Dalip Prajeet was arguing with his supervisor at the call center.

“I tell you, the phone in my bay’s not ringing,” he said. “Nobody’s called in two hours. Normally I get one every few minutes.”

“Well, the phone’s definitely working,” his supervisor said. “I traced the lines and everything.”

“So what’s happening?”

“Beats me. Maybe the software that diverts the calls doesn’t like you.”

“Can I have another bay?”

“The center’s at maximum capacity. Look, sorry, you’ll just have to sit there and hope whatever’s wrong fixes itself. Conversation’s over, pal. I have a floor to run.”

Then the supervisor disappeared, leaving Dalip fuming. This was going to screw up his metrics for the day.

He tried to clear up his desk, so that at least he was doing something on company time.

Among the scattered papers, he found a 3.5” floppy disk.

On it were two words. STRANGE LOOP.

He couldn’t recall bringing this in to work.

Had the supervisor put the disk there, and he hadn’t noticed? Why would a supervisor at a major telecom company put anything on a floppy in 2016?

Bored and irritable, he inserted it into his computer.

Immediately, a batch file started to execute, running a program called STRANGELOOP.EXE

His screen flashed and was replaced with a computer-rendered image. A moment of panic, then he remembered that his cubicle was in the corner of the building – nobody could see what was on his screen unless they entered his bay.

He looked at the image more closely.

It looked like a computer game from the pre-CD era. The resolution was 320×240. The graphics were 16-color CGA. The neon hues almost burned his eyes.

It was a crude, pixelated image of a man sitting at a desk in front of a computer, with his back to the viewer.

At the bottom was an RPG-style inventory of items. It only had one thing in it: a floppy disk.

He had cursor input, and could move a disembodied hand around the screen with his mouse.

Curious, he clicked on the floppy disk item in the inventory.

The hand picked it up.

He dragged the cursor over to the desk, and clicked again. The floppy disk appeared on the desk.

The pixelated man looked across, saw the floppy disk, picked it up, and after a minute, put it into his computer.

Spellbound, Dalip tried to see what was happening on the computer inside the game. The screen was too small and the resolution too low. A line of text flashed in the empty inventory: PRESS + TO ZOOM.

He zoomed in, saw that the computer inside the game was running a batch file, and that it was launching a file called STRANGELOOP.EXE…

On the man’s screen there was now a digital image of another man sitting at a desk, in front of another computer, with another floppy disk.

The man inside the game started to play.

They’re like little Russian dolls… Dalip thought, zooming in even further to see what was on the screen.

He continued “playing” for the some time, going down iteration after iteration, watching game after game get installed on computer after computer, each one contained within the last.

Eventually, he was at least twenty levels deep, watching another man insert a floppy disk, run a game, use his cursor to place a floppy on a digital desk…

Are they really like Russian dolls? He thought. If I go down far enough, will I reach a final one? Or does it continue forever?

A buzzer beeped beside his head, shocking him back to earth like cold water to the face. He realised he was now at clock-off time.

And his phone still hadn’t rung once.

He no longer thought this was a coincidence.

He gathered his things together, and remembered that company policy forbid the installation of third party programs on the office computers.

Whatever STRANGELOOP.EXE was, he’d get in trouble if it was discovered.

He was about to hit ESC to close the game and then erase it from his system, when something new happened on the screen.

The man at the desk was turning around to look at him.

Hairs stood up on Dalip’s neck as he saw an expression of alarm and confusion resolve amongst the pixels.

He pressed the – key.

Started zooming out.

Another face, looking at him.

Then another.

He started reassembling the Russian doll, flying backwards through the generations.

In all of the games, the man had turned around and was looking towards the screen, as if staring his own creator. The faces stared outwards, like the endless reflections of two mirrors.

Finally, there were no more games-within-a-game, and Dalip was at the original one.

Or is that really true?

Am I really the first? How can I know?

Each of those digital copies thought he was the first, the original, the only.

And each of them were wrong.

Suddenly, Dalip felt a sensation that he did not like at all, the sensation of being watched.

It was on his back like the hand of a ghost. His nerve endings tingled.

He turned around to see what was behind him.

The Biblical Urheimat of 3D shooting games. Asking if it’s fun is like asking if the Hammurabi Codex is good writing: it’s transcended such things.

In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D changed everything. It made people nauseous. And upset. There were violent games before, but their lack of immersion softened the blow. “You” didn’t rip out spines in Mortal Kombat 2, a sprite on the screen did. But from a first person perspective (with a phallic gun-barrel intruding into your viewfield), the illusion breaks. In this game, you are definitely the one pulling the trigger.

Nobody who’s played Wolfenstein 3D could be seriously offended by it. The Nazi element is played for kitsch and camp, this is Springtime for Hitler: The Game. And the game’s sense of realism is shallow at best: the corners are all 90 degree angles, the ceilings and floors lack textures, the repetitive environments make you feel like a rat in a maze, etc. The massive body count has a nugatory effect: after a few hours, shooting someone is as shocking as the 300th “fuck” on a rap album.

Gameplay kicks off with a screen saying “GET PSYCHED!” and this captures the game’s flavour: a crazy sugar rush. You charge around turning Wehrmächte into Swiss cheese. You’re not exactly thinking “only the dead have seen the end of war”.

