Steven Gotzler

Research

01

Books

Yellow wooden worker pieces standing on the department board of the board game Carnegie

In development

Working Models

Computation, Labor, and the Procedures of Play

A study of how games model work. The book examines cases across analog and digital games, from the managerial arithmetic of worker placement mechanics, through automation games in which the factory runs without anyone in it, and work simulators in which work itself is all there is, to the self-valorizing financial energetics of historical railroad games, and character creation systems that render the labor of self-invention as a computable object.

The book explores how games make the cultural organization of work legible to us as players — available to be manipulated, optimized, or broken — and asks what follows from the procedural fluency they leave behind.

Presented at
Tübingen, DiGRA 2026, UNCG, DiGRA 2025, UNC–Duke, KCL
A page headed General Description from a 1983 computer service manual, with a labelled line drawing of a desktop computer, monitor, and keyboard

Manuscript in preparation

Terminal Degree

Computing and the End of the Public University

A history of computing and the public university since the Cold War. It traces how universities built the computing industry, reorganized themselves around it, and now face AI tools that threaten to replace the institutions that produced their training data.

Computing, the book argues, has been both the university's terminal achievement and the grounds of its potential termination.

Press
Johns Hopkins University Press, series in Critical University Studies (under contract)
With
Avery J. Wiscomb
Presented at
MOSAICS
A page headed Assembly and Disassembly from a 1983 computer service manual, with a line drawing of the machine's rear panel and numbered steps for removing it

Digital supplement, launching with the book

Re-Tool Kit

An online companion to Terminal Degree, with practical guides and resources for scholars and graduate students putting the book's strategies to work.

With
Avery J. Wiscomb
02

Writing and Talks

Publications

2028chapter · forthcoming

A Genealogy of Minimal Computing

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2028

University of Minnesota Press

With Avery J. Wiscomb

2027chapter · forthcoming

The Detections of Totality

Cognitive Mapping in Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet

Crime Does Play: Detective Fiction in Video Games

Bloomsbury

2027chapter · forthcoming

The New Cinema of Surplus

Partial Lumpenization and the Reserve Army of Labor in Contemporary Cinema

The Idea of the Lumpenproletariat

Routledge

2026article

Machine Learning

INSIDE's Cinematic Lessons in Control

Open Screens 8.3

Special issue on Teaching Video Games in the Humanities

2026article

Making Marx More Readable

A Minimal Computing Approach to a Community-Driven Edition of Capital Vol. 1

Digital Humanities Quarterly 20.2

With Avery J. Wiscomb

2019article

1956

The British New Left and the “big-bang” theory of Cultural Studies

Lateral 8.2

Years in Cultural Studies

2019contribution (project video)

