I donate to Wikipedia every year because it’s probably the site I visit most. I’m there on a daily basis, multiple times per day. Sometimes it’s to answer a question I have about a movie or TV show (Hey, who was that guy who was in that thing, with the thing?) or about history (Hey, who was the guy who did that thing, with the thing, in the past?) and of course sometimes it’s about a game (Hey, what was that game? With the guy? And the thing?).
But while Wikipedia can give me a game’s release date and developer info and a nice overview of the story, individual game wikis are where I go for a deeper dive. And they almost always go extremely deep. Full character histories. A detailed blow-by-blow recounting of the story, main quests, and side quests. An examination of lore and in-game history. Screenshots of everything imaginable. A complete list of weapons, items, locations, and characters—even the most minor ones—all written in amazingly fine detail.
I spend a lot of time using game wikis to refresh my memory about games I haven’t played in a while, get caught up on games I’ve never played, or help me out with a game I’m currently playing. I use them to research articles or satisfy my curiosity or discover things I might have missed (and I tend to miss a lot). Game wikis are the games themselves in written form, and they’re indispensable.
And they’re created by passionate fans who use their precious spare time to record all the details of games you could ever want. And I guess I just wanted to say, uh… thank you? Thank you. Thank you for doing that. And thank you for doing so much of it. Thank you!
Are there stronger words than thank you? How about… thank you forever. Thank you 3000? I want to thank the shit out of you. I want to thank you until the cows come home, and when they come home you’ll probably write down the location of their home, when they came home, how many of them came home, and where they came home from. Because that’s what you do. You dive into a game and discover all the details and write it all down and make it really easy to find.
Game wiki writers, thank you. You’re at the top of my list of wonderful, selfless people, which also includes people who post technical issues they’re having with their PC in forums and then come back later to post the solution they eventually found so other people with the same problem can actually fix it, too.
In fact, I just took a quick scroll through my browsing history over the past 30 days and it shows I’ve visited game wikis for Cyberpunk 2077, Spelunky, The Sims, The Elder Scrolls, Ark: Survival Evolved, Borderlands, Sunless Sea, Half-Life, GTA, Blaseball, Viscera Cleanup Detail, The Legend of Zelda, Death Stranding, and Super Mario. And I didn’t even play most of those games this month. I just needed some specific info about them.
And there it was, because you wrote it all down. Thank you for doing what you do.