This paper investigates contemporary reception patterns of Franz Kafka in digital games by analyzing user-generated reviews on the Steam platform. While previous work has focused on intertextual references and remediations of Kafka within specific games, this study shifts attention to paragame discourse, examining how Kafka and the Kafkaesque are negotiated in digital environments. Drawing on a corpus of over 100 million Steam reviews on games, the analysis identifies 977 reviews across 384 games that explicitly reference Kafka or the Kafkaesque.

Quantitative and qualitative analyses reveal that Kafka functions less as a precise literary reference than as a marker of cultural authority used to position games within broader aesthetic, philosophical, and canonical frameworks. Co-mention patterns with other canonical authors and artists point to informal processes of canon formation in game discourse. Collocation analyses further show that the Kafkaesque is predominantly used as an affective category and increasingly in a semantically broadened, pop-cultural sense (Popkafkaesk).

Methodologically, the paper demonstrates how large-scale user-generated data can be leveraged for empirical reception studies in the digital humanities. Conceptually, it contributes to debates on canonization, reception theory, and the language of gaming by tracing how literary authority is reconfigured in participatory media environments.