User:Ryan W

 Salutations! (That's my fancy way of saying hello.)

I am an administrator on this wiki; you can leave me a message if you want help with one of the specialized tasks that administrators do (basic list; pedantic list). Be aware however that such edits can cause arguments, and are more difficult to undo than normal edits, so please come with evidence that a real disruption is occurring.

As an editor, I devote the vast majority of my energy to gameplay-related articles: walkthroughs, Things, animations, and so forth. This is making a virtue of necessity, as I know nothing about the Doom engine and even less about the community's history. (The source port programmers in attendance are remarkably patient with my inexplicable bug obsession.) I also believe that in order to be "encyclopedic", articles of similar purpose should be organized and formatted similarly; my edit count is therefore perpetually inflated by such things as changing Stim packs to Stimpacks on every walkthrough page.


 * Origin of the name "Ryan W"

 Doom is important because it has...


 * first and foremost been a powerful experience as judged by individual gamers, an all-time classic. Once played, it is never forgotten, no matter how jaded you thought you were already.  (Other examples: The Legend of Zelda, Planescape: Torment.)
 * sold a lot of units. (Final Fantasy VII, Space Invaders.)
 * immense replay value when its players are also programmers, because it can be forked. (Angband, ADVENT.)
 * immense replay value for everybody else too, because custom scenarios can be designed and distributed in a straightforward way. (Counterstrike, Bolo.)
 * had overwhelming crossover success, where "overwhelming" means that it was received enthusiastically by people who did not think of themselves as gamers, by people whose friends were not gamers, by people whose parents were surprised to learn that they had bought their first console or graphics card. (Pac-Man, Madden 99.  This is the phenomenon I had in mind when I said that I had listed the eight most significant titles of all time.)

What other game is all five of these things? How about four? I can only think of a few with three. No wonder it needs its own encyclopedia (and deservedly so).

My qualifications for contributing to this project include:


 * 1) Being geographically isolated from all my friends, who are therefore less able to persuade me that my free time ought to be spent constructively.
 * 2) That faint streak of autism which allows me to look at a map and immediately yell, "Hey, where'd the potion go?"
 * 3) A relationship with Doom/Doom II so intense and longstanding (in gaming terms) that it has affected the way I see the world, above and beyond gaming in general.  My maps and notes from Ultimate Doom, D!zone 150, and the first part of Maximum Doom are on my living room wall, and I still look at them every day.   (Heh, my new apartment is too small for this.  But you see my point, I hope.)
 * 4) Apparently, a certain facility for actually writing about games after I've played them.  The following e-mail has to do with my being recruited as a beta tester for a Macintosh program called Technical Snapshot 2.0:

> I must report that my regular access to computing spaces is ending today and > may not resume for several years, so you may as well cancel any future pieces of   > electronic mail which may have been in store for me. I am very sorry to hear that. The world of computing will be a little more quiet and a little less polished without your voice. I hope that you are able to gain access again in the near future, and that such access will be on a Macintosh. Thanks for your help and critical eye. Sincerely, David Cook Storm Impact, Inc.   -- <BR><BR><BR>

Milestones in my wiki career

 * 2005 June 08: First engine crash in a source port while doing wiki research.
 * 2005 November 16: Reading a one-sentence stub and thinking, "Wait a minute, did *I* write that?  No, that couldn't be; it sounds way too confident."
 * 2006 January 18: Spraying Drano on an anon user.
 * 2006 January 19: Offering driving directions around campus.
 * 2006 January 30: First new article from scratch (the others were all abridged Wikipedia material, one-sentence bug reports, or essentially non-textual infrastructure).
 * 2006 February 14: Taking screen shots for E1M2: Nuclear Plant means that I have now used a double-digit number of versions/ports.
 * 2006 February 24: Watching an entire demo on the automap.
 * 2006 September 13: Dreaming about preview pages.
 * 2006 November 05: While taking notes that no one else will ever read, discovering that I am calling the Doom monsters by their type names from the source code.
 * 2006 November 25: User: and User talk: pages vandalized for the first time.
 * 2007 January 10: I actually know the largest number of edits I have ever made in one 24-hour period.
 * 2007 January 16: First instance of typing a URL by hand which contained "index.php".
 * 2007 June 05: *sigh*   First instance of clicking the block link before the diff link on Special:Recentchanges (I did look at the edit before I actually pulled the trigger).
 * 2007 August 25: First piece of obscure technical research that has (apparently!) never been done before.
 * 2007 September 19: First known occasion of reading a talk page post by someone I've met IRL.
 * 2007 November 13: Made a low-level adjustment to a computer so that Doom would run more smoothly, whereas it is not my computer and its owner probably would have objected to the installation of a game.
 * 2008 January 17: Not only do I know the largest number of edits I have ever made in one 24-hour period, but it is a number which is considered totally ridiculous on Wikipedia.

Actual money I've spent on this project (in U.S. dollars)

 * 2005 September 30: $0.99 plus $6.00 shipping for a vanilla copy of Doom II v1.666.  (The Doom II disc from Depths of Doom, which I bought new, was DOA.)
 * 2006 February 06: $0.26 for a CD-R to bring home most of the COMPET-N archive.
 * 2006 September 21: $1.29 plus $3.95 shipping for a copy of the Doom movie.
 * 2008 September 23: $0.28 for a CD-R to archive all my E1 walkthrough drafts and stuff.

Articles that bring out my unhealthy maternalistic instincts

 * Knee-Deep in the Dead and its maps
 * Doom Wiki:Policies and guidelines
 * How to download and run Doom
 * Doom, Doom II
 * Weapons, Monsters
 * Speedrun and its styles
 * Games, Source ports
 * To a lesser extent, every article linked here and in these tables