Netrunner: Every deck tells a story

My entire life, I’ve been disappointed by “cyberpunk” video games, even the ones I thought were good. The reason why is simple. Plenty of games let me walk around in rainy, neon-lit urban dystopias, and yes, I love this as much as anyone. But what these games often focus on is the experience of shooting people in these environments, or maybe of punching people with cybernetically enhanced arms. 

You know, meatspace stuff.

What I wanted more than anything from a cyberpunk game was the experience of entering cyberspace, a realm of pure information, making a run on some megacorp’s priceless data, and encountering some deadly, seemingly impassable piece of ice the corp has in place. Then would come the thrill of slamming just the right icebreaker into my rig to exploit some infinitesimal weakness in the corp’s code, something that lets me carve a hole the size of a pinprick in the corp’s defenses, but that pinprick is all I need, because this is cyberspace, and here, a hole a needle can’t even fit through is endlessly vast because the only thing that needs to pass through it is my consciousness. 

Expecting games to transport me to a realm as abstract and spiritual as this may be a bit much (though at times, Rez comes close). When cyberpunk video games do try to work hacking into their play, the experience is often so mundane that I wish they hadn’t bothered at all. But last year, I found a game that gives me what I’ve always wanted from a cyberpunk game–Android: Netrunner, a card game for two players in which one takes on the role of a corporation and the other plays the part of a runner who is trying to hack into the corporation’s servers. 

I never expected the game to do it to be a card game, but now, of course, it makes perfect sense. With William Gibson as my escort, my earliest trips into cyberspace were facilitated by my imagination. There’s no reason why it should be any different now. What I love about Netrunner is the way in which every deck I put together has stories woven into it; stories about the life of a particular runner or the unscrupulous operations of a particular corporation, and when my deck collides with that of my opponent, those stories play out. 

This happens because the theme of the game and its mechanics complement each other seamlessly. With almost every card, its mechanical function and its description mesh in such a way that a narrative takes shape over the course of a game. I understand and get invested in the life my runner is living, or in the happenings at the corporation I’m running. 

For instance, this is Noise, one of the game’s many runners:

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And this is Wyldside, a seedy club.

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Wyldside has the benefit of giving you two cards, but that comes at the expense of one action. (Normally drawing one card costs one action, so with Wyldside you net one extra card, but with the downside being that you don’t have a choice; you lose that action no matter what if this card is in play.) 

So with Wyldside in effect, part of my experience of the game becomes the idea of Noise (or whichever runner I’m using) staying out too late every night in this seedy club, making connections there, getting his hands on new hardware, new software, the stuff that lets him fuck with the corporations during the daylight hours when he finally drags his ass out of bed after partying too hard at Wyldside the night before.

I love this game’s cast of characters. There’s Kate “Mac” McCaffrey, who’s as skilled with nuts-and-bolts hardware modification as she is with beautiful code that can create doors in corporation ice where none exist.

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There’s Elizabeth Mills (seen here on the Scorched Earth card), a ruthless executive for the Weyland Consortium, one of the game’s four corporations. 

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From a narrative standpoint, my favorite runner is Valencia Estevez, an investigative journalist digging into the corporations’ doings to give a voice to the voiceless.

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I imagine her risking her own life to be a thorn in the corp’s side, using the work she does…

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…to put the squeeze on the corporations and hold them accountable.

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I find myself thinking about Netrunner all the time. I admire the elegance of its systems, like influence (the number 15 you see on all the runner cards in this post), which lets you pull in cards from other factions like you’re calling in favors. I build hypothetical decks in my mind, wondering about strategy and the effectiveness of pairing this card with that card, sure, but also thinking about the narrative possibilities. Can I build a Weyland deck, for instance, that’s all about how vicious and vindictive that corporation is (see Scorched Earth above) and how it tries to brush aside the human consequences of its projects by presenting those projects as as progress, rejuventation, and urban renewal? 

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Android: Netrunner is a living card game, and the newest series of cards, called the Mumbad Cycle, focuses on India. I love that both the game’s world and its mechanics are alive and in flux, constantly becoming richer and more colorful. I’m just as eager to discover the narrative texture of each new “data pack”–the people and locations, the hardware and software–as I am about seeing the actual functioning of the cards. 

The way it all fits together is beautiful. And when I make a run on a corporation’s server, using my icebreakers to slip past their defenses, dive into their systems, and swipe some precious, glowing core of data, it feels just like I always imagined it would.