#making-of

[easternmind]

J A P A N o F I L E S # 10 – Like The Baseless Fabric

[ The preponderance of Playstation titles featured in this series should not raise a single eyebrow. It is becoming increasingly evident that, parallel to this emancipatory system’s decade-long victorious streak, ran an involuntary cultural movement of unfettered creativity and ingenuity, guided in its first steps by the baton of Sony’s music division. The number of digital artifacts within this library that are deserving of extended explorations is as vast as it is varied in nature. The following is a pristine specimen firmly within the grand lineage of graphical adventures, whose astute assimilation of Western influences is not only structural, but also thematic and aesthetic. The first draft of this article dates from mid 2007, from a time long before the Eastern Mind Tumblr existed. Since then, a considerable amount of research and commentary has been made available online. And yet, much remains unsaid. ]

~ Paper Trails ~

The invention of the printing press in the 15th century tends to overshadow the technological revolution introduced by the production of paper. It may be altogether impossible for the contemporary reader to fathom the scale and scope of this innovation in its fullest expression. Although the papyrus was commonly used in ancient Egypt, the most direct ancestor to modern paper originated in China, with recorded uses in the 2nd century, spreading across the far east and central Asia in the ensuing centuries. By the 8th century, it was carried to Persia by Chinese prisoners in captivity. For hundreds of years, the Islamic world safely guarded to itself the secrets of paper making, having incorporated considerable improvements to the production process. The first use of paper in Europe is attributed to the Moors, and is estimated to have occurred in Spain sometime in the 11th century.

One notable advancement took place in the province of Ancona in Italy in the 13th century, where one of the early production centres of paper in Europe developed as a result of exchanges between local artisans and incarcerated Arabs. It was there, in the town of Fabriano, that the concept of the watermark - as it remains known to this day - first originated. As is true of any other craft in medieval times, paper mills, too, were organised as guilds, each bearing their own unique brand and emblem. The increased importance of ascertaining provenance precipitated the need of a solution that could permit each sheet’s manufacturer to be readily identified, in due course setting the standard for papermaking across Europe for many centuries. Watermarks are obtained by carefully manipulating how the paper fibres mesh during the production stage, a technique that remains preserved to this very day as a resource to deter counterfeiting of high-end stationary, stamps and bank notes. In a sense, the watermark represents authenticity, deeply imprinted into the object of one’s creation, such that it’s at once concealed from plain view and indelibly present. This clever concept acts as thematic binding in The Book Of Watermarks, one of the most peculiar creations of this matchless era of Japanese game design and the only independent videogame creation from graphic artist Takashi Kobayashi. An ode to classical culture and artistic creation, it invites the player to explore the vistas of an imaginary island on an expedition to recover a series of lost books that have vanished, all save one: the homonymous master catalogue from whence all human knowledge streams.

[ Visually reminiscent of Mont Saint-Michel, Iris and Ceres’s terrain was modelled after Ebisujima and Mikomotojima, two small islands in Shimoda, Izu. ]

~ This Rough Magic ~

As sweeping as Shakespeare’s influence on all genres of fiction has been, even to the English language itself, the medium of videogames appears to have remained suspiciously impervious to it - in any meaningful capacity, at least. From what direct adaptations of his work have been attempted, the lion’s share of which minor affairs, only the 1984 IF adaptation of Macbeth by the long defunct Oxford Digital is deserving of fond remembrance. Game critics and analysts were late to identify a formidable, if cunningly muted undercurrent of Shakespearean tragedy in Japanese role playing games, dating back to the mid 1980s. It took the blatant theatrical elements of Final Fantasy IX for specialty magazines to so much as utter the dramaturge’s name in relation to the long-standing series. By the time the twelfth episode of this series willed out, no doubt owed to the divisive choice of an all-English voice cast, the acknowledgement was near commonplace. It would be fair to assert that the bard’s wit and wisdom has found its finest representations in digital interactions when more loosely fitted onto an original game design, as opposed to the myriad of spiritless and lacklustre transliterations. At that, The Book of Watermarks has more than merited its mention as a self-styled adaptation of his 1611 mystical comedy, The Tempest, from whose dramatis personae and plot it borrows but a sprinkling of fragments. Whereas the original tale is firmly footed on inter-character conflict, political power plays and a fervour for revenge, the entirety of those elements were cast aside in the game into a state of deliberate neutral abstraction. Prospero, whom the great playwright likely modelled after the bibliophile John Dee, is depicted herein as a benevolent sorcerer in need of aid; while the element of agency, Ferdinand, washes up on the shore of his enchanted island not as a result of a resentful spell, yet by mere happenstance.

