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Currently running at the British Library (until 25th February 2024), the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition manages to pack a lot into its four rooms. If one of its aims is to cover the breadth of fantasy as a mode of creative expression, they’ve certainly succeeded, as the exhibition covers books, film, TV, art, games (both digital and physical), as well as oddities such as Bernard Sleigh’s “Ancient Mappe of Fairyland” from 1918 (is it art, a story, a game?) which greets you as you enter.

The best thing, for me, was certainly the opportunity to see some original manuscripts. A page from Alan Garner’s Owl Service (written in red ink) was presented alongside an example of the Owl Service plate that inspired it; there was Michael Palin’s notebook in which he was working out the plot for Monty Python and the Holy Grail; and a page from C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe manuscript beginning: “This book is about four children whose names are Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter” (alongside Lewis’s own map of Narnia); as well as handwritten pages from Angela Carter, Diana Wynne Jones, and E. Nesbit, among others.

My favourites among the manuscripts, though, were the ones which featured drawings. (Do any but fantasy authors create drawings as they write?) I didn’t know, for instance, that Ursula Le Guin produced illustrations (for herself, I think, rather than publication) for the Earthsea books. Alongside her manuscript for A Wizard of Earthsea was a drawing of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe, and a page (perhaps done in ink wash, and certainly easier to make out in a photograph) depicting Tenar’s first sight of Ged in The Tombs of Atuan.

I did know, on the other hand, that Mervyn Peake peppered his Titus Groan and Gormenghast notebooks with drawings, but it was wonderful to see them. The illustration of the Prunesquallors, for instance, was alongside a page on which Peake had written out the dialogue for a scene (with no he said/she saids). There was also a double-page drawing by G K Chesterton of characters from The Man Who Was Thursday (it turns out Chesterton can draw quite well), and Susanna Clarke’s plans of the house from Piranesi.

And speaking of Piranesi, as well as manuscripts, there were printed books on display, among the more impressive of which was an edition of Piranesi’s Carceri, which I was surprised to see showed one plate over a double page spread (I’d have thought they’d print one to a page, to avoid losing details in the fold); and a first edition of William Morris’s highly illuminated Story of the Glittering Plain.

The other thing I love to see up close are paintings, though there were only a few here. Few, but all good ones: for instance, Richard Dadd’s Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke (which reminds me, one aspect of fantasy the exhibition seemed to have missed out on was music — it would have been great to have had Queen’s “Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke” playing through one of the exhibit’s little hold-it-to-your-ear listening devices alongside the painting). What struck me about this painting, which for a long time I had as a poster on my wall, was that it was smaller than I expected — which made the level of detail all the more impressive.

Ditto for an Alan Lee original. In a display that included Gandalf’s staff from the Peter Jackson films and a page of notes from Tolkien commenting on a proposed BBC adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, there was an Alan Lee watercolour depicting the assault on Helm’s Deep. It was, perhaps, little larger than A3, but the level of detail was incredible. Distant figures — millimetres high — were tiny but sharply outlined, and my mind boggled at the level of hand-control Lee must have (as well as the fineness of his brushes).

There were also a couple of Brian Froud pieces from The Dark Crystal, alongside a display of props from the film: costumes worn by the gelflings, along with a shard of the Dark Crystal itself. (It didn’t glow as I approached, so I guess I’m not the chosen one. Or does it mean I’m not a Skeksis? Maybe I’m glad it didn’t glow…)

There were also film loops from Pan’s Labyrinth and Princess Mononoke playing on enormous screens. Also (for some reason on a tiny screen), a scene from Xena: Warrior Princess. The Xena screen, small as it was, was right next to what was surely the most unimpressive display in the exhibit, the case dedicated to sword & sorcery.

This contained three modern paperbacks. Just that. They looked like they were social distancing. This made me wonder if, alongside exploring the breadth of fantasy as a genre (in books, films, art, games, TV), there needed to be some exploration of its sometimes overwhelming mass. An exhibit like this, tastefully showcasing the manuscripts of great works, perhaps needed to switch tack when representing something like sword & sorcery, which, to my mind, needed a case stuffed with examples of trashy-covered paperbacks: so many you’d be overwhelmed. (But perhaps it was difficult, with sword & sorcery, to find covers that would keep the exhibit schoolchild friendly!)

Similarly, with the display of D&D rulebooks, I thought they looked a bit sparse and sterile on their own, and could have done with a few polyhedral dice, dungeon floor-plans, characters sheets, pencils and so on strewn about — an element of playfulness amongst the respectfulness.

I’ve probably missed out a lot in this run-through of the exhibition’s highlights. It seemed quite well-spaced when I was walking through, but now I realise how much it packed in. There was, in addition, an area mocked up like the Red Room from Twin Peaks, scenes from computer games (including one you could play, but I wasn’t about to show up my lack of skills), a Warhammer set-up, some pretty impressive LARP costumes, ballet costumes, and more.

