translate the word Bauern as "peasants" or "villagers." Sometimes, both terms are used within the same translation to refer to the inhabitants of the village below the Castle.

In the German Minecraft wiki, villagers are referred to as Dorfbewohner, literally "village dwellers," while Bauern translates more accurately as "farmers."

In English, the translations of Kafka's novel tend to favor "rustic" or "peasant," while Minecraft villagers are simply called villagers.

So the connection I made between the game and the novel was based more on a liberal spanish translation of Bauern.

The appearance of villagers

This is how villagers are described on minecraft.fandom.com:

Villagers are passive creatures that live in villages, work in their respective professions, reproduce, and interact...

Villagers are almost humanoid creatures that resemble humans but are characterized by large heads and noses, green eyes, and always keep their arms crossed.

Kafka, however, describes them like this:

It was as if their skulls had been crushed by blows and the features of their faces had been formed by the pain of those blows.

Seeing the in-game villagers with their "flattened" cube-shaped heads, like everything else in Minecraft, reinforced the connection between the book and the game. Another passage in Kafka's novel seems appropriate as well:

They were cleaner and more uniform, dressed in coarse cloth of a yellowish gray color; the jackets were loose, the pants tight. They were small men, at first glance very similar, with angular, flat faces, but at the same time with rounded cheeks. All seemed calm and hardly moved; they only followed those who entered with their eyes, slowly and indifferently.

The grayish tone is also interesting, for example, in the description of Pepi's attire:

She wore a plain dress that fell vertically and didn’t fit her well: it was made of shiny gray fabric, clumsily and childishly tightened at the hem with a silk ribbon.

Or Barnabas:

Had she been charmed by Barnabas’s silky, shiny, tight jacket, which he now unbuttoned, revealing a coarse shirt underneath, of a dirty gray color, full of patches over the powerful, angular chest of a servant?

And this is how Minecraft describes the villagers clothing:

Villagers have a base appearance with gray-colored garments, but this is never visible in the game because it is covered by their profession- or biome-specific attire.

Environment

Another thing that struck me is how the food described in the book seems fitting for survival games in open worlds. The novel casually mentions a variety of sausages, bread, sardines, bacon…

As I kept reading, the images of the game and the book began to intermingle, even the landscape had an eerie familiarity. I searched for images of Kafka's castle online to see how illustrators or theater companies had represented the villagers. But just by googling "Kafka castle" you’re met with this disturbing image:

The "Kafka Castle" apartment building by Ricardo Bofill. A structure made of cubes in the purest Minecraft style. According to the project’s website:

Each cube contains a minimalist environment: living-dining room or bath-bedroom, arranged on different levels. Despite their small size, these "unités d'habitation" are efficient and spacious, with flexible partitions, including movable mirrors and an open kitchen.

Villager behavior

By then, I had already accepted that my reading of The Castle would unfold in my mind within the world of Minecraft. So I began to observe the behavior of these villagers, these passive creatures.

Passive creatures are those that do not attack the player directly, even when provoked or attacked.

This reminded me of the following passage, when K. arrives at the castle:

For a moment, K. thought that everyone — Schwarzer, the peasants, the innkeeper and his wife — would throw themselves at him; to at least avoid the first assault, he curled up under the blanket, then slowly stuck his head out and heard the phone ring with unusual force. Even though it was very unlikely it referred to K. again, everyone stood still.

The innkeeper waited in front of the inn. He would never have dared to speak unless asked. Three or four maids, distant from each other, literally froze in their work when they saw K.

It’s true that in the book the villagers don’t always have their arms crossed — the default pose of Minecraft characters — except in this passage:

I saw Sortini often during the party, sitting on a perch, his arms crossed over his chest, and he remained like that until the car from the castle came to pick him up.

This also emphasizes a passive stance. But figuratively speaking, I recognized the same inner pose in the villagers of The Castle, always stolid and diligent. Entrenched in their positions, they are at the same time willing to offer, to exchange, to perform tireless administrative work for the good of the village. Their crossed arms underscore the contradiction of the merchant, who simultaneously offers a service and demands compensation. The villagers exude the same tenderness as the insect in The Metamorphosis. Like industrious insects, always focused on some task no matter how trivial. At the same time, they are timeless, like ancient Silk Road merchants. They make up a pragmatic society from which only the player, the protagonist, can rise above this open yet rigid world, always remaining out of place.

The surveyor

And what better protagonist for this cubic story than a surveyor, with the power to reshape the landscape, to dig his own tunnel down to the lava fields? K. is a hacker, a tester, or more likely a troll. He is inappropriate, disruptive, immune to threats and shouts. He bothers everyone, and sometimes seems to do it on purpose. He acts with the confidence of someone who has been through countless castles before and has conquered or reduced them to ashes. Even with the certainty that he could have mastered the castle in a single day, he deliberately takes the most tortuous and absurd path—the hardest difficulty setting. Or perhaps he does so because the developers’ hero path seems too boring to him, and he chooses the most precarious scenario and the weakest character, who can’t even withstand a snowy walk, a glass of liquor, or a sleepless night, and only knows how to craft wooden sticks instead of diamond swords. Maybe he just wants to pass the time, wander into random houses, fall for the first villager he meets, contact the first stranger he hears about, accept the first job offered to him. Or maybe he's looking for an Easter Egg, a hidden message or object left by the developers in the lower levels of the game. Perhaps he’s seeking a shortcut to break the speedrun record and complete the game in the shortest possible time. Even K. himself admits he hadn’t come to lead a life of peace and honors:

There was a belief that, although K. was now small and horrible, in the future—though almost unimaginably distant—he would surpass them all.

