Sam Pizelo

Samuel Pizelo is an Assistant Professor of Game Studies at ICCIT whose research focuses on the relationship between games of all kinds and knowledge production practices. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Davis, and has formerly held a visiting professorship at the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. His current book project, tentatively titled Histories of Our Making: Games and the Modeling Revolution, argues that games are modeling technologies that have been centrally important to the global development of computing technology, technoscientific research, artificial intelligence, and neoliberal Capitalism itself. His research has appeared in Representations, Game Studies, ROMchip, and Digital Humanities Quarterly. He is also a media practitioner, who uses data science, media art, and digital and analog game design practice to complement his research and teaching. He co-created Project Quintessence, a corpus exploration framework integrating machine learning and statistical models with dynamic visualizations to facilitate archival research. He is also a founding member of the Degrowth Game Design Project (DeGDP), a multi-campus design and research cluster exploring the possibilities of different games for helping us to imagine a post-growth future.