Bio (It’s not the Res Gestae, but I’m content…)

Regrettably, I was unable to coax one of the Pompeii site dogs into my selfie.

My name is George B. Paulson and I’m an aspiring educational game designer and developer living in my hometown of Fayetteville, Arkansas. My academic background is in classical studies (I received a B.A. in Classics from Willamette University in 2016), but my academic interests shifted towards game design near the end of my undergraduate career. While the classical world will always be one of my primary interests, I found that the interdisciplinary nature of game design gives me a creative way to pursue many of my other interests as well and share them with a wider audience.

For the past two years I have studied game design at the University of Arkansas and become very familiar with the Unity game engine as an intern at the U of A’s Tesseract studio. Currently, I am working towards an M.A. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, with a focus on Latin and game design. For my research project, I’m creating an immersive video game to help beginning Latin students learn the language actively in the context of Roman material culture and daily life. A prototype of this game will be tested out in U of A classes during the Fall semester, 2019.

How I Got Into Game Design

Although I have played games for most of my life, I did not become interested in game design until I studied abroad in Rome at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies. Early in the semester, I decided to make my final class project an educational card game about Roman gladiators ‒ one of my favorite subjects. Making that game was one of the most invigorating experiences of my life and inspired me to do what is probably still the best research I have ever done. At the time, however, I knew next to nothing about game design, spent way too much time researching gladiators, and massively over-scoped my project. This resulted in a game that had an arcane rule set and lacked a reachable win state. To make matters worse, despite my having worked on it for nearly the entire semester, the game was not finished when I turned it in… late. The grade I received was fair ‒ one of the worst I have ever gotten on a project ‒ but despite this failure, my first foray into game design taught me a great deal and left me eager for more. Since then I have gained a lot more experience and I am now confident that I can successfully take on the challenge of designing and building an immersive video game with only minor massive over-scoping.

Why “Ludator George?”

Because all the good domain names with gladiators were taken…