02.02.2021 08:00 AM

An Inclusive, Cyberpunk Future Is In the Cards

A humble card game, Android: Netrunner has the same roots as Cyberpunk 2077— but went in an entirely different direction.

netrunner skulljacking — Courtesy of Fantasy Flight

It’s the cyberpunk future — a world even darker than the one we’re living in now. The line between humans and robots is blurred. You’re on a mission either to hack into a corporation and steal its secret plans, or to advance those agendas on behalf of a powerful conglomerate.

This is the plot of Android: Netrunner, a card game we’ve both played dozens of times during the pandemic, and neither of us is done getting vengeance on our opponent. After long days staring at our respective computer screens, we look forward to sitting down for a game where hackers install programs to access corporate servers.

And it’s not just us. Even though the game went out of print in 2018, a fan group called Project NISEI has kept the enthusiasm alive by organizing tournaments and even designing and printing new cards that fans can add to their existing sets.

A selling point of Netrunner is its inclusivity, which contrasts with many games that tend to feature American cities and characters that appear largely white and cis-gendered. The New Angeles of Android: Netrunner is in Ecuador. Much of its action happens