✮⋆˙ beginning, liminal, ego - Aya Takano Video game Adaptation (final project) ✮⋆˙

What makes a good adaptation?

There are plenty of bad ones out there, and I'm sure that without me even naming one, you’ve already thought of several. Sometimes, adaptations stick too closely to the source material so that it lacks any novelty, sometimes they vary too much and lose touch with its purpose. Usually, these problems stem from a lack of consideration of the mediums being used to tell either story, failing to properly adapt a narrative due to failing to mold it to the new form. It is important to look closely at the medium of your source material, its intrinsic strengths and weaknesses, and figure out how adapting that into a different medium will impact those variables.

I wanted to explore the possibilities of adaptation, and see how a narrative can change through switching its medium, and what might be lost/gained. For this, I choose to adapt a collection of paintings, since I wanted to emphasize how the medium itself can affect a story, rather than adapting a movie or book, which is more commonly adapted and already has some precedents. I also just really enjoy this artist’s work, and wanted to research her more.

AYA TAKANO - BEGINNING, LIMINAL, EGO

Aya Takano is an artist, illustrator, and writer based in Japan. She is most known for her work as a Superflat artist, which is a postmodern movement that is associated with manipulating depth in art. So, while there still is a sense of depth, the presentation of it appears to press the foreground/middle ground/background pieces into one, “flat” plane, reminiscent of Ukiyo-e style landscapes.

Aya Takano is known for her surreal and floaty atmospheres, stemming from her Superflat influences and painting techniques, frequently using brush strokes for texture and low-contrast between colors. The usually female characters in her work tend to be floating, flying, or seem out-of-sync with the background, with elongated limbs and fingers and an almost “1,000 mile stare” that creates a dreamlike, liminal, surrealist mood.

“Beginning, Liminal, Ego” is a collection by Takano that debuted at Perrotin in Hong Kong in the summer of 2021, featuring ten paintings and twenty-four drawings. Literally speaking, the collection follows the story of three girls and their lives in Hong Kong, participating in festivals, visiting their favorite places, and generally experiencing their youth in the city.

While there are many ideas on the deeper meaning in the collection, for this adaptation I will focus on the idea that the pieces depict a world in which the girls, who have been commodified by society, take agency over this identity, taking from the society what suits them and engaging in consumerist pleasures without being the “pleasure” themselves.

This interpretation is based on many opinions and ideas from art critics and Aya Takano herself, although it is most strongly based off of the quote “Every moment is connected to a place that goes beyond the common good and evil, and to a transcendental moment that goes beyond the everyday world.” from Takano on this collection. Among other feminist readings of her work and Takano herself acknowledging that “living as a female in this society affects my work”, we can read the characters in her works, even when portrayed in ways which may seem objectifying, more as symbolizing freedom from the constraints of reality and consumerism.

Along with this, I will generally be focusing on the overall feeling her work provokes, focusing on the “dreamlike” atmosphere to keep my adaptation grounded in her style. In interviews, Aya frequently uses terms and phrases like “transcendental moment”, “beyond good and evil”, and “freedom” to describe her work, conveying that her intentions usually to convey a reality that is beyond the limitations and constraints of our world, existing somewhere beyond us but still tangentially related. In order to have my adaptation remain at least somewhat faithful to her collection, I used these ideas to guide my adaptation.

PLANNING THE ADAPTATION

After analyzing her collection and artistic intentions, and then creating a design “ethos” behind my adaptation, next would be to begin planning the adaptation itself. To do this, I first needed to pick a medium to adapt it into, which was easier said than done. To pick a good medium, I needed to define which affordances from painting as a medium of storytelling were helping convey Beginning, Liminal, Ego’s story, and then pick a medium that has similar affordances, while being different enough to create a new experience.

AFFORDANCES OF PAINTING

- Still images reinforce the liminal space feeling, time is at a standstill since the painting we see is just a single moment in time, although the story is still unfolding.

- Time had to be represented differently in paintings, since this singular frame needs to convey a timeline of events happening sequentially. This is more of an affordance that painting lacks, and is seen better in animations or graphic novels. However, a sense of time passing can still be represented in paintings, but still has this sense of a “standstill”. As said before, this adds to the liminal feeling to Takano’s work
- A painting that is meant to be physically displayed in a space is different to a painting meant to be viewed virtually, as there are different considerations for each that can change the way viewers perceive the work. For example, the paintings actual location within the space can enhance the narrative, as seen in this critic’s interpretation of Takano’s gallery:

"‘We have a pool’ was mounted next to the showroom’s window, so that her hungry eyes were trained on Victoria Harbour, a larger expanse of water she can never touch. She is trapped in the periphery.”

- Including the space the painting is displayed in adds a degree of interactivity, and is something that some mediums can never replicate, such as something written or meant to be purely viewed digitally.

So, through presenting her work in this medium, she gains many advantages that enhance the overall feeling of her work. So, I decided to adapt this collection into another visual form, as a visual medium lets me use Takano’s unique artstyle, along with many of the affordances listed here.

In the end, I settled on adapting Beginning, Liminal, Ego into a video game. A video game lets me translate her art style directly into game visuals, and can be interacted with in a way that mirrors how viewers interact with paintings. Also, in a medium like this, the player gets to navigate through the world themselves, rather than being “lead” through in a way a film or show does, mirroring the experience of meandering through a gallery. With a video game, I can take the advantages of visual mediums already present in Takano’s work, and amplify the interactivity already present, without having to change the narrative too much and divorcing my adaptation completely from the original.

THE ADAPTATION

Beginning, Liminal, Ego is a 2D, story-driven platformer which plays with warped perspectives and physics combined with storytelling to deliver a unique experience, meandering through an otherworldly Hong Kong and uncovering the uniquely normal lives of 3 teenagers.

..or simply put, it's a 2D platformer that plays with physics and perspective, and has a narrative about the 3 girls we see in the paintings that unravels as the player progresses. The game treats each painting as a level, adapting it into a map for the platformer, and the player has an objective to “clear” the level by participating in the narrative, learning about the characters and environment. For example, in the following mockup of the level “lunar new year, a lion dancer who is a future culture anthropologist celebrates”, the player has the objective to collect 5/5 red envelopes and “meet up with friend” afterwards. The player needs to collect the five envelopes through platforming puzzles, and then find their friends to then unlock a small cutscene dialogue with them and clear the level:

Video games have most of the affordances of other visual mediums, with an emphasis on interactability. By leaning into the interactions, a Video Game can very effectively tell a story that the players feel they are discovering for themselves. However, to adapt Beginning, Liminal, Ego into a game, some sacrifices had to be made:

- Changing the composition of the paintings into levels compromises Takano’s original vision for the painting, separating it from her art in a way that may no longer “feel” like Takano. Also, the order of the levels are different from the way that the paintings were originally arranged, creating a difference in how someone may interpret the collection depending on which medium they are experiencing it through. However, rearranging the paintings was necessary to make a platformer that is playable and fun.

- The game includes dialogue, which is completely absent from the original collection (if you don’t count titles), shifting the narrative from purely visual to a mix of visual and written. This changes the way the story has to be told, as inserting text takes the storytelling “power” away from the visuals. But, dialogue gives clarity to who the characters are & their relationships, creating a grounded feeling to this world. This ends up conflicting with the dreamlike limbo many of Takano’s characters live in, but creates a better storytelling experience for a game. If I wanted to be more faithful to the original collection I would omit text, however as this is a new medium with the ability to have these sorts of dialogue boxes & brings clarity that simply did not have to exist within paintings, I find it necessary for this adaptation.

- The game gives the whole collection an overall story, which did not explicitly exist in the original collection. The game’s story is still loose and disjointed, more like a collection of memories, but still gives a concrete timeline and correlation of events that wasn't defined before, and characterizes the people in the collection. This again takes away the dreamlike atmosphere away from the paintings, as a strict sequence of events and personalities makes this space feel more like our reality, however the strange perspectives and level design transfers this feeling over in a way that is more appropriate for the medium.

- Time in this game is linear, or at least events can happen one after another, unlike in the paintings where everything must happen all at once. This might change the intended timing between events, and again makes the game feel more grounded.

Overall, many of the changes made during this adaptation were made for the sake of clarity when swapping to a new visual form, losing some of the dreamlike atmosphere in the paintings and transferring it into level design. Paintings have certain affordances when it comes to time and space that video games do not have and vice versa, and changes needed to be made so the game was playable and enjoyable. Essentially, the liminal, dreamlike space in Takano’s work is really enhanced by the medium of painting, and so when transferring that narrative to another medium, more work has to be done in order to get that same feel.

So, with my game adaptation, I tried to stick to the original collection as much as was reasonable, and used the design ethos I made earlier to pick and choose what was necessary to change to fit the new medium better. I’m sure there are some choices that could have been better to preserve the dreamlike atmosphere better, however considering the time/scope constraints, I think this project has at least served its purpose of exploring affordances of mediums and adaptations as a whole.

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