Seen and heard: November 2015

80 Days – addictive and educational (sort of) game from Inkle Studios, based (a bit) on Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Essentially a resource management game, you play Passpartout making decisions about time and money to travel all around the world in the 80 days allotted while keeping your master Phileas Phogg comfortable. The world is a steampunk version of the 1880s, so long-distance airships, underwater trains and so on to provide many more alternative routes than were actually available to Verne’s travellers. Along the way, Passepartout encounters real contemporary situations and events, which is an educational aspect. But more than that, it’s great fun, and once you’ve got around the world once inevitably you want to try it again with a different route. (See Adventure Gamers review.)

Telltale Games: story mode – intelligent YouTube 30 minute documentary about the games company currently leading the field in narrative games such as The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. As one of their ex-LucasArts Games founders says, they ended up specialising in four things on which most other games companies had given up: digital distribution, episodic gaming, licensed gaming and interactive narrative.

Let Us Entertain You – BBC documentary series by Domenic Sandbrook, presenting his thesis that Britain’s historic manufacturing pre-eminence has been replaced by pre-eminence in the creative and entertainment industries. Certainly entertaining, if you’re prepared (as the reviewer of the book comments) to go along with his celebration of popular culture to the exclusion of high art.

Periodic Tales – tremendous exhibition at Compton Verney art gallery, themed around the periodic table of chemistry and stocked with artworks based on the cultural associations of certain elements: gold, silver, iron, lead, copper, cobalt, aluminium, uranium. Highlights were Cornelia Parker's Thirty Pieces of Silver and Anthony Gormley's FUSE 2011.

Memoryhouse – really lovely album from contemporary classical composer Max Richter previously only name to me, but whose music we heard and loved as the accompaniment to the ballet ‘Serpent’ in BalletBoyz at the Roundhouse. Like Philip Glass, but different. An album to put on and just hear, doing nothing else