For years, Scotland’s economic strategy for innovation has suffered from tidy, bureaucratic categorisation.
On one side of the corridor, you have ‘Tech’ – enterprise software, fintech, data, cyber, AI platforms, scale-ups, and data infrastructure. On the other side sits the ‘Creative Industries’ – screen, theatre, music, design, games, performing arts and cultural festivals. Each has its own funding streams, its own trade delegations, its own vocabulary, and its own designated networking rooms where everyone nods along to the same familiar talking points.
Videogames and interactive technology usually find themselves marooned somewhere in the awkward middle: too commercial for the arts community, too playful for the enterprise orgs, and rarely understood as anything beyond a high-value entertainment export.
The recent collision of Fusion Fest and TecTonic broke all the above rules – and made something glorious happen.
It was the tech event Scotland’s creative industries desperately needed – and the creative industries event Scotland’s tech sector didn’t know it needed.
While TecTonic has, from the outset, been about bringing together lovely people from a wide range of sectors, backgrounds and interests, in a playful, informal and creative way, Fusion Fest has emerged from Glasgow Tech Week as a new highlight. A collaboration between Glasgow City Innovation District and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the event brought together technologists, artists, performers, makers, companies, creatives and people in suits, for a day of conversations, coffee, cross-sectoral learning and presentations which included insight into prime numbers, a carfull of AI James Bonds and an invitation to ‘stay weird’, all in a beautiful studio space, a million miles from a keynote and conference business event.
The Myth of Separate Verticals
What became clear across both events is that the tools, mindsets, and mechanics of the creative and interactive sectors are no longer confined to film, performance or digital games. Real-time 3D engines, virtual production environments, spatial audio, and interactive storytelling are rapidly becoming the foundational infrastructure for contemporary creative expression, advanced visualisation, education, and even civic engagement.
Yet, when tech talks to tech, it often suffers from a sterile imagination and reliance upon old formats. Conference. All day. With in-depth dives into technical complexity, or a relentless focus on the business of ‘doing’ tech in 2026. There’s not a whole lot of room for fun, imagination, or hearing from people who you’d never meet at a business conference.
Conversely, when the creative sector gathers alone, it can often view tech with suspicion or even fear, treating digital tools as a threat, or as mere distribution channels rather than native creative mediums, with relevance to multiple parts of their practice.
By introducing a deliberate, unapologetically playful approach, TecTonic and Fusion Fest, shifted the dynamic entirely. Play is not frivolous; play is an exploratory design methodology. It is how human beings stress-test complex systems, understand emergent rules, and build intuitive relationships with technology. When you put technologists, narrative designers, live performers, and software engineers in a room governed by interactive design rather than dry panel pitches, unexpected value happens.
The Small-Nation Advantage
Scotland is geographically compact and culturally interconnected. We do not have the vast, sprawling capital reserves of Silicon Valley or the deep, highly compartmentalised corporate hubs of London. What we have instead is proximity.
In Edinburgh, Stirling, Glasgow, Inverness, Aberdeen and Dundee, a world-class game designer, an enterprise AI researcher, a national theatre director, and an academic historian can easily sit around the same table. Our relative size is only a disadvantage if we copy the siloed, highly exclusive models of larger economies. If we lean into agility, our size becomes a distinct structural advantage.
A cohesive national strategy cannot rely on single-sector silos where videogames only ever talk to videogames. The real economic and civic opportunities lie in deliberate cross-pollination:
- Heritage & Interactive Media: Breathing life into archival records and museum collections through procedural and spatial design.
- Health & Public Sector Reform: Applying game mechanics and behavioural design to healthcare education and public service delivery.
- Live Performance & Virtual Production: Creating hybrid cultural experiences that reach audiences far beyond physical venue capacities.
Moving From Sector Silos to Ecosystem Value
The conversations sparked across Fusion Fest and TecTonic proved that there is a deep appetite for spaces that refuse to stay in their traditional lane.
For the tech community, interactive creatives offer masterclasses in user engagement, retention, intuitive UI, and emotional connection. For creative practitioners, interactive technology provides an escape from old formats, precarious legacy models – and the opportunity to engage with your audience in entirely new ways.
This is precisely why More Than Games was established: to serve as the active translation layer between these worlds. We need to stop treating digital creativity as an isolated vertical and start deploying it as a horizontal catalyst across Scotland’s enterprise, creative, cultural, and public landscapes.
The future of Scotland’s innovation economy will not be written in isolated sectoral silos. It will be built at the messy, playful, and ambitious intersections where tech and creativity collide.
The amazing people behind it all: Alistair Gunn (GCID), Janine Mathieson (RCS) and Nick Murray (TecTonic) – and their teams – have shown Scotland exactly what can happen when you step outside the norm and build something beautiful, playful and fun.
Now, how do we get involved in 2027?