User:John Stumme/About me box

 Who I am: + My name is John Stumme (stuh-me), and I am currently the Lead Designer of the Guild Wars Live Team. I have been with ArenaNet since 2005, and have previously held the title of "Quietest Designer" (oh, if only they knew what was to come...) My desk remains one of the high points of this building, because it is one of the only places where you can see a Gundam gleefully riding on Godzilla, or Haruhi commanding a Dalek. How many people can say the same?

I am happily engaged to the cutest girl that I have ever known. Together we have two cats, which are sometimes incredibly annoying (but make for incredibly reliable alarm clocks.) I am very much a geek, but I try to maintain a well-rounded lifestyle, with anime, music, gaming, drawing, and the great outdoors. Mountain hiking is an excellent way to fight off the atrophy that would otherwise come with a desk job, and I highly recommend it. Seeing a sunset from the top is an incredibly rewarding experience.

Game Design is pretty much what I've wanted to do ever since I was little - my first system was an Intellivision, and I was hooked. I programmed my first game when I was 11 using QBasic, a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style text game titled "The Haunted Mansion" (cut me some slack, I was a little kid!) I can still remember writing a ridiculously long draw string to illustrate the mansion, and then using CLS commands and redraws to animate it. Think of animating an Etch-A-Sketch where everything is a single line, and a change in any part of it affects everything that comes after. Yeah, it was a bad idea. I also didn't care, because it was something that I made, and that thrill of creation has remained with me ever since.