[ The name Ariel, after the spirit that serves Prospero, is employed in the game in relation to two symmetrical male figures wearing a vine leaf crown, who more closely resemble the figure of Dionysus, or Bacchus as he was known to the Romans. ] Earlier versions of the game developer’s website made reference to the usurping Duke of Milan, Antonio, and his banishing of the wizard brother to a remote island. They also cite the old Neapolitan advisor, Gonzalo, who smuggled thirteen books from a library onto Prospero’s boat upon learning of his expatriation. Such personages and events were, at the last, excluded from the game proper. Ariel, the air spirit, whose role was traditionally played on stage by an actress, was converted to two statuesque masculine figures guarding the quarters. The names Iris and Ceres, the two intervening gods of the Roman pantheon, were repurposed to identify the two islands shaped by the rightful duke’s thaumaturgy. Though the game opens and closes with two quintessential citations from the play, that which occurs in between is informed by countless other sources of inspiration whose identification begs closer scrutiny.

In many respects, the game’s visual presentation does little to conceal the occasional parallel to Peter Greenaway’s 1991 acclaimed Prospero’s Books. Itself a loose, eccentric and schismatic adaptation of selected aspects of the bard’s valedictory opus, the film stands as an apocryphal, homage fiction rendition of the magic tomes from which Prospero gathered the knowledge to protect his daughter - themselves a secondary element in the play. The picture’s processional enumeration of its twenty four books - one for each frame of the cinematic second - is distinctly mirrored in the game’s own structure and exposition. Prospero’s garments as is the use of brief imagetic interludes to showcase each book vividly bringing to mind the intricate visual compositions for whose composition and editing Greenaway enlisted the expertise of NHK studios in Japan. Combining their revolutionary Hi-Vision HDTV technology with the unique capabilities of Britain’s own Quantel Paintbox software, film, video and computerized graphics were layered atop one another to striking effect. This collaboration opens up interesting possibilities as to how the motion picture may have earned some degree of following in Japan that year, establishing it as a topic in dedicated media, securing a theatrical release and, in time, spawning this interactive disquisition.

In Shakespeare’s play, the books represent the wellspring from whence Prospero’s magical powers derive and grant him agency - for without them he's but a sot. In Greenaway’s film, they are a living mechanism of Prospero’s fantasy as it unfolds, an element of seclusion and control over the remaining dwellers of the island. In Book of Watermarks, however, the books serve a twofold purpose: they are the object of an elaborate fetch quest and the most visible emblem of the humanistic component at the centre of its themes; countermanding the construct of mageia with techne, the ripe fruit of Human imagination. In other words, a knowledge so advanced, so out of step with its time that it bound to be misinterpreted as sorcery.

One striking aspect about the game is its absolute detachment from the ubiquitous religious components inherent to the cultural heritage it wishes to commemorate. Taking into account that the action takes place in a fictional southern archipelago in the year 1611, this very observation raises a critical question. One of the principal locations of the game, the Quattuor Angelus Aedes, flaunts a virtual replica of the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris that preserves the Gothic splendour in its entirety, save for the fact that it was sanitised of any Christian iconography. It would be safe to assume that this is owed to the same commercial concerns that, for the near entirely, have kept religious cogitations far afield from video game development. Here, exceptionally, it lends a beneficial clue as to how the game may wish to be interpreted.

[ Prospero’s library designs went through a few iterations, all of which distinctly borrow a number of elements of Antonello Da Messina’s seminal painting San Girolamo nello studio. Notice the raised room and the two-light window at the center and colonnade. ]

~ A Polymath’s Reverie ~

It is by no means accidental that The Book of Watermarks is set during the late Renaissance. Even the most superficial study of Prospero’s digital books will leave little room for doubt as to their evident alignment with Enlightenment values, memorialising as they do the great triumphs of Man alongside a set of mystical references that evoke the principles of early Italian Humanists such as Ficino or Pico della Mirandola. Some constitute a direct correspondence to actual historical writings of great historical import. The remainder navigate a liminal space between history and fantasy in service of the thesis that human progress is owed to ancient knowledge, often transmitted through the written word, many of its records erased by time and preserved only in oral tradition. This knowledge, this magic, is at the nucleus of the civilizational apogee that was the Renaissance. All books, without exception, are presented with a certain reverence and visual flair, the discovery of each lost manuscript imparting a greater sense meaning to the resolution of its spatial, alphanumeric or geometric enigmas; a recompense that transcends the congratulatory and manipulative positive reinforcement games so frequently cajole their unwary players with. On occasion, the puzzles themselves are themed after the contents of the reacquired book. The linear and immutable order in which they are found is denotive of their premeditated Pythagorean numerical attributes. A closer scrutiny of each tome yields bounteous returns.