I’ll end, though, with an echo of the last exhibition I covered on this blog, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth exhibit that was held at the Bodleian (five years ago, I’m shocked to see). There, I commented on the tiny-ness of some of the handwriting on display, which reached its apogee in a letter from Tolkien’s mother. That, though, is nothing compared to the tiny-ness of the Brönte siblings’ writing in their hand-made books detailing their imaginative world of Glass Town. One tiny, tiny book, filled with tiny, tiny writing defied my attempts to read it, so I have no idea how anyone actually wrote it:

I’m playing LA Noire at the moment, and it’s just starting to grow on me. As usual with me — particularly in a game with a lot of controls to remember, like this one — the main barrier to my enjoying it is that I’m still getting use to which button does what, which means that, even though I’ve been promoted from uniformed cop to traffic to homicide (“This is the big time, Phelps!”), I’m still a danger to the good citizens of LA while simply driving at low speeds from location to location (and a lot of this game involves covering the eight square miles of 1940’s LA streets that makes for its backdrop), let alone when giving high-speed chase. And when faced with a genuine armed perp, I’m as likely to jump out from behind cover and start frantically re-loading my fully loaded gun as I am to actually shoot the guy. (So far, all the gun-wielding perps have been guys, but there have been some pretty shady dames…) The thing is, there’s always a few controls you get used to more quickly than others — moving around, picking up objects to examine them for their clue-potential — while others, usually the more emergency-oriented ones, like taking cover when being fired at, or blocking a punch, or applying the brakes in a moving vehicle(!), you only need to use in situations of dire emergency, so you don’t get used to them till you really need them. But that’s just me. I’ve never been a power gamer and never will be. As I’ve said before, what I play games for are immersive stories.

LA Noire‘s big selling point is its “revolutionary new facial animation technology”, by which actors’ expressions have been used to program the reactions of suspects to the questions you fire at them, and you then have to use their body language (alongside the evidence you’ve gathered) to judge whether they’re telling the truth. So far it’s not been too difficult. If, after answering a question, the suspect looks you in the eye with a relatively placid expression, they’re telling the truth, but if they immediately start looking at anything but you, they’re lying. (Though I did upset a female clerk in a shoe shop by calling her a liar when she was probably just upset her boss was lying in a bloody pool on the pavement outside.) The thing is, they keep doing their reaction while the game waits for you to make your choice of truth, doubt, or lie, so it’s not like you’re checking for telltale micro-expressions. What this aspect of the game hangs on is the realism of the faces, and I’m happy to say that I find the faces believable enough to react to as faces, rather than the weird things you found looking back at you in games from only a few years ago (those starey bubble eyes in Oblivion always made me a bit uncomfortable).

So far, LA Noire has been pretty forgiving of my kack-handed way with the controls. I haven’t been kicked off the force for the not inconsiderable amount of injuries to pedestrians and car prangs I’ve caused while heading to the next location. Also, if you fail an action sequence (such as a chase, car-tail or shoot-out) three times, you’re given the option to skip it at no game-cost. So far, I’ve only skipped one, and that was accidental because, the first time I was given the option to skip it, I didn’t read the message properly. (One annoying thing about all these lush new immersive games coming out at the moment is they really need you to have a big, preferably HD, TV. On my old CRT one, the tiny text is often near-indecipherable. I’m beginning to feel a bit technologically outmoded.)

It’s got me thinking about interactive stories, though. There are two ways interactivity can add to your enjoyment of a story. One is that, through your actions, you can change the outcome, and that’s usually seen as the holy grail of interactive storytelling. The other is that, because you get the chance to explore and examine the environment at your own pace and in your own way, you really feel as though you’ve stepped into the game world, and so feel much more involved in whatever story you’re being guided through. And really, it’s the latter I prefer. As far as the former is concerned, I think a story has a pretty fixed structure, otherwise it just doesn’t work. Influencing the outcome is okay for minor changes, but usually there’s one correct way through a story, and you either hit that or you fail. I’ve never really been fussed by that sort of game, anyway. (Perhaps because I’m not much of a re-player.)

LA Noire — so far at least — has been pretty well structured in terms of its stories. After all, these are crimes that have been committed and there’s only one correct way to see them through, which is to arrest (or kill) the criminal responsible. (I’m not sure at this early stage if it’s possible to arrest the wrong person, yet. But certainly there are a few shady characters who don’t get arrested, even if you feel they should.) It would be nice if the investigations themselves were a bit more free-form — at the moment, you’re pretty much guided to each succeeding location or suspect till you’ve gathered all the necessary evidence, but I’ve a feeling things will be getting more complicated as the game progresses. (Hopefully, I’ll have figured out the difference between the punch and drop-your-guard buttons by then.)

And, of course, it’s the setting which is a big part of the fun of playing LA Noire. LA in full, sunny colour isn’t really a very noir-ish place (you can play the game in black and white if you want, but what you really need are stark shadows and shady personalities, and they’ll come through equally well in colour or mono), but the cynicism is certainly there. It’s an immersive world of forties slang, seen-it-all-before detectives, glamorous broads and drunk no-hopers, sleazy bars and cheap hotels, fading starlets, dodgy vice squad officers, drugs, blood (a lot of blood), corpses, fast-talking wise guys, strong-arm dumb gangsters, dodgy psychiatrists and an awful, awful lot of waiting at goddamned never-changing red traffic lights.

