Video games

If there is one thing this cursed year of lockdown has been good for, it’s been video games. The right game — in a way that a box set cannot — will give you a sense of steady progress and achievement, a series of goals; and a world more forgiving and expansive than the four walls of your living room. My kids, for instance, have become very good indeed at Mario Kart Wii and have built vast empires in Minecraft; and I don’t dare look at my own total playing time on World of Warcraft.  With the prospect of the tier system continuing well into the new year, now is a good time to stock up on the best new goodies. The big news in gaming this autumn has been the release of the latest generation of consoles.

After several days in quarantine, you're probably thinking: what now? You've exhausted a few Netflix series, spent some time in the kitchen baking, had some drinking sessions over Skype with your buddies, and now you're probably getting a little bit stir crazy. And if you're a video gamer, you might have finally finished the one or two games you bought a few months ago but never had time to play because of work or social obligations. Unfortunately, that means you're fresh out of ideas for how else to spend your time in self-isolation. Lucky for you folks, I've put together a list of my top video games you should play while quarantined.

Grade: B Resident Evil 2 takes the original zombie shooter, which has become a cult classic and, to many, the quintessential horror video game, and gives it a lick of digital paint. Gone are the blocky hallways of the Raccoon City police station, along with the slow moving hordes of undead who, if you squinted, might’ve had a pixel of drool at the corner of their mouth. In their place is a German expressionist labyrinth of disorientating shadows, and antagonists so realistically putrefied the game ought to come with the sort of warnings they put on particularly pungent cheese.

Digital art is a crowded field. It’s also now older than I am. Yet despite a 50-year courtship, art galleries have been reluctant to allow it more than a toehold in their collections. Things are changing. Take MoMA’s visit to Paris last year. Alongside the Picassos and Pollocks was a very popular final room, made up of a single, beautiful computer-generated animation, in which a huddle of humans tramp across a constantly disintegrating landscape. ‘Emissaries’ (2015–17) is the work of the 33-year-old artist Ian Cheng, who two weeks ago opened his first show in the UK at the Serpentine Gallery. Cheng’s first inspirations were video games like The Sims, and working in special effects on Pirates of the Caribbean.

Sand in the Sandwiches is the perfect show for those who feel the West End should be an intellectual funfair. It sets out to amuse, surprise, divert, uplift and nothing more. Edward Fox’s biographical portrait of John Betjeman has a smattering of his most famous poems ingeniously woven into the narrative. Fox knows his stuff. His shrill, elongated upper-middle-class accent is 99 per cent impersonation and 1 per cent exaggeration. He reminds us that when Betjeman said ‘Edwardian’ he rhymed the second syllable with card, not sword. From early boyhood Betjeman knew that poetry would be his trade. Aged 14, he read the sonnets of Oscar Wilde’s chum, Bosie, and judged them superior to Shakespeare’s. He sent the ageing poet an admiring letter.