This book brings together selected contributions developed from the workshop “Games Matters: Innovating Game Studies and Research”, held in Bari, Italy, on December 12, 2025. Rather than reproducing the conference’s tripartite structure, the book reframes the contributions within a broader narrative arc. It opens by outlining a theoretical framework for understanding games as complex communication artefacts, moves into analyses of what unfolds within games, and then turns to the practices, institutions, and pedagogies that take shape around them, before concluding with a reflection on artistic deactivation and reframing. Within this trajectory, case studies and more transversal interventions coexist as complementary modes of inquiry. Across the book, games emerge as artistic media, socio‑technical systems, pedagogical tools, and infrastructures of participation. The book thus advances a methodologically plural and critically grounded approach to game studies—one capable of relating form, design, embodiment, labor, and power within a shared framework of investigation.