Art, Media, Industry

This series looks at games from three sides at once. As an art form, they have their own ways of expressing ideas, through what a player is asked to do as much as through what they are shown. As a medium, they sit alongside film, literature and music, borrowing from them and competing with them for attention. As an industry, they are financed, scheduled, marketed and sold, and those conditions leave marks on every finished work.

The three are rarely separate. Budgets decide which risks a studio can take, platforms decide which forms reach an audience, and business models shape what a game rewards and how long it wants to be played. Understanding a game fully means reading the work and the system that produced it together. Every episode returns to the same question: what can games say, and what shapes what they are allowed to say?