Wolfenstein 3D is an arcade game. The more you play WOLF3D (as the DOS executable was called), the more it feels like it belongs on a CPS-2 arcade cabinet with wadded-up gum jamming the controls. You have lives, and a high score. All that’s missing is B.J. Blazkowicz telling you to insert a quarter. Modern 3D shooters aspire to be on the cutting edge. There’s the feeling that a game with revolutionary graphics needs to be revolutionary along other axes, too. Wolfenstein 3D remains (as it did at the time of release) stuck in the past.

There’s lots of fun goodies herein. A hidden “Call Apogee say ‘AARDWOLF'” message, remnants of an aborted contest that was immediately made pointless by fan-made data viewing programs. A Pacman level. Another level made entirely out of swastikas. The statement “This game is rated PC-13, for ‘Profound Carnage'”. A naff and entertaining battle against Adolf Hitler. A episodes 4-6 are called Nocturnal Missions. Barring Rise of the Triad, this is perhaps the most overtly comedic FPS until the release of Duke Nukem 3D (Ken’s Labyrinth was too autistic to be funny).

Little map design is possible with such a limited engine. You wander mazes and shoot groups of enemies. While Doom would give the player new and varied things in its later levels, WOLF3D has nowhere to go except harder mazes and larger groups of enemies. At a certain point, your brain becomes bored, and starts craving more stimulation. You could argue that the game reinforces the social message that mass murder is boring.

Even the game’s technological wizardry smacks of Uri Geller. Just fire up Ultima Underworld, which came out six months earlier, and had angled walls, textured ceilings, slopes, look up/down, swimmable water, etc. Not a fair comparison, since that game was developed over years next to this one’s months. And Wolfenstein 3D’s engine is faster and leaner. Too bad that equals a fast and lean journey through Legoland.

Wolfenstein 3D is a dated experience with immense historical. I can’t imagine myself ever replaying Wolfenstein 3D the same way I play Doom. But though I don’t play it, I can’t ignore it.

In zoology, you’re not supposed to anthropomorphosize animal behavior. For example, a dog doesn’t “laugh”, it “vocalises”. The idea is that you keep a bit of daylight between human emotions and animal emotions, because they’re not the same thing.

But people are fine with anthropormophisizing other things. We talk about nations, states, churches, backyard mud wrestling federations, etc as if they’re people. Reagan described the USSR as an “evil empire”. Can an empire be evil? Any more than an empire can have a favourite basketball team?

(All adjectives are behavioral. “Evil empire” = “an empire that does evil things”)

Ayn Rand once said “don’t ask me about my family, my childhood, my friends or my feelings. Ask me about the things I think.” But the things she thought were caused by her family, her childhood, her friends, and her feelings. There isn’t some “Ayn Rand” homunculus issuing orders from on high. It seems to me more likely that Rand’s feeling of free will emerged from lots of little incidents, both inside her mind and in the world outside, and they composited to form her personality. And if they created her personality, maybe they deserve the credit or blame for her actions.

Like Rand, The Soviet Union was a very large emergent froth coming from many subunits, which themselves were made up of many subunits, etc. What level of the apparatus bears the mark of Cain? Which level is “evil”? When talking about, say, a massive artificial famine like Holodomor, who do you blame?

The USSR itself? No, it only acted the way it did because of the smaller gears ticking inside. The NKVD, or the People’s Commissariat of Land Cultivation? No, same problem.

What about the minions who enacted the policies? Were they to blame? They would have claimed they were following orders.

So we can blame Stalin. He was the irreducible evil. Hopefully he won’t claim that he acted ideologically, otherwise blame for the Ukrainian famine gets passed back to Vladimir Lenin, then to Karl Marx, then to Adam Smith, then to John Ball, then to Jesus (and then to…). But hey, at least we’ve found the ultimate source of the Holodomor…

…No, we we haven’t. We’re still horsefucked. A nation is very complicated and elaborate, and if we’re withholding judgement on the USSR for this reason, we need to realise that  Joseph Stalin’s mind was even more  complicated and elaborate. There were 100 billion neurons in his brain. Each hemisphere had 400 to 500 distinct brain areas. His genome encompassed 20,000 genes, 84% of which were expressed in the brain. He was an incredibly sophisticated thinking machine.

Even if we understood a normal person’s brain, I don’t think we could have understood Stalin’s. Everyone who knew him or his works commented on how unusual he seemed, how cold and cruel. No more a human being than HAL9000. Adolf Hitler, although he owned a dog, strikes me as a stereotypical “cat person” – anxious, neurotic, sensitive, and artistically-minded. Benito Mussolini is more like a stereotypical “dog person” – a gregarious backslapping Il Duce, prone to self-aggrandisement and egotism. Stalin strikes me as a person who would have brooked no pets at all. Although maybe he considered Lavrentiy Beria a kind of pet.

So what in this confusing mare’s nest can we “blame”? Stalin’s neurons? They have to fire together in elaborate Hebbian patterns, and no one neuron is responsible for anything. His genes? All behavioural traits are heavily polygenic, there wasn’t any one “evil gene” in Stalin’s mind. And these genes were gifts from his parents, so we’re almost back to blaming cavemen again. “What caused the Holodomor?” It seems the answer might be…everything.

Homer Simpson’s method for getting out of trouble is to say “It was like that when I got here”, and so is mine.