I - Book of Navigators An imaginary book on shipbuilding, oceanography, geography and astronomy, herein said to have belonged to Prince Henry the Navigator, a towering figure in the context of maritime expansion of the Atlantic islands and Western Africa under whose leadership the mighty Portuguese caravel was introduced. It nonetheless renders a striking allusion to the scattered knowledge of the seas and of shipwrighting that was directly or indirectly inherited by Portuguese sailors from seagoing Phoenicians, Romans and Arabs. The number one stands for individuality.

II - Book of Architects A purely fictional book from ancient history that is described to have inspired the twelfth century French abbot Suger to introduce the Gothic style. Though it is correct that his contribution is widely acknowledged among early adopters of this architectural current, there are no known books on the construction of the mythical Tower of Babel - contrary to popular belief, no such passage as much exists within the Old Testament. Though the concept of verticality is instrumental to both these references, the Babylonian edifice’s height symbolized the human ambition of supplanting the divine, while Gothic architecture’s efforts to reach new heights were rooted in a desire to ascend nearer to the heavens. Number two stands for symmetry. III - Book of Elements of Geometry The description provided, albeit specious, is rooted in some knowledge of history. The abbot Saint Bernard de Clairvaux was neither a mathematician nor an architect, nor was he known to have possessed any books on such matters, but his pure interpretation of the Rule of Saint Benedict gave rise to Cistercian Order, whose ascetic theology embraced the ideal of a simple monastic life nurtured by work and prayer. These were the guiding principles behind the austere and unadorned aesthetics of Cistercian architecture that came to characterize the proto-Gothic. The concept for the book in question may be inexplicitly sourced from Euclid’s Elements, namely its thirteenth century translation whose influence over key figures of Renaissance art, from Da Vinci and Dürer to Brunelleschi and Alberti, is well established. The number three is associated with the principle of harmonious creation.

IV - Book of Labyrinth The notion of a book that antecedes Daedalus is as provocative as it is unfounded. Himself a reference belonging to Ancient Greek folklore, no work of this skilled builder and father of Icarus echoes more in eternity than the Labyrinth of Crete, built to trap the fabled minotaur. The afterword of his getting lost in his own maze is accurate to Ovid’s account in the narrative poem Metamorphoses. The numerical implication relates to the four directions, which is further expounded by the maze-like segment of the game.

V - Book of Fabrica De Humanis Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem is an innovational sixteenth century treatise authored by the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius composed of seven volumes, featuring detailed illustrations attributed to the artists at Titian’s workshop. For shedding new light on human anatomy at the cost of dissecting cadavers, thus overturning many of Greek anatomist Galen’s widely accepted conclusions, Vesalius faced persecution from the Church and was trialled by the Inquisition. Though he was spared from death at the burning stake, the return trip from his compelled penance and pilgrimage to Jerusalem caused him to become ill and perish prematurely in the Greek island of Zante. Five is the sum of the first even number with the first odd number and concerns the number of extremities of the body and the senses.

VI - Book of Roses Prospero describes it as a book containing the origins of poetic love and the sonnet form, later adding this was the definitive guide to romantic manners once owned by Petrarch and, two centuries later, Shakespeare. An altogether imaginary codex likely gleaned from an assortment of Ovid’s works Amores, Ars Amatoria and its continuation, Remedia Amoris, the ancient Roman poet having been a notable influence in the works of both. Inversely, there is less legitimacy to the suggestion that his elegiac meter was the root of the Italian sonnet found more famously in Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere. The reference to roses is itself an intrepid intimation to the medieval French poetic allegory Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The number six is illustrated as a hexagonal star, made of two triangles, the perfect union between man and woman.

[ The Villa Forma’s walls are sumptuously decorated with an assortment of Italian paintings, including Tiziano’s Amor Sacro e Amor Profano (above), Giovanni Lanfranco’s Il Consiglio degli Dèi, as well as Guido Reni’s Aurora, the last two from the Baroque period. ]

VII - Book of Necronomicon At first glance, the reference to a meta-fictional book within the corpus of H. P. Lovecraft's literature may sound entirely out of place. However, as it shall be discussed later in this text, this is an amusing, self-referential play on words meant to evoke the developer’s previous works. The claim is that the book contained knowledge of death and the journey of the afterlife places it in neat thematic alignment with the ancient Egyptian funerary texts commonly named Book of the Dead, the Tibetan Bardo Thodol or the incunable Ars Moriendi. The mention of the book once belonging to the library of the order of Saint Francis of Assisi, seeped though it may be in artistic liberty, gravitates around a kernel of truth. After all, the Catholic friar and mystic did travel to the East on a mission to convert the sultan of Egypt. Later representations of the saint often include a skull as memento mori and testament to his moribund ponderings on Sister Death. In great measure, his followers preserved the symbology of death in their doctrine, best exemplified by the eighteenth century edification of the Chapel of Bones in the south of Portugal. Seven stands for spirituality, the convergence of physical four and the spiritual three.

