H
aiku 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 itwas 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, Williamsand 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 http://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“EMBELLISHMENTS
MUST ‘BELONG’ IN
THE GAME WORLD
WE’RE BUILDING”BELOW: Haiku and
ukiyo-e combine in
Small Island Games’
exploration of nature.HAIKU
ADVENTURE
Reading the fine prints
Pen and Paper Gaming
FEATURE