[game_preservation] Late Intro to Myself

[n8dunn at juno.com]

I just went back and read the archives of the posts, and realized that Simon was the only one who introduced himself, so in the interest of getting more people to do the same, I will follow his lead.

My name is Nate Dunn, and I am new to the industry, having just graduated from Full Sail in Orlando, FL, where I worked on quite a few demo projects. Since then I have been trying to actually get a job, which, as I'm sure many of you know, is an imposing task.

As for why I'm interested in game preservation, I think that it's extremely important that people today and in the future are able to enjoy games that are amazing, and yet never really got much recognition since they were made in a time when games were taken less seriously than they are today (not that they are taken all that seriously even now, but they're getting there). Some games that come immediately to mind are Pirates! and the old Scott Adams adventures, which I spent many, many hours playing over and over again when I was younger. I feel that games that we loved deserve to be preserved and possibly even remade so that they can be enjoyed and revered for years to come. It's also important to save these games because they are our history. As any grade-school history teacher will tell you, it is extremely important to preserve history, and to learn from it. If we continue to create games, only to lose them to time and obsoletity (is that a word?), we will forever just be rehashing the same ideas over and over with newer, "better" technology, and no real progress will ever be made. If instead we could hold on to the past, and expand upon it, we could end up seeing extremely realistic simulations which completely immerse the user (which some people may see as a bad thing, since there would be no seperation of reality and simulation, and could cause quite a bit of madness and social destruction, but that's an entirely different topic). The third point that I would like to make is that the older generations (age 50+) have a hard time playing games which are fully 3D. There is a lot of disorientation and motion sickness involved, which eliminates the majority of newer games being made. In order to get this group of people involved in what we do, we need to at the very least preserve the games of the past, which are easier to play, or produce new ones which are similar. Since most publishers would rather not market to the small group of game players who want games like Pac-man and Pong, the best option is to keep them around for that group to enjoy. A perfect example of this would be my father, who has a hard time even watching me play an FPS, yet will sit for hours and play a solitare or 2D puzzle game on yahoo. This indicates that the desire is there, but the physical means isn't.

I hope all that made sense, and maybe sparks some discussion.
Take care.
Nate.


Nathan Dunn
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Graduate 2004 Full Sail Real World Education Game Design and Development Degree Program
http://www.geocities.com/n8dunn/Resume.doc

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