VIII - Book of Astronomicon Inspired by Manilius’ first century poem the Astronomica, often named the Astronomicon. Divided into five books, it pertains to a moment in history when astronomy and astrology stood as inseparable subject matters, rendering a parallel between the twelve signs of the zodiac and the human body. Some historical inaccuracies in the archduke’s chronicle are rather conspicuous. The books were originally written in Latin, negating the stated claim of a later translation - probably an acknowledgement of their fifteenth century compilation by Lorenzo Bonincontri. The poem was not known to have been a direct influence on Giordano Bruno’s cosmology or his adoption of the universe’s infinity as a model, a concept entirely absent from Manilius’ attempt at immortality; nor was it ever proscribed by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, ostensibly due to how unobserved it was both at the time of its creation and during the Rinascità. In addition, Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome, not in Venice, his ashes cast to the Tiber. For the Pythagoreans, the number eight aptly denotes infinity.

IX - Book of Aesthetics Said to have been owned by the Medici and single-handedly instigating the styles of Da Vinci and Michelangelo, it finds a close resemblance in Vitruvius masterwork De Architectura dated from ca. 20 BC; no doubt a pillar of the artistic production of the renaissance whose relevance greatly transcends its inestimable worth as a compilation of centuries of Greco-Roman architecture, having become a reference on proportion and harmony that guided the principles of painting and sculpture for centuries. The book was surreptitiously preserved among ancient monk’s manuscripts until the early humanist Bracciolini recovered it in the fifteenth century. The pervasive image of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, presumably steered by Andrea’s early rendition, is regarded as the first accurate pictorial rendition of Vitruvius’ writings. It would be important to mention, in brief, that the modern usage of the term aesthetics in this context - as coined by Baumgartner in the mid-eighteenth century - is forgivably anachronistic. The number nine stands for wisdom, altruism and intuition.

[ There is a singular ambiance in The Book of Watermarks that speaks of the creator’s obsession with light, shadow and texture. Notice the sun-drenched surfaces that punctuate the composition’s impeccable diffuse lightning display. ]

X - Book of Polychronion The medieval prototype of the contemporary best-seller, the Polychronion is the necessary abbreviation for the seven volume history Ranulphi Castrensis, cognomine Higden, Polychronicon (sive Historia Polycratica) ab initio mundi usque ad mortem regis Edwardi III in septem libros dispositum. Authored by the Cesterian Benedictine monk Ranulf Higden, this all-encompassing history records a voluminous assortment of events from Genesis to the reign of Edward III, and is believed to have been concluded circa 1327. A well-placed annotation by Prospero speaks of the 1482 edition by English printer extraordinaire William Caxton, based on an update to the Polychronion by John of Trevisa in the 1380s, to which Caxton contributed nearly another century of recorded history, naming his coda Liber Ultimus. It represents the ceaseless process of writing history. The number ten possesses pythagorean numerology ties with the act of creation and the interrelation between all things.

XI - Book of Le Viander As books offer nourishment for the mind, so does food for the body. Le Viandier, often translated to the food provider, is a collection of more than a hundred recipes created by Guillaume Tirel ca. 1300. The title may also be understood to mean a collection of recipes. His large, aquiline nose earned him the sobriquet Taillevent, the wind cutter. Tirel went from being a simple cook for Jeanne d'Évreux to becoming the Premier Ecuyer of all royal kitchens in France. His was an invaluable contribution not only to French cuisine and the appreciation of Bordeaux red wines as part of experiencing a meal, but the concept of fine dining itself, including its decorative, at times theatrical facet. The number eleven has long been understood to mean a sin due to naturally exceeding ten (commandments). Quite the guileful hint to gluttony.

