Hi! Zoe here, new Lead Designer at Null Signal Games. I’ve been waiting three years to tell the story of Arissana Rocha Nahu, the new Shaper identity from The Automata Initiative. The time has come!
While I’ve experienced the joy of creating characters and seeing them brought to life by our brilliant Narrative and Visual teams before, The Automata Initiative is the first product for which I was on the Design team from the very beginning. The Liberation Cycle’s design process was consistently led by narratively-driven ‘top-down’ designs, and I’m thrilled to share an example of that journey from narrative to mechanics with you here.
Check out the new Shaper identity, Arissana Rocha Nahu: Street Artist, in How Arissana Got Back In The Groove, the new fiction by Erin “Chouxflower” Celovsky!
In late summer 2020, my predecessor June Cuervo and I began discussing this cycle, then code-named ‘Bell-Tower’. While the bulk of the story around each set is built out by our excellent Narrative team, as designers we lay out the basic narrative foundations when conceptualizing a set. In this case, those foundations were built in part on the experiences we and our community have gone through in times of political unrest.
That raised a question about Runner factions: when everyone takes to the streets to fight the power – in other words, when everyone leans a little Anarch – what does it mean to be Criminal or Shaper? Narrative took our broad Criminal concept and ran with it brilliantly, as you saw with yesterday’s reveal of Mercury.
In Shaper, both narrative and mechanical themes came together early. Shapers are the creatives, the artists, the show-offs. Looking around at the riot graffiti still decorating my city’s streets in 2020, the connection was obvious. A primary theme of Arissana’s story is an emerging sense of purpose in her art as she becomes politically active, devoting her unique skills to the wider struggle for bioroid and clone rights. Growing up in the favelas of Rio-São Paulo, the adversity she’s faced as a trans woman with mixed ethnic heritage has instilled a key lesson: none of us are free until all of us are free.
Since exiting art school in spectacular fashion, she’s charted her own path and found a more liberating and meaningful form of expression. You’ll see her tagging up everything from border walls to Ice Walls, while outrunning cops and prisec on magnet-powered hoverblades.
Mechanically, programs that can be hosted on ice (recently recategorized under the subtype Trojan) are a perfect fit for graffiti. thike, a member of Null Signal Games’ Development team, had already been working with that concept and refining a suite of Shaper cards on that theme. They made the connection to street art while watching Miles Morales put up slaps at the beginning of Into The Spiderverse.
Their design showcases Shaper’s flexibility and spontaneity. It evokes skating up to a piece of ice and making it your canvas. Arissana pairs beautifully with her console, which creates a feeling of building momentum and enables engine-building shenanigans. While some specific details changed in the iterative process that is development, the identity we are previewing today is fundamentally the same as it was at the very beginning of design.
⬩ LilyPAD
Shaper Hardware: Console
Install cost: 4 – Influence cost: 4
+2
The first time each turn you install a program, you may draw 1 card.
Limit 1 console per player.
Leaps and bounds better than the competition!
Illustrated by Martin de Diego Sādaba
The Liberation Cycle is about the connections we make in our communities, about the people we find friendship, solidarity, and love with. In Arissana’s story, love – and specifically queer joy – is our focus. Her relationship with her fiancée, Beatriz, is the first trans lesbian relationship we’ve put in the spotlight in Netrunner narrative. Representation always matters, but it feels especially urgent when we as trans people are being targeted with genocidal backlash in many parts of the world; when I meet more and more people moving to my city because they’ve fled hostile states where their rights are in jeopardy.
In a media landscape where mainstream trans representation is subtext, novelty, or a story about cisgender society’s reaction to us, I want to do better and depict my community as I know it. That means stories where we love each other. Stories where that love is beautiful because we are enough. Stories about the ways loving one another can help us love ourselves and build up our community. While t4t (trans-for-trans) relationships can suffer from the same problems as any relationship, at their best they are uniquely affirming and healing. We are bringing some of that beauty and power to Netrunner in Arissana’s story.
There will be struggle ahead, for these characters and for us all. But this set isn’t just about the struggle. It’s about the kind of love that’s worth fighting for.
