Monthly Mecha: Anti-Desert, Lichen Arrowsmith, and Lyric Mecha RPGs

Asa: Anti-Desert is tagged as a lyric game on itch. How do you see Anti-Desert participating in the lyric game movement?

Lichen: I'll preface this by saying that it's been five years since I wrote Anti-Desert and, young as I am, I have changed a lot artistically in that time. It is still, however, a piece I feel proud of and I intend to return to the setting in my writing. So, this is more of a retrospective on the piece than an accurate reflection of my inspirations and ideas at the time (the specifics of which I have forgotten), but I think I will still have interesting things to say about the game.

The key idea behind the lyric game movement, as I see it, is that there is literary and poetic value to the form of roleplaying game manuals. Everyone in this hobby has spent hours and hours pouring over long gamebooks preparing for a session. These are frequently tedious in their writing and reading them is a task done in spite of the text rather than for the joy of it, because there is some framework of a real game in there that we want to play. With lyric games, we focus on the joy of the text rather than the game contained in it and we can use the tropes of gamebooks, such as second person instructional writing, to prime the reader to respond emotionally in specific ways. I'll get more into this when I talk about other lyric games for a later question.

With Anti-Desert, I was intentionally reacting to what I felt was a certain staleness or repetitiveness to gamebook writing and sort to write more poetically than functionally. The book speaks directly and frequently informally to the reader, and the line is blurred between player and character. We move somewhat chaotically between sections, weaving in narrative sections such as the opening and the Deus Ex story with direct instructional portions like "Building the living grid" and "What is XP?". There is a game here that can be played, but the reader has to put in some work to find it. I've never played it and I doubt anyone who enjoyed the book has, but it functions anyway as a piece of written art.

Asa: What about the mecha genre appealed to you for a game about climate change?

Lichen: Mechs are capable of embodying a large number of concepts simply because they are mirror images of ourselves and when we pilot them we inhabit them fully. In Gundam they are the concept of the future, in Evangelion they are trauma, in Escaflowne they are the legacy of war, in Heaven Will Be Mine they are the disconnect between body and soul that being transgender can make you feel sometimes. The idea of the mech and pilot becoming a single unit, of synchronisation, or feeling what the mech feels is so prevalent because of this.

Mechs are also inherently full of self-contradictions. It's a classic joke that Gundam is anti-war whilst entirely built to sell you toys of war machines. Anti-Desert is about climate change, but it's specifically about electricity and machinery. It is a direct response to the rejection of technology, power and modern innovation in the face of climate change. The mechs are this tension. Deus Ex is maybe the clearest articulation for this — it is the resurrected form of a machine built to destroy, and it channels nuclear fission, perhaps the most dangerous (but perhaps most necessary) source of electricity.

Asa: Who should try (to read or play) Anti-Desert? And why?

Lichen: The place I was in when I wrote Anti-Desert was one where I felt very scared for the future of the world. I still am, of course, but back then I couldn't manage it nearly as well. The text you see on itch.io is a "play-kit" because it is significantly cut down from a larger document that I was working on and which was essentially all of my anxieties about the climate poured into a single piece of writing. It was very sad, but also very cathartic to write, and I think people found it cathartic to read. So this is who I would recommend Anti-Desert to the most- people who are scared and need some catharsis to help manage those anxieties. There's a whole bundle of hope in there too, and I hope people can find it and grab hold of it.

Asa: What inspirations or touchstones does Anti-Desert draw on?

Lichen: I was embarrassingly under-read on the mecha genre when I wrote this, in all honestly, but I of course drew heavily from Evangelion. Between writing the original text and releasing the playkit, Rebuild of Evangelion 3.0+1.0 released and quickly became one of my favourite films of all time. It also deals with hope and reconstruction in a devastated world.

For the climate side, I was strongly influenced by the climate sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson. In particular, New York 2140 (which I admittedly never finished) features a New York that is mostly flooded due to rising sea levels and is now filled with boats and walkways between skyscrapers. I think it's really important that we be both realistic and optimistic about climate change and Anti-Desert is a game about adapting to dire circumstances and building something precious and valuable in them. The climate horror of Jeff Vandermeer, and Annihilation in particular, was vital for providing me with aesthetic material.

I also have to mention Desert. The name "Anti-Desert" likely sounds quite abstract for those not familiar with the original text, but it's called that because it's a direct rejection of the book Desert (and also a riff on Jared Sinclair's Anti-Sisyphus). Desert is a post-civilisation anarchist book that posits the inevitability of our lives being disrupted by climate change and the necessity of embracing suffering and worse lives in order to weather the storm. One of the first stories I wrote for Anti-Desert was about maintaining a hospital's power through a blackout, directly because Desert suggests that we need to accept that old and disabled people will die as we cut down on our power usage, which I find repulsive (as well as being factually inaccurate). Anti-Desert is about accepting the inevitability of climate change but refusing to ever stop fighting to live good lives.

Asa: What other games would you recommend?

Lichen: The purest crystalisation of the lyric game is Riverhouse Game's We Are But Worms: A One Word RPG. I mentioned before that when we sit down to read a gamebook we are priming ourselves to receive and follow instructions. A sufficiently concise and powerful instruction can change your life. I won't spoil the word, go read this one.

Sol Race-Malone's What is an RPG? is a great commentary on a tired gamebook trope. Crows Danger's Fight Truck is a powerful and cathartic expression of queerness. Geostationary's An Annihilation Fangame is a great example of instruction-as-poetry. Shelves' Schwa's A No-Humans Death Stranding Clone and & You are the light moving through the hole (18+) are incredibly affecting texts and experiment with form in ways I've seen no one else do. In all truth, Shelves' might be the greatest and most under-appreciated designer of our time.