Trouble is, I’m just too honest a cop to use my siren except when it’s a real emergency. But as soon as I do, you get to see mailboxes, street lamps, and even innocent pedestrians fly!

I play one or two video games a year, partly because I don’t spend many hours per week playing them, and partly because my tastes (and gaming abilities) seem to be different enough from the marketplace in general that I can’t find many I know I’m going to enjoy. (And also, of course, because they’re expensive, which puts me off too much experimentation.) I like, above all, games which tell stories — and I don’t just mean those which have a cutscene or two to explain why we’re moving from level one to level two, but games with some sort of genuine emotional content. Failing that, games which allow me to explore an atmospheric environment. Among the former, I’d place the Myst series (particularly Myst III), Final Fantasy VIII, and Ico; among the latter, the early Tomb Raider games. (I haven’t finished any of the more recent Tomb Raider offerings, but the first five are among the few I’ve played twice, all the way through.)

BioShock 2, which I finished recently, sits sort of halfway between.

The BioShock games take place in the city of Rapture, built in the 1950s by plutocrat Andrew Ryan, whose idea was to create a place in which people could live without government interference — specifically, without the government placing any limits on what profit-hungry businessmen and knowledge-hungry scientists could get up to. And as the only place to build such a city is the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, that’s where he builds it: a magnificent Art Deco temple to consumerism, leisure, and wild genetic experimentation. In its later, semi-ruined state, it makes a wonderfully weird game environment.

Ryan’s ideals are based on those of the writer Ayn Rand. What little I know about Rand comes from my one attempt at reading her brick of a book, Atlas Shrugged, which seemed to be mostly about self-indulgent industrialists moaning at how labour laws interfere with their profit margins. Rand believed governments shouldn’t get in the way of business tycoons by imposing such things as minimum wages and worker’s rights. Life, for Rand, was meant to be a fight for survival in which the strong impose their will on the weak as much as their strength allows. Rapture was conceived of as the living example of her ideals, but it quickly descends into chaos, and by the time you visit it as an outsider in the first BioShock game, it’s nothing but a once-beautiful ruin populated by deranged, feral “gene splicers”, and a handful of holed-in entrepreneurs clinging to their failed ideals.

But the core story of BioShock is about rescuing innocence. Fifties America, from which the games get so much of their look and feel, was one of the last modern eras to have a culturally-accepted idea of innocence. It was an era that allowed itself to believe in simple ideals. This tends to be seen, nowadays, as a veneer over the decade’s intolerance and repression — as typified by the image of the housewife going quietly insane trying to live up to advertisers’ ideals of perfection, or the awful race riots in the country at the time — and anyway it was all put paid to by a combination of Senator McCarthy’s paranoia, the fear of atomic war, the disaster of Vietnam, and the assassination of JFK, among other things. By the sixties, the belief in innocence was relegated to the hippie counterculture, and then was pretty much laughed out of court. Since then, cynicism has become the cultural norm, to the point that it’s often referred to as realism.

The ruined Art Deco beauty of the city of Rapture is ruined innocence in concrete, glass and formica. But it’s the figures of the Little Sisters who are the real focal point. The Little Sisters are little girls, dressed to the girliest in Alice bows and petticoated dresses, but who have evilly glowing eyes and go around draining corpses of the gene-modifying substance known as “Adam” with monstrous syringes. In this, they’re accompanied by their protectors, the Big Daddies — dumb, lumbering giants looking like old-fashioned deep sea divers, who tramp obediently after their charges and attack anyone who gets too near. But the Little Sisters are in fact real little girls — orphans, as if the screw needed a further turn — who’ve been genetically altered by Rapture’s scientists to harvest Adam. The story of both BioShock 1 & 2 is ultimately about freeing these little girls from the tyranny of Rapture, and returning them to being innocent children once more.

BioShock allows its players to make a few moral choices. You need to capture Little Sisters to get supplies of Adam, for instance, but having captured them, you can choose to rescue them, or harvest them (which gets you more Adam, but kills the girl). I, being an awful softie, just couldn’t harvest them, even to find out how it alters the game’s outcome.

Other than that, BioShock is basically a shoot-em-up. The story part progresses mostly through taped journals from a variety of characters you find throughout the game, but the gameplay generally consists of collecting a wide variety of ammo and blasting the hell out of gene-splicers and Big Daddies.

Which was fun.

As a game, I found both BioShock 1 and 2 to be wonderfully playable, and though the story never quite reached the heights of the games that really involved me in their characters (Final Fantasy VIII, Myst III), it at least had some thought-provoking ideas behind it. Games achieve their effects in a different way from films and books; the major factor is the time you spend in the game’s world, doing the same sort of action (exploring, puzzle-solving, fighting) over and over again. It’s in this area that the real meaning of a game comes out, not in the cut-scenes. And it’s in this area — the gameplay — that BioShock works best.

Nice to know there’s a bit of artistry as well as mere commercialism in games, still.