Kafka: Before Existentialism

Franz Kafka: The Law: The Flash Game: The Existence of them

Okay, so now I have to look at Kafkas work, and the video game made based on his work in an existential light. Before I even begin to discuss the actual content of them, I'm going to point out the existential irony of essence and existence present in the very existence of the game. We have Franz Kafka, who may or may not be a creation of God Almighty, and could quite possibly be the existence after the essence that this strange being in the sky has made up, who is a man, who exists. And he has created a short story (in fact, he has created lots of these) called "The Law." The short story didn't exist until he created it, which was in his head, which at that time was just the essence of the story. And then it did exist, a story of his creation. The story then gained essence as decided by his readers, who didn't ever get a chance to actually read his works until he stopped existing, and his dick friend and attorney buddy decided to keep his works from not existing, which he specifically requested to be destroyed in his will. So because of what some reader got out of that, they came up with a new idea, a flash game, and the whole process started all over again. There you go, existentialism in the making.

Alright, now for the content of the story and the game. We have this man. And he's a boring man, from a country, who has come to see THE LAW (dun dun dun). Why? We don't know... it seems his entire purpose is to try and get to see it, much like how many young girls exist entirely to see Justin Beiber in concert. The law is... this thing... this idea. It's not really anything more than that, and I could prove it in an existential fashion: we never see the law, and what it's comprised of never actually gets written down, it never exists, and since no content of this mysterious law ever comes to light, it doesn't exist. So we have this... non-exist, non-real, arbitrary thing called the law, which I'm going to call "thing," because that's all it is, is a thing, we don't know what it is. And this man, who does exist, has defined himself by it. In a way, this thing has become his essence, presumably of his own volition (except of course the fact that he's a character in a story who actually does not have any free will from our perspective... in his world, he does). Aaaaaaaaand viola! Existentialism: a man who makes the conscious decision to be defined by this essence- and not only himself, but notice: the guard is also now defined by the law, because the guard is one of many, individual to this one specific man So the guard's entire essence revolves around the same thing as the man; and if the man had not made the conscious choice to define himself by it, the guard would not be defined by it himself. -or- A man who spends his entire life writing stories, and makes every conscious decision possible to -not- be defined by them... except for actually writing them, which becomes his downfall, and now has his essence defined by the one thing he absolutely did not want to be defined by.

Kafka: The Law

Franz Kafka: The Law: The Flash Game
My Rating: B-Boring
Length: about 30 seconds...

It's a rather short game, not much to it. There's a total of two endings, which is fascinating for a game that only has two controls, I think. The game starts with a single, rather blank character with no known background except that he is some sort of foreigner to the law, or perhaps just the place where the law is kept. He walks forward with one of the controls, and meets a gatekeeper who tells him, in these words exactly, "Yo, you can't go through right now" (or something like that)

So then you have the option of waiting until you die (which goes along the lines of the orginal Kafka story), or proceeding through the gate and seeing the law, which is presented on an earthen pedastool. Other than that, there's nothing really very noteworthy. The core message of the story changes if you don't wait... since the whole point of obeying the guard and waiting for the law was a depiction of a lawful person who always ends up waiting for the law to benefit him, and it never does. The new theme seems to be that in order to get the "law" to work for you, you yhave to break some rules to begin with. Both of the stories really point to the unfairness of modern society and feels like a bit of a short rant in story form from a disgruntled old guy.