K. has one foot outside the causal laws of the game; he possesses an enviable and carefree power, a mystical clarity. He is aware that he is the only one who can move his arms, act by his own will rather than obeying an algorithm:

He felt no admiration, not even envy, because it wasn’t the proximity to Klamm that seemed worth the effort, but the fact that he, K., only he and no one else, could approach Klamm with his own intentions and no one else’s.

NPCs

In the context of video games, an NPC (Non-Player Character) is a character controlled by the game’s AI rather than a human player. These characters can have various roles, such as offering information, assigning quests, acting as enemies or allies, and are fundamental to the game's narrative and gameplay. In internet culture, "NPC" is also used to describe people who follow trends unthinkingly or lack distinct personality or initiative.

When K. encounters the young Hans, their conversation resembles that of a human player with an NPC:

It was as if, in his opinion, only he could ask questions, and others’ questions violated some rule or were a waste of time.

Another NPC-like scene appears when objects are fixed and characters move around them, unable to pick them up or act on them:

On the desk were large open books, side by side, most of which were read standing up by the officials; they didn’t always stay at the same book, but rather changed positions, not books.

The assistants

The assistants deserve a separate consideration. More than NPCs, they resemble inexperienced players—useless, unaware of proper multiplayer etiquette, clinging to an expert player to form a group. The expert player tolerates them, even defends them. But in truth, they are children assuming adult roles in-game. They are clumsy, unserious. They try to prove themselves by helping, but only get in the way. They fool around at the wrong moments, disrupt paths, mock absurdities, and fail at everything they do. They are aspiring trolls, sent on simple missions to gain experience—or simply to get rid of them for a while. The book offers countless examples:

Then K pointed to the assistants, who stood cheek to cheek, smiling—unclear whether humbly or mockingly—as if introducing an entourage imposed by special circumstances.

Those apparent assistants, however, instead of guiding him to the castle, through a small charade led him to their family, steering him off course; whether they wanted to or not, they were working to sap his strength.

Frieda laid a bed on the floor; the assistants entered the room, were thrown out, climbed back in through the window, and K was too tired to expel them again.

The assistants stood in the outer yard, hopping alternately from one foot to the other in the snow. They feigned joy at seeing K, pointed at him, and tapped the kitchen window. At a threatening gesture from K, they stopped at once, tried to push each other away, but ended up standing together again.

They were young, cheerful, and somewhat simple boys, serving a stranger for the first time, freed from the castle’s strict discipline—hence a bit excited and bewildered—and in that state they occasionally did silly things, which one ought to scold, but which were perhaps best laughed at

Our assistants are children who, despite their age, ought to be in school.

The glitch

In video game terminology, a "glitch" refers to a visual or functional bug that can disrupt gameplay or make the game unplayable.

In The Castle, the glitch occurs in the secretaries’ corridor. Kafka describes how the secretaries deliver files to the gentlemen’s rooms:

The more the work advanced, the more difficult it became: the register no longer matched, or the servants couldn’t distinguish the files, or... the gentlemen objected…

The confusion intensifies in the corridor:

Suddenly, he would throw them down the corridor, the strings snapping, the pages flying.

The characters resemble NPCs stuck halfway through a closed door, their arms flailing, or jammed between walls:

That gentleman... likely found an electric bell button and, delighted by the relief, began ringing it nonstop

Skins

In gaming, "skins" are cosmetic items that change a character’s appearance. In the case of the assistants, their skin seems tied to their mission. Once dismissed, they change skins and age, as if their physical appearance were just another tool to complete a quest.

Even Klamm, the mysterious official K. seeks, has traits worthy of a video game—he can change his skin at will. Within the village, people speak of notable differences in size and demeanor, or beard thickness, but all agree on one point: he always wears the same long-tailed black coat.

Klamm and K.

The surveyor K. tries to approach Klamm. There’s a disturbing detail in the novel that reinforces the video game sensation: Klamm sends letters to K. through a messenger. In one, he praises K.'s work as a surveyor—as well as that of his assistants. Clearly a mix-up, K. thinks, since he hasn't done any work. The letter also seems old, recovered from a past file, possibly before K. even arrived.

If this were a video game, a range of interpretations would open. Klamm might actually be K. Perhaps the player created a new low-level account to see if it could reach the high-level character—also theirs—called Klamm. Maybe they enjoy hearing others speak of them as someone distant and mysterious, feel the vertigo of their own greatness from below. Maybe they want to start over, pick up their old character's story from a save point. Maybe the high-level character sends these letters to help. Perhaps they’re truly old messages, from another account where the surveyor task had actually been completed.

Frieda

Another reading within the same multi-account logic: Frieda was Klamm’s lover before becoming K.’s fiancée. Perhaps Klamm, wanting to test her motives, created a low-level character, K., to seduce her—to see if she loved him for himself or for his status. Klamm could also have assigned the assistants—Frieda’s old friends—to test her loyalty in a game of jealousy.

Conclusión

Viewing The Castle as a Minecraft-like video game has sparked many new images and interpretations for me. I doubt I’ll ever read Kafka’s novel again without thinking in cubes. I believe Kafka, understood as an echo (a topic I explored in a previous essay), resonates more deeply when refracted through other fictions than through reality itself. If we limit ourselves to drawing parallels with the real world, his universe quickly exhausts itself in analogies with bureaucracy or absurdity. But in dialogue with other artistic creations—like a video game—the echoes come alive and enrich one another. Certainly, if someone recreates the novel within Minecraft, I’ll enter their world without hesitation.