[ An illustration from Cesare Cesariano from the 1521 edition of Vitruvius’ De Architectura, included in animated form in the ninth book of aesthetics. ]

XII - Book of Silence An explicit invocation of the seventeenth century hermetic illustration catalogue Mutus Liber by unknown author Altus. Or is it? Upon discovering the book, Prospero refers to this wordless volume as being sequestered away in the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II as its previous owners. This presents a problem due to the fact that the Mutus Liber was published in La Rochelle in 1677, some fifty years after his death. The Dengeki guidebook adds another layer of mystery by way of a mention to the seer of seers, John Dee. The resolution to this quandary may come in the form of what is perhaps the most inscrutable book of all, The Voynich Manuscript, which Wilfred Voynich said to have one been bestowed to Rudolph II by the English sage. This ventures into the realms of historical conjecture, as there is no established relation between the two. The number twelve is the base of the Babylonian duodecimal system, a symbol of perfection resulting from the multiplication of alchemy’s four elements by the three fundamental principles.

XII - Book of Silence An explicit invocation of the seventeenth century hermetic illustration catalogue Mutus Liber by unknown author Altus. Or is it? Upon discovering the book, Prospero refers to this wordless volume as being sequestered away in the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II as its previous owners. This presents a problem due to the fact that the Mutus Liber was published in La Rochelle in 1677, some fifty years after his death. The Dengeki guidebook adds another layer of mystery by way of a mention to the seer of seers, John Dee. The resolution to this quandary may come in the form of what is perhaps the most inscrutable book of all, The Voynich Manuscript, which Wilfred Voynich said to have one been bestowed to Rudolph II by the English sage. This ventures into the realms of historical conjecture, as there is no established relation between the two. The number twelve is the base of the Babylonian duodecimal system, a symbol of perfection resulting from the multiplication of alchemy’s four elements by the three fundamental principles.

~ The Book of Watermarks ~

Paper and ideogram weaved into one tome at the heart of the narrative, it is said to be a compilation of all books ever published. Also called The Catalogue of Babel, its contents are written in various languages from Sumerian to Akkadian, Arabic, Greek and Latin, evoking the linguistic incompatibilities of the old fable. A conceptual inversion of the book as the athenaeum itself that turns all preconceived notions about the game on their head. A relic from time immemorial unfolding, announcing its presence through symbols as words, words as symbols; simultaneous the book number zero of the quest and the thirteenth, as Zeus was the thirteenth deity of Olympus, a symbol of arrogance, totality and of the sublime. For all its extolment of classic antiquity and its rebirth, its epicentre shudders with the erudition Jorge Luis Borges’ late modernist, early postmodernist literature . If Shakespeare’s swan song holds Watermarks together like bookends, it is the unbridled genius of the twentieth century Argentinian author that helped to edify its towering achievements.

[ The interior of Prospero’s library is modelled after the master work that is the Library of the Trinity College Dublin, conceived by the eighteenth century architect and engineer Thomas Burgh. ]

His 1941 short story The Library of Babel takes place in an imaginary library of unfathomable proportions, each of its innumerable hexagon-shaped rooms containing the same number of books, each containing the same arbitrary amount of books, each page the same amount of lines, arbitrarily composed out of the same set of twenty five orthographic symbols. The dwellers of this convoluted structure firmly believe that because the library contains every possible permutation permitted by this limited character set, it must therefore also possess every word ever written by Man in the past, future and, perhaps more astoundingly, texts that never were, and never shall be.

Tortured by their despondent existence, librarians find solace in their own creeds. Some cling on to the messianic hope that one of the rooms in the library must have the one book containing the foundations to a complete understanding of the library’s system, as well as the ability to decode the remainder. And that if such a master book were to exist, whoever read it would be as a god. In this universe of stone and paper, every person is a librarian and the library is their cosmos. A later story named Book of Sand revolves around an approximate idea of a book of obscure provenance, sold to the narrator by a Bible seller who claimed to have obtained it in India. The book is described as endless, written in a language that cannot be deciphered. No two pages are the same, and new ones materialise whenever the book is opened. It contains illustrations although, in fine Borgesian form, there is no discernible account provided of what they are.

There is a most prodigious orientation not only within the internal themes explored in the game, but one that extends to these its most substantive influences. Borges and Greenaway’s opuses are characterised by a maddening obsession for books and their metaphysical properties, capable of containing entire worlds, nay universes; their characters, consumed by the exasperating pursuit of knowledge, at times defeated by the futility of the search. Likewise, Kobayashi’s quest for books is ultimately a futile one: despite all of the player’s effort to overcome challenges and solve enigmas, as with Shakespeare’s and Greenaway’s Prosperoes, so does this one break his staff and drown his book; an inescapable act of liberation for chaos to be restored from fastidious and fruitless order.

