Steven Gotzler

Pedagogy

01

Courses

The course website for Video Games and Narrative Cinema, its lead image, a street scene from a video game, shifting from grey into colour

ENGL 257Spring 2027

Video Games and Narrative Cinema

A hands-on gaming course in which students decipher the narrative design of video games while exploring the legacy of cinema in gameplay, and reading cinema, in turn, as a ludic and participatory artform.

We approach games and films through three frameworks: as media technologies, visual cultures, and narrative forms. The course ends with student video essays.

Taught
Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2025, Spring 2027
Visit
sgotzler.github.io/ENGL-257
The course website for Tabletop Games, with a photograph of hands moving pieces on a gridded game board
ENGL 341Fall 2026

Tabletop Games

Narrative, History, and Design

Treats tabletop games as cultural objects with histories, meanings, and consequences, through their material histories, their narrative affordances, and the practice of design.

Taught
Fall 2025, Fall 2026
Visit
sgotzler.github.io/ENGL-341
The course website for Games and Literature, with a stylised rose emblem
ENGL 168Fall 2026

Games and Literature

Part hands-on gaming studio, part literature seminar. Students play and craft role-playing games alongside readings in fantasy, horror, and detective fiction.

Taught
Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Fall 2026
Visit
sgotzler.github.io/ENGL-168
Course flyer for Horror Fiction, its title in red above a vintage illustration of two huge eyes staring out of the dark
ENGL 148Summer 2026

Horror Fiction

Zombies, vampires, and ghost stories. What is it that frightens you most, and why? This course examines the complexities and pleasures of horror, from its origins in Gothic literature up to the present day.

Taught
Summer 2023, Summer 2024, Summer 2025, Summer 2026
02

Student Work

multimodal composition

ENGL 257

Video Essays

Students capture and edit gameplay footage together with cinematic footage, composing essays that make visual arguments about the interpenetrated histories of games and cinema. Each essay is scripted, storyboarded, and edited in stages, building its argument shot by shot.

A Stardew Valley dialogue box reading: You're starting to feel exhausted.

ENGL 258 (now ENGL 168)

Stardew Poetry

Students cut-and-mix in-game text from Stardew Valley with pastoral poetry from Theocritus to Wordsworth, composing new eclogues. The remix format collapses close reading, procedural analysis, and creative writing into a single composition.

game design

The title screen of a student story game, The Retail Job: the title in glowing red capitals above a glowing white Start, on black

ENGL 168

Story Games

Students design short role-playing games inspired by the course’s readings, turning the conventions of fantasy, horror, or detective fiction into rules for play. Designing in a genre becomes a way of reading it closely, isolating formal techniques for worldbuilding, atmosphere, and investigation.

The GO corner of Feudopoly, a student redesign of Monopoly: a castle in place of GO, and property spaces renamed Catacombs, Indulgences, Ashfallow Ruins and Bloodmire Wastes, beside a Divine Will deck

ENGL 341

Monopoly, but…

In small groups, students rewrite the rules of Monopoly around a theme of their choosing. Rewriting a game everyone knows turns its assumptions into choices that students can reverse, keep, or exaggerate.

Sample work is shared with the permission of the students.