A little more than a decade ago, the video-game designer Davey Wreden experienced a crippling success. In October, 2013, he and a collaborator, William Pugh, released the Stanley Parable HD, a polished and expanded version of a prototype that Wreden had developed in college, and which he had made available, free of charge, two years before. Wreden and Pugh hoped that they might sell fifty thousand or so copies of the new version in the course of its lifetime. They sold that many on the first day. Wreden was twenty-five years old, and he had everything he’d ever wanted: money, success, recognition. He became severely depressed.

The Stanley Parable is a game about a lonely man. It centers on an office worker, Stanley, who, one day, looks up from his cubicle and discovers that his colleagues have vanished. All that’s left to keep him company is a voice in his head—provided by the British actor Kevan Brighting—which narrates Stanley’s actions. But Stanley doesn’t have to do what the voice says. The game quickly becomes a contest of will between the player and the narrator.

When I first played the Stanley Parable, I was gobsmacked by one sequence in particular, which begins when Stanley walks down a dark corridor marked “ESCAPE.” He finds himself whisked toward a hydraulic press—and certain death, if the narrator’s taunts are to be believed. Just before impact, a previously unheard female narrator (voiced by Lesley Staples) describes how the machine kills Stanley, “crushing every bone in his body.” But the machine doesn’t mush him. Instead, he arrives at a brightly lit museum. Therein lies a small-scale model of his office, with signs explaining how each section was fussed over to insure that the player progresses at a good clip. On the far wall are the game’s credits. The new narrator notes that soon it will be re-started, and Stanley will be alive as ever. “When every path you can walk has been created for you long in advance, death becomes meaningless, making life the same,” she says. Then she adds, “Do you see now that Stanley was already dead from the moment he hit Start?”

I had been playing video games for thirty years, and I had never seen the medium deconstructed so skillfully or with such existential humor. I felt the way that I imagine cinephiles did in 1960, emerging from dark theatres