~ Metal, Wind and Water ~

Born in 1968 in Misawa, Takashi Kobayashi began his career in the videogame industry working as a graphic designer at Henk Rogers’ Bullet-Proof Software studio in Yokohama. Having joined the team at the time during which the studio was leveraging their rights to the Tetris name through mostly insipid spin-offs, he soon grew weary of his assignment and looked elsewhere for employment. His name Perhaps due to his preference for mechanical games over digital ones, he found his way into KAZe, a Tokyo-based studio specialising in Pinball and Pachinko video games. His first project was the Super Famicom game Super Pinball: Behind the Mask in 1993. His visual artistry came to greater prominence with two of the studio’s most acclaimed titles, Digital Pinball: Last Gladiators in 1995 and its sequel, Digital Pinball: Necronomicon the following year. Aficionados of the genre look back fondly at these titles as pertaining to the zenith of the studio’s production and of digital pinball games, with abounding praise for the game’s faithful recreation of real-life tables through astute programming and the outstanding visuals. Chief among them, Grasshopper Manufacture founder Suda Goichi and the dearly departed Kenji Eno, both of which were Kobayashi’s acquaintances.

[ Top: picture of the original game proposal document, with apologies for the low quality of the available capture. Bottom: screenshots from the concept video presented to SCEI, with great emphasis on the tower of Babel, edited out entirely from the final product. ]

While still employed at Kaze, Kobayashi came in contact through an acquaintance with producers at ARC Entertainment and SCE. This presented him with the opportunity to make a pitch to one of Japan’s greatest game publishers, with a known appetite for novel and inventive ideas. The concept behind “Book of Watermarks” was brewing on his mind for long and so a proposal was presented and received so much enthusiasm that an option to gain employment at Sony was made. Kobayashi did not intend on restricting his career to videogame production and politely declined. It was from this sponsorship that the Watermarks, LTD. studio was born, a veritable independent endeavour situated in a fifty square meter apartment in Shibuya, where he and two former members of KAZe, Mie Owashi and Hiroki Uraguchi worked for the better part of three years.

[ Top: Some animated sequences in 3D were created using EIAS, later completed and polished using Adobe After Effects. Parsimoniously, Kobayashi purchased older versions of the software tools. Below: audio files containing voice overs and music, coming from the US and Europe, were put together at the SCE Aoyama Studio using Mac Pro Tools. ]

Whereas Silicon Graphics workstations were widely adopted for game and game advertisement production in the second half of the 1990s, particularly among major studios, The Book of Watermarks was entirely created using Windows and Mac personal computers running affordable software. For terrain modelling, the studio used Animatek World Builder. Building and object modelling was performed in Form-Z software and later imported into 3D Studio Max for rendering and scene composition. A minority of elements seen in the final product may also have been designed in Softimage. Kobayashi strived before a very specific lighting balance for the visual composition of the game. He recalls it as the most time-consuming segment of the game’s graphics production. For instance, the interior space of the Quattuor required as many as seventy five individual spots in lieu of a generic ambient lighting, accurately representing light entering the ceiling apertures and generating complex contrasts. Realism was by no means the intended objective of his lengthy pursuit, rather a more oneiric, painterly look.

Although chroma key technology was the industrial standard for blending filmed footage and computer graphics, this was an easy road that could not be taken. Three months before any filming was done, Kobayashi organised the storyboards, wardrobe and set construction, maintaining contact with the staff at Culver Studios in Los Angeles, and lensman John Le Blanc using the phone and fax. He moved to LA three weeks before filming began to oversee the final preparations. For the most part, the varied props that adorn Prospero’s studio were rented from specialty shop: a pair of navigator’s terrestrial globes, frames paintings, copious amounts of hardcover books, some framed paintings, assorted busts, charts, a feather quill and ink jar, a chess set, a sextant, a narghile, an hourglass and a lute. The all-important staff wielded by the duke has to be created to match the concept art ideas. Glistening metal objects were made to look weathered with the use of ordinary brown hairspray. As with the composition of the game’s visuals, cinematography was a key concern, requiring an entire day to adjust to the intended Caravaggista result, obtained with the use of tungsten lights. All footage was converted from 35mm film to D-1 tape.

[ Stills from the lost D-1 digital conversion of the footage shot at Culver City Studios in Los Angeles. It was of great importance that the bookshelves included the letters ANNO MDXICIX, as 1599 was the year in the game’s chronology of events in which Prospero built the library. Further below: a humorously composed clip of the filming sessions which can be unlocked within Disc 2 of the game upon its completion. ]

The actor playing the role of Prospero was the late Jack Donner, whose wide-ranging career as guest star and supporting actor in a variety of North-American TV productions made his a recognizable face for more than four decades. He was chosen through a casting company for which received nearly thirty applicants. Amusingly, he recalls, some submitted their video audition tape wearing a tuxedo. Kobayashi only had the opportunity to meet Donner two weeks prior to the shooting sessions. Remarkably, he is cast to play his first and last role in a videogame at a moment when he began being invited to perform more frequently in movies. Despite his fifty odd years of experience, this was also the first time he was involved with the process of dubbing, due to the absence of any audio capture during filming. This was the part of the work he considered the most taxing. His training and vast experience as a stage actor made him peculiarly eligible for a part which he plays elegantly and credibly. At seventy years of age, his piercing look and graceful gestures amplify the aura of sophistication and ambiguity the game intensely required, somehow managing to stand a cut above the average acting performance in the context of digital games.

