Playing Doom in 2025, or, Sculpture from Clay

I found myself perusing YouTube the other day, the way you do when you're desperately trying to avoid doing any useful work for the day, and found myself somehow watching a video about a ... Doom map, named, implausibly, My House. I think this was the actual video. Something about the video and this somewhat bizarre map was compelling enough for me to plunk down $2.99 for a copy of Doom and try it out. Yes I know I can download things on the internet. I can afford the $3. It was either that or try to find the Doom95 CD I swear I had, you know, 25 years ago.

...and everything about it was weird and amazing. I happily played through the crude 1993 era graphics with a smile on my face. From the seemingly mundane introductory post to the bizarre journal entry that comes along with the map, there's a carefully crafted atmosphere which starts out normal enough but gradually becomes more and more confusing and twisted as you go along. Nothing is really explained in the course of the "game". You just continue to explore the ever expanding and mutating "house", with each failed attempt locking you into a loop. Presumed exits from the level only bring you back to the house. The author seems to delight in twisting your sense of direction, and it's truly creepy, perhaps even amplified by the 30 year old technology. The author is clearly inspired by House of Leaves, and having read that book myself 20 years ago it was kind of wonderful to be dropped into a live version of it.

I couldn't help but marvel at the effort and imagination that went into the work. The author of My House likely spent hundreds of hours crafting this absurdly complicated map and creating the creepy story around it, including fake obituaries about a friend. And the result is really fun. Not just fun in the "I remember playing these games when I was a kid" way, but genuinely enjoyable even here in 2025.

It's amazing that there's still an active community of Doom modders, building weird worlds out of the basic gameplay elements that the Doom engine gives them. There's something deeply cool about seeing a group of people be enabled by technology in this way. I don't mean this in a condescending way, either. I think it's truly amazing that there's a tool that lets people make art for themselves and the broader world, art that they wouldn't be able to make otherwise. Seeing users build amazing things with this ancient technology says something about the requirements for building things of value. I'm not saying something built with Unreal or Unity wouldn't look better, but clearly you don't need amazing 3D graphics to build cool things.

What does a program need to do in order to provide this type of long-term value? Clearly it doesn't need to provide amazing graphics, or we wouldn't have Doom modders or Roblox in 2025. More the value comes from the ability to make the software your own, to solve your own unique problems with it.This isn't new, of course. People are creative, and will use tools in unexpected ways to accomplish their goals. Check out this paper from 1990 on how spreadsheets were being subverted even back then for cooperative development projects. Could we as developers be building more tools like spreadsheets and Doom engines which let everyone express their creativity? Yes, software is inherently complex, but the same type of personThe My House author might be a programmer, for all I know. But there's lots of non programmers who make complex maps. who can make arcanely complex Doom maps or RPG games in Excel could also write some interesting programs.

In a way programming is one of the most creative things we can do: what other form has you so directly taking something from your mind and turning it into something concrete to share with others? Wouldn't it be wonderful to make it so almost anyone could make their own experience?

This is very much not a novel thought. Back in the 80s, systems like Hypercard and Visual Basic were developed around the premise of letting ordinary people build interesting applications. Looking at all of the Hypercard apps people made over 30 years ago, and it's hard not to see the resemblance to My House: each is a small expression of creativity, little weird worlds of their own. Sadly Hypercard and its brethren gradually became less relevant as the web took over, and except for the brief heyday of Flash, we've seen a decline in the ability of normal folks to make fun apps.

Like many I see LLMs helping bring back this type of agency for everyday users. It's energizing to meet with non-programmers who have ChatGPT'ed their way to building some weird application that fits their needs. LLMs really help reduce the needless complexity you have to wade through to get something working. And it's encouraging to see projects like Scrappy that are interested in making, well, scrappy apps.

If you were expecting a conclusion to this meandering rant, I apologize. If I'm being honest, I wanted to talk about the Doom map but found it hard to justify a blog post that boils down to "I played a game, it was fun". But I did play My House, and it was fun, and not only that, it was fun seeing the community behind this work. If you don't play the map, consider watching the video in the background sometime. And maybe think about how we can write our tools to enable a little more creativity.