The Historical TV Guide

Using Digitized Text to Study Television History

The Digital Humanities Literacy Guidebook

With Kathy M. Newman

Talks

Oct 21–23, 2026conference paper

After Fossil Play

Eco-Games Beyond 18XX

Sustainable Futures at Play, Universität Tübingen

Oct 15–16, 2026conference paper

Pretrained

The University and the Making of AI

MOSAICS, Charles Babbage Institute

With Avery J. Wiscomb

Jul 9–10, 2026workshop paper

Rules, Models, Components for a Critical Pedagogy of Play

Playful Media and Sustainable Futures, Universität Tübingen

Jun 14–18, 2026conference paper

A House Is Not a Home

Queergaming and Recuperative History in Molly House

Digital Games Research Association

Jun 14–18, 2026conference paper

18XX Forever

Railway Time & Fossil Play on the Tabletop

Digital Games Research Association

Mar 20–21, 2026conference paper

Transacting the Future

Financial Speculation and Futurity in 18XX Games

UNCG Game Studies Conference

Jun 30–Jul 4, 2025conference paper

The Art of Counting Labor

Worker Placement Games as Capitalist Realism

Digital Games Research Association

Jun 30–Jul 4, 2025conference paper

Detections of Totality

Cognitive Mapping and Urban Space in Disco Elysium

Digital Games Research Association

Oct 25, 2024invited talk

Flat Reading

New Materialist Methods for Analog Game Studies

UNC–Duke Critical Game Studies Symposium

Jun 4–6, 2024symposium paper

Dollars, Departments, and Donations

Carnegie as Managerial Architecture and Performance

Transatlantic Exchanges, King's College London

Jan 4–7, 2024conference paper

Unsettling the Remediations of Settler-Colonialism in Video Games

Modern Language Association

With D.A. Hall

Aug 2, 2023conference paper

Game Studies Podcasting with Subject Matter: Table Top

Gen Con Trade Day

With Jordan Tynes

Mar 29, 2023invited workshop

Python for Humanities Teaching

Humanities Data @ UNC

Jan 5–8, 2023conference paper

Rethinking Reading Editions

Minimal Computing Principles as Practical Commitments

Modern Language Association

With Avery J. Wiscomb

Jul 23–26, 2019conference paper

Deploying Lightweight Digital Editions in the Community and Classroom

Association for Computers and the Humanities

With Avery J. Wiscomb

May 30–Jun 1, 2019praxis session

MARXdown

A digital edition of Marx's Capital Vol. 1

Cultural Studies Association

Mar 14–18, 2018conference paper

Using the Television “Mega-Text” to Find Social Class in 1950s TV

Society for Cinema and Media Studies

With Kathy M. Newman

03

Games

The page Parachute Nomenclature and Function, with drawings of piggyback and conventional rigs, three canopy types, and a labelled diagram of a square canopy
A logbook page with the first four jumps of 1992 filled in by hand: dates, aircraft, altitude, and seconds of delay
The manual's Warning and Disclaimer, which begins: Whenever a person leaves the ground, he or she risks injury and even death
The back cover, a photograph of skydivers linked in formation, with the quotation: and once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward
1 / 4
2026Prototype

Skydiver’s Information Manual, 1992

A found-object solo role-playing game, composed out of the United States Parachute Association’s handbook for new jumpers, a manual of rules for managing a dangerous form of play.

Draws on
W. J. Miller and J. H. Frey, “Skydivers as Risk Takers: An Examination”; a logbook kept by a skydiver in 1992; my childhood
An Air Raid Precautions Warden's Report Form, photographed in an archive beside a grey scale card, with blank fields for the type of bombs, casualties, fire, and damage to mains
A bomb damage map of the City of London around St Paul's Cathedral, with most of the surrounding blocks coloured purple for damaged beyond repair
The words Keep Calm in white capitals on the creased red paper of the 1939 poster
1 / 3
2025–In development

Keep Calm and Carry On

A historical board game about the London Blitz, drawing on materials in the Imperial War Museum archives and designed as an operational war game, but without combatants.

Draws on
Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future; Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz; IWM London
04

Podcast

05

Past Work

A heavily pixelated black-and-white portrait of Karl Marx
2018–19Digital Reading Edition

MARXdown

A minimal reading edition of Marx's Capital Vol. 1, with community annotation.

With
Avery J. Wiscomb
Published in
DHQ
Presented at
MLA, ACH, CSA
Funding
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, dSHARP, Carnegie Mellon University (2018)
Visit
marxdown.github.io
Code
MARXdown/MARXdown.github.io
A newspaper television listings page from February 1950, headed On Television, with handwritten notes in the margins
2017–19Text Digitization

The Historical TV Guide

A digitized record of 1950s television listings, built for the distant reading of programming that no longer survives in watchable form.

With
Kathy M. Newman
Published in
DH Literacy Guidebook
Presented at
SCMS
Funding
A.W. Mellon Digital Humanities Seed Grant, Dietrich College, Carnegie Mellon University (2017)
Visit
sgotzler.github.io/Historical-TV-Guide
Code
sgotzler/megaText
Poster for The Frankenstein Complex, its title set over a red-tinted grid of film stills of Frankenstein's monster
2018Rare Book Exhibit

The Frankenstein Complex

A bicentennial exhibit setting the 1818 first edition of Frankenstein beside Carnegie Mellon rare holdings in the history of science and archival materials on robotics and AI.

With
Avery J. Wiscomb, John Quirk
Funding
Posner Rare Book Collection Fellowship, Posner Fine Arts Foundation (2018)
Visit
exhibit coverage