Another one of Kobayashi’s initial intentions for this project was to honour the true origins of The Tempest, whom many scholars have attributed to Silvester Jourdain’s chronicle of his accidental discovery of the Bermuda islands after being side-tracked by a sea storm. For this reason, he sought to implement this type of music although in a manner that was refined, contemporary sounding and at the same time linked to the British isles. Given the designer’s admiration for Enya’s new age music, the aforementioned concept video submitted to Sony played to the sound of her emblematic 1991 single, Caribbean Blue. A puzzling parallel is suggested by the fact that the Irish musician’s most famous album is titled Watermark. Be that as it may, this is merely a diverting coincidence, as the word, as symbolically employed in the poem that Enya wrote and which inspired the song, refers to another application of the same English word, that of a mark that indicates the level to which a body of water has risen.

An unidentified person at SCE pointed Kobayashi in the direction of her sister and former fellow Clannad band member, Moya Brennan, whose musical identity resonated even more with the Irish folk theme tradition. Her 1998 album, Perfect Time, was released in Japan early in the year and provides the aural blueprint for the three themes which she, Dennis Woods and Graham Murphy composed and recorded at the Production Suite studio in Dublin. Her ethereal vocalisations result from a process of overdubbing the same recorded phrase up to one hundred times, condensing and magnifying her voice into her signature ethereal lacework.

Additional music was commissioned to composer and multi-instrumentalist Maartin Allcock, of Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull fame, and recorded in the Chipping Norton Recording Studios at Oxfordshire. Brennan’s themes are sparingly played in key moments of the same such as the introduction and closing, while Allcock’s music accompanies most of the book announcement segments. One in particular, that of The Book of Necronomicon, stands out due to its dissonant use of a boldly cranked up electric guitar overdrive effect, an intentional flashback to the heavy metal sonorities of KAZe’s pinball game. Far too engrossed with production back in Tokyo, Kobayashi was forced to review the themes as they were completed over the phone.

[ The creation of Book of Watermarks was a book hunt of its own. The need for references and illustration required Owashi and Kobayashi to consult and acquire a great many books, scouring bookshops and even calling in favours from friends living abroad to ship editions that could not be found in Japan. ]

The debugging process was done by a quality assurance team at SCEI lead by Shinichi Yoshida. Various members expressed their discontentment with how the game’s story concluded with the destruction of the books irrespective of how well the player performed. The day before the Book of Watermarks was released, a press conference event was hosted by Jiro Ishikawa from TV Asashi at the Ginza Sony Building’s Somido Hall, to which Kobayashi, Owase and Arc Entertainment Executive VP Ryoji Akagawa were invited.

The game received ample coverage in TV, newspapers and dozens of magazines which, from early on that year, previewed the game, making a clear distinction in their approach to this as an adult production to tell it apart from the common videogames of the time. SCEI veteran Hironori Komiya, together with Hiroe Suzuki, worked hard to synthesise this very same take in the way they tackled the game’s package design so as to signal to audiences the uniqueness of this offer. It isn’t known how well the game performed in the market. Attempts were made to hire a CG animator later that year, in preparation for the studio’s next project, Style Laboratory, set to explore the world of fashion in videogame format like no other game before on the newly launched Microsoft Xbox. Alpha footage of the game was released in a DVD press kit handed out at Tokyo Game Show in the Autumn of 2001.

Shortly after, the Watermarks studio, founded on principles of independence and originality, suffered a major setback when an agent embezzled them for one hundred million yen from the production budget, forcing the ensemble to fold. A chance meeting with a director at Panasonic who was openly fond of his games opened the opportunity for him to design computer graphics movies for their new LED screen placed on the façade of a building in Akihabara, then the largest one in existence in Japan. At present, Kobayashi has a solo venture under the label McGuffin & Co., producing bespoke, high-quality CGI movies for public venues. At the moment of this article’s conclusion, a new series on the complex Japanese tradition of dressing in layers, entitled KASANEIRO, premiered on YouTube. He clings on to his long-held ambition to publish a graphic novel blending the Japanese manga and Franco-Belgian comic codes into a single creation.

~ What's past is prologue ~

By the turn of the century, pre-rendered 3D puzzle adventure game had grown into a market segment all its own. The phenomenon erupted at the dawn of the nineties, galvanized by the introduction of the CD-ROM format, albeit firmly rooted in the great graphical adventure model that captivated more mature audiences the previous decade. Most disruptive among them were the two highly experimental discs published by Synergy Inc. in 1991, Refixion and Alice: Interactive Museum. The resounding international success of Myst and The 7th Guest encouraged existing companies like System SACOM to seize the moment and thrive within the niche, as well as new and exciting studios like WARP Inc. to emerge and stir it up. Largely a defunct category today, it is all too easy to overlook the motives why graphical adventures resounded with a large number of players, a genre that so readily traded interactivity for audiovisual splendour and in rare occasions, weave some of the richest thematic tapestries the common game experience could ill afford.

The Book of Watermarks stands firmly within this tradition of simplified mechanics, linear progression, chimerical landscapes and trying riddles. It seeks not to redefine the existing template, rather to utilise it as the resource with which to convey important commentary on the nature of knowledge at the height of the information revolution. The pleasurable promenade through splendorous regions, grandiose venues and enlightening discoveries represent only the alluring surface atop a well of studious meditations on the origins of modernity and the human condition itself.

That which it may arguably lack in structural finesse it more than amply makes for with its unique take and potentially profound implications, letting on just enough about its intentions to maintain the player or spectator engaged and at the same time motivate the right audience to extend its journey in deep thought. It courageously preserves the conclusive moral of the stories it celebrates. In The Tempest, the magus compassionately relinquishes his powers in the name of reconciliation. In Prospero’s Books, he abdicates knowledge as the mechanism of control. Similarly, Watermarks concludes with the submergence of all books and the undoing of the islands, an act to restore chaos from order, to bring the microcosm of illusions to a close, to compel the player to see the deep blue ocean as a blank page to resume their reality from. This can be construed as a comment on the futility of play itself. Recommended links: - The Watermarks website (archived) - ASCII coverage of The Live Tome event - McGuffin website and YouTube Channel Author’s note: I wish to thank Kobayashi-San for his availability to answer my many questions, as well as for his effort to locate additional resources without which this article would not have been possible. More JAPANoFILES features JAPANoFILES #9 - Under The Tokyo Sky JAPANoFILES #8 - Chronicle of Opening a Shina Soba Shop

[forgottenbones]

Electric Callboy - ELEVATOR OPERATOR (Behind The Scenes)

[vero-niche]

adhd will get you thinking "i should make this doctors appointment" every day for 7 months and counting

[pirateprincessjess]

When I was early on in my transition I got in a Lyft, and the driver was this big country guy. I was a little nervous so I just sat quietly in the back.

After a moment he changed the music on his phone to what sounded like a Hatsune Miku song. Curiosity got the better of me, so I finally spoke up and said “is this Hatsune Miku?”

And he said “Yep. You looked uncomfortable, and I know Transgender women like Hatsune Miku, so I thought it might help.”

I think about that interaction a lot.

[crimsonservbot]

You ever hear that old chestnut about how most people neglect the part of the story of Icarus where he also had to avoid flying too low, lest the spray of the sea soak his feathers and cause him to fall and drown? You ever think about how different the world would be if Icarus died that way instead? If the idiom was to Fly To Close To The Sea? A warning against playing it far too safe, about not stretching your wings and soaring properly? You ever think about how Icarus died because he was happy?

[semperintrepida]

This is the worst timeline. (x)

[beaft]

googling shit like "why do i feel bad after hanging out with my friends" and all of the answers are either "you need better friends" (i don't; my friends are wonderful) or "your social battery is drained, you need to rest and regain your energy levels" (i don't; i've got tons of energy, it's just manifesting as over-the-top neurotic mania). why is this even happening. it's like some stupid toll i have to pay as a punishment for enjoying myself too much

[yuttikkele]

hey gamers I’ve started watching star trek does anyone else see the romantic tension between captain kirk and mr. spock

[scottsumrners]

[iamthetruestrepairman]

women’s bodies weren’t “made” to do anything, nature didn’t “intend” anything, no human action is “unnatural” and there is no inherent “purpose” to a human life

[sniffanimal]

god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that's so fucking frustrating. I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I'm not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world

this post got too much attention so I sniffered it

[meltymoth]

WHAT THE FUUUUUUCK ME ME ME ME ME ME

[mobgoblin]

Queued right up for it

[fangsforfags]

fake idgafer. i saw tht haunted look in ur eyes