HAIKU ADVENTURE
Reading the fine prints
“embellishments must ‘belong’ in the game world we’re building”
Haiku Adventure is the work of James Morgan and Ceri Williams. It channels their conversations about growing up on islands and their shared connection with nature into a game. The art style draws heavily on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print tradition and, although still in development, will be featured in an exhibition at the William Morris Gallery. The exhibition, which runs from Feb 26 to May 26, is fitting since it was an earlier show at the gallery that brought ukiyo-e prints into the equation. “The prints seem to acknowledge that capturing a truly accurate representation of nature is an impossibility,” says Williams, “and instead shows a stylized view that gives a fleeting impression of how the natural environment is experienced.” He adds that the absence of a single point of perspective also means the image can be explored by the viewer’s eye as if they were moving around the scene instead of at a fixed point.
At the same time, Williams and Morgan had started to look at haiku poetry and how it aims to capture an experience of the natural world. “Stylized ukiyo-e prints offer postcard snapshots of nature, while haiku poetry attempts to remove the ‘self’ entirely to try and get closer to the truth [of ] nature. Alongside this, Shinto worships the forces of nature by imbuing every part of nature from animals, trees, plants and even mountains with its spirit, the kami.”
Research included visits to ukiyo-e displays and a printing workshop during Williams’ honeymoon to Japan. Other valuable resources were the V&A’s collection, the British Museum’s Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave exhibition, and the website www.ukiyo-e.org, which collects hundreds of thousands of prints in a database. “Primarily we want to faithfully get across the feeling of what it’s like to look at the natural world through the framing of ukiyo-e,” explains Williams.
One of the biggest challenges is figuring out the composition of a scene. “The original prints we reference have really precise framing, which is less easy to capture when parallax and animation causes constant changes as players explore scenes,” says Williams. To resolve this, the pair is focusing on how players are encouraged to pause in specific places so they experience particular framings.
creating atmosphere
Another consideration was how to add a sense of ukiyo-e printing’s physicality to a digital product. Adding visible woodgrain patterns to larger areas of color is one way of doing this. Williams used to work at a joinery so he’s been back to raid their wood offcut pile, scanning these offcuts to create a texture library, which can then be used in the game. “Where we have cliffs, a straight grain overlaid horizontally can represent strata in the rock without needing to add extra linework or additional tones and colors.”
But tapping into the traditional artforms of another
country carries the risk of appropriation or exoticism. I ask how Williams and Morgan are handling this.
“In deciding to use Japanese artistic and cultural traditions as the key references for the game we’re well aware that proper research, understanding and testing are needed,” says Williams. “We’ve been careful to represent ukiyo-e as not just a visual medium but a tradition with a culture and history attached. Above all, a key principle for us has been to make sure that including or referencing any element in the game should never be solely aesthetic— embellishments must ‘belong’ in the game world we’re building.”
The studio is also in early talks with a Japanese publisher who has offered to provide cultural advice during development. “We think working with people who deeply understand aspects of the cultural context this artform exists within is really important. And as two British developers we had to admit to ourselves that it’s easy to misinterpret things when working outside our native culture.” Williams gives an example from working with a translator on the Japanese text for the demo: “We thought we had everything covered until learning that we had used the Japanese font equivalent of Arial… not exactly fitting for the style of the game! Working with Japanese calligraphers and other cultural consultants will help lend our game an authenticity that we might not otherwise achieve on our own.”
Williams adds: “We’ll continue to seek feedback but the positive reception we’ve had when speaking with Japanese friends and companies we’ve been in discussions with so far has been really encouraging.”