In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block on the Lyndon B Johnson freeway in Mesquite, Texas, to start a new job. The building had a jet black glass exterior and sat utterly incongruent amid acres of car parks, single-storey industrial units and strip malls. Game designer Sandy Petersen called it the Devil's Rubik's Cube. Taylor's new workplace was on the sixth floor in office 615. The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above.

In Wolfenstein II: New Colossus, our hero B.J. Blazkowicz has grown into far more than a couple of chunky pixels -- but he still kills a lot of Nazis. In Wolfenstein II: New Colossus, our hero B.J. Blazkowicz has grown into far more than a couple of chunky pixels -- but he still kills a lot of Nazis. For years now, some of the best, wildest, most moving or revealing stories we've been telling ourselves have come not from books, movies or TV, but from video games. So we're running an occasional series, Reading The Game, in which we take a look at some of these games from a literary perspective. In the beginning, B.J. Blazkowicz, hero of the Castle Wolfenstein series, was just a rough collection of pixels that excelled at exactly one thing: killing Nazis.

"We are hurting," David Brown, the chief of the Dallas Police Department, said at the beginning of a press conference on Friday morning. The Dallas officers are hurting. There are no words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our city. All I know is that this must stop--this divisiveness between our police and our citizens." Brown is an African-American in his mid-fifties. He was born and raised in Dallas, which, like many American cities, is highly segregated along racial and income lines. Brown joined the department and made his way up the ranks. According to a profile that appeared in the Dallas Morning News in 2010, when he was appointed a chief of the department, Brown had a reputation as a "tough and demanding leader." In his nearly six years running the department, which had a reputation for overly aggressive, and sometimes deadly, policing, Brown has proved to be a reformer, firing rogue cops for poor behavior, and making sure all officers got extra training in when to use lethal force. In a 2014 article about Brown's reform efforts, Radley Balko, a Washington Post blogger who has written a book about the militarization of America's police forces, commented, "One could quibble with the battles Brown has chosen, but he at least seems to be fighting on the right side." In the past few years, the number of shootings involving the Dallas police has fallen significantly. After making his opening appeal for unity and reconciliation, Brown delivered an update on the investigation into the sniper attack on Thursday evening, which took place during a protest against police violence, leaving five police officers dead and seven wounded. Brown said the alleged shooter, whom he didn't name, had told officers who cornered him, in a parking garage, that he wanted to kill white police officers, that he acted alone and wasn't affiliated with any groups, and that, after negotiations for a peaceful surrender broke down, the police killed him by using a robot to place a bomb in his vicinity and detonating it. Inevitably, these details dominated the headlines. But, at a time of heightened tension and widespread fear of further violence, some other things Brown said deserved noting. After saluting the actions of the Dallas police officers who rushed toward the gunfire, which appeared to come from a rooftop, he addressed the public, saying, "We don't feel much support most days.

In this still image from video provided by NBC DFW, police officers salute their fallen peers outside Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where several officers were transported after shootings at a protest late Thursday, July 7, 2016. Five Dallas police officers were fatally shot and seven others wounded during a protest over the deaths of black men killed by police this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. It was the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In this still image from video provided by NBC DFW, police officers salute their fallen peers outside Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where several officers were transported after shootings at a protest late Thursday, July 7, 2016. Five Dallas police officers were fatally shot and seven others wounded during a protest over the deaths of black men killed by police this week in Louisiana and Minnesota. It was the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. John Fife hands a police officer guarding Jack Evans Police Headquarters a rose in Dallas on Friday July 8, 2016. Snipers opened fire on police officers in the heart of Dallas during protests over two recent fatal police shootings of black men. Investigators leave the home of Micah Xavier Johnson in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, Texas, Friday, July 8, 2016. A Texas law enforcement official identified Johnson, 25, as the sniper who opened fire on police officers in the heart of Dallas during protests over two recent fatal police shootings of black men. Dallas police respond after shots were fired during a protest over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota, Thursday, July 7, 2016, in Dallas. Snipers opened fire on police officers during protests; several officers were killed, police said.

Police used a "bomb robot" early Friday to kill a gunman who fatally shot five police officers and wounded seven others in downtown Dallas, saying he "wanted to kill white people," officials said. The end to the standoff came several hours after a suspect began firing during a protest over recent police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana and then holed up in a garage, officials said. "We cornered one suspect and we tried to negotiate for several hours," Dallas Police Chief David Brown said during a Friday morning news conference, but "negotiations broke down" and turned into "an exchange of gunfire with the suspect." The suspect was identified as Micah X. Johnson, 25, a former Army reservist and resident of the Dallas area, two U.S. law enforcement officials said. Johnson had no known criminal history or ties to terror groups, the official said, and has relatives in Mesquite, Texas, which is just east of Dallas.The official said federal agents were assisting Dallas authorities in the investigation.