Game of the Week: The secret to Baldur's Gate 3's success is fanfiction

I remember visiting the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition at the British Library and being quite taken with how it featured - and therefore recognised - fanfiction. There in a digital exhibit counting the tens of thousands of stories written about famous fantasy worlds, it seemed to declare these stories a crucial part of how fantasy exists now. In a sense, it portrayed fanfiction as the lifeblood of fantasy, pumping it around the world, keeping it alive.

That stayed with me because I think too often fanfiction is niche-d. People disregard it as work overly concerned with characters being romantically involved - usually characters who aren't together in the official canon. They don't take it seriously. But that's a mistake, and I learnt how much of a mistake when I watched a talk by Baudelaire Welch at the Develop Conference in Brighton this week.

Welch oversaw the companion romances in Baldur's Gate 3, and wrote the Dark Urge storyline. Most importantly of all, though, they grew up - figuratively speaking - in the fanfiction community. They came in via a fixation with Garrus in the Mass Effect series and never left. It's one of the reasons Welch eventually landed themselves a job at Larian Studios on Baldur's Gate 3. And as their talk was at pains to point out - much as the Fantasy exhibition had months earlier - few things are more important for keeping worlds alive than fanfiction.