Ideas from Edo & the Floating World

Turning children’s designs into a videogame

Dylan Yamada-Rice
5 min readSep 2, 2024

Previously I wrote two blog posts about workshops undertaken with children aged 8-12-years-old to bring them into the design of a videogame that will allow them to play and tell stories about future landscapes with trees. The workshops focused firstly on gaming worlds, and secondly, on the creation of characters, narratives and gaming mechanics. The work forms part of the Digital Voices of the Future project.

Eleanor Dare, my friend and colleague, has been working on the development of the videogame. Right before she began work on it one of the issues we discussed was how to deal with two seemingly disparate desires for the game that arose from the children’s ideas, and those of the major adult stakeholders. For example, the Mersey Forest and the tree scientists had an educational agenda and values they wanted to pass on to children about how to interact with and care for trees, as well as very specific lessons they wanted to share about tree types and their growth. On the other hand, the children’s ideas were more fantastical having created mythical creatures and magical trees with golden acorns, and special powers as they aged. Yet, as I discussed previously, these child-designed narratives were rarely superficial but rather created to illustrate their awareness of politics and concerns about and ideas connected to the climate crisis.

I began thinking about ideas from when I had previously studied Japanese History and Japanese Art History. Specifically how Edo, the predecessor to Tokyo, had been controlled to such an extent that it necessitated the development of the Floating World (1615–1868). The two spaces lived in symbiosis with the Floating World acting as an escape for play and pleasure from the mundane and regimented life of Edo city. To me this reflects the differences between formal education and learning through free-play, as well as, the everyday structured school learning of the children we worked with, compared to the more chaotic workshops where children expressed their ideas and knowledge about trees through a range of analogue and digital making that was only loosely controlled.

Map of Edo (image via the Tokyo Metropolitan Library)

In the same way, we thought that the videogame could have an urban landscape with more direct references to tree types, their growth and how they should be looked after, in short more controlled like Edo or formal schooling.

Images of the inner city developed in Roblox by Eleanor Dare

Thus, conversely the outskirts of the town could be a mythical treescape based on the children’s ideas, which would be freer and allow possibilities for free-play and learning and exploration that occurs in such spaces too.

Simultaneously an MA Experience Design student, Brandon Barnard that I was teaching at the time, began working with some of the ideas from the school workshops as part of my inclusion of the Trees Project as a “live project” in one of the modules he opted to study. In exploring the masks and narratives the children had created, Brandon came up with the idea of turning them into comics that would then be hidden amongst trees in the videogame. He used paper prototyping to test the idea in the real world.

Images and concept by Brandon Barnard

Brandon was not aware of the discussions Eleanor and I had been having about Edo and the Floating World, so unbeknown to him I could also see parallels between his comic idea and Edo period art. In the Tokugawa period stories of the Floating World were brought back to Edo through woodblock prints that became known as Ukiyo-e. It has been suggested that the production of Ukiyo-e became the first time in Japanese history that art was produced for the masses. This is also similar to the history of comics.

Thus, I began to see how I could extend Brandon’s idea to turn children’s character and narrative designs into short comics that could be digitally geocached in the game, providing tales of the mythical and playful treescape outside the city boundary.

Comic based on a child’s character design.

More of the comics and the children’s ideas that were used to develop them, can be found here.

Geocached comics developed in-game by Eleanor Dare

The collaborative ways of working that Eleanor and I use as a mainstay to our collaborative and individual practice-based research usually brings together threads from disperse areas to create new meanings and possibilities. This time it has brought me joy that a small part of the trees videogame is also a very subtle ode to Edo, the Floating World and Ukiyo-e.

--

--