Staff Profile
Dr Matthew Spokes
Associate Professor
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I am an Associate Professor in Social Sciences, with research interests in interactive entertainment, death and mortality, and spatial sociology. I lecture on video games, social justice and research methods primarily.
I am co-director of the investigate.games research group.
My background is pretty diverse, starting with an undergraduate degree in Politics and Sociology from the University of East Anglia (2005) followed by a Master’s degree in Conflict, Governance and Development from the University of York (2007). I had a few years out to save for my PhD (working as a painter and decorator, then running an unsuccessful record label) before re-joining the University of York to start my PhD in Sociology in 2010. I worked as an Associate Lecturer at York from 2013 until 2016 when I joined York St John University.
- School – School of Humanities
- Email – m.spokes@yorksj.ac.uk
- Phone – 01904 876 279
- Research - View my work in RaY
- Postgraduate Research Supervisor
Further information
Teaching
Alongside supervising PhD students, I teach across the following modules:
- SSC3001 - Exploring Society
- SOC6011 - Investigating Games
- SSC6001 - Social Sciences Investigation
- YBR7002 - Contemporary Research in Social Sciences
- YBR7003 - Thesis in Social Sciences
Research
My research activity is clustered around popular culture (specifically video games), social/spatial theory and death. I am currently working on a number of methods papers alongside research looking at gaming, fear and failure. My most recent published work has focused on grief and gaming, as well as the educational value of dialogic thinking in games design and development. My most recent book - Gaming and Virtual Sublime - explores the intersection between gaming and transcendental experiences.
Alongside colleagues in my research group, I work on extensive knowledge exchange work underpinning an impact case study - 'Games for Good' - which explores the relationship between games developers, games, arts/cultural institutions and social justice. Our Games Lab with Aesthetica has seen us work with over 150 developers since 2023, and we now collaborate with the National Science and Media Museum to deliver their annual Yorkshire Games Festival to thousands of members of the public each February half-term.
My research has received external grant funding from a variety of funders including Research England (Y-PERN), the Science Museum Group and the Screen Industries Growth Network (SIGN).
Publications
Books
Spokes, M.(2020). Gaming and The Virtual Sublime: Rhetoric, Awe, Fear and Death in Contemporary Video Games. Bingley: Emerald (ISBN 9781838674328)
Spokes, M., Denham, J. and Lehmann, B. (2018). Death, Memorialization and Deviant Spaces. Bingley: Emerald(ISBN: 9871787565746)
Journal articles
Denham, J. and Spokes, M. (2026). Video Game Cities: Towards an Architecture of Virtual Enjoyment (forthcoming)
Spokes, M., Denham, J., Coward-Gibbs, M., & Veal, C. (2024). ‘I wasn’t me, grieving in my room. I was spiderman’: gaming, loss and self-care following COVID-19. Mortality, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2024.2315961
Veal, C., Denham, J., Coward-Gibbs, M., & Spokes, M. (2024). “You Feel Like You’ve Found a Place Where You Belong”: Symbolic Interactionism and Online Social Video Games in the Age of COVID-19. Games and Culture, Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241273873
Denham, J., Spokes, M., Coward-Gibbs, M., & Veal, C. (2023). Personal, pedagogic play: a dialogic model for video game learning. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2023.2272164
Denham, J and Spokes, M. (2022) Little Data: Navigating the New Normal with Incomplete and Idiosyncratic Datasets. In the International Journal of Social Research Methodology https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2022.2087850
Denham, J and Spokes, M. (2021) The Right to the Virtual City: Rural Retreatism in Open World Gaming. In new media and society, Vol 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820917114
Denham, J., Hirschler, S., and Spokes M., (2021) The Reification of Structural Violence in Videogames. In Crime, Media, Culture, Vol 17 No. 1
Spokes, M. and Denham, J. (2019) Developing Interactive Elicitation: Social Desirability and Capturing Play in The Qualitative Report Volume 24 Issue 4. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol24/iss4/10
Spokes, M. (2019). The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, procedural rhetoric and the military-entertainment complex: two case studies from the War on Terror. In Vol 32 Issue 2 of Media, War and Conflict. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750635219828761
Denham, J. and Spokes, M. (2018). Thinking Outside the Murderbox: Subjective Violence in Open World Gaming). In the British Journal of Criminology Volume 59 Issue 3. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azy067
Spokes, M. (2018) “War…War Never Changes…”: Explicit and implicit death narratives in a post-apocalyptic gameworld. In Mortality, Volume 23, No. 2. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2017.1319348
Book chapters
Spokes, M. (2023) ‘Death. Carnage. Chaos: Mortality on the roof of the world’. In Coleclough, S., Michael-Fox, B and Visser R., Difficult Death, Dying and the Dead in Media and Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan (ISBN: 9783031407314)
Denham, J. & Spokes, M. (2023). Il diritto alla città virtuale: la regressione rurale nei videogiochi open world. In Bittanti, M. (ed). Reset: Politica e videogiochi. Milano: Mimesis Edizioni
Professional Activities
- Recognised Research Supervisor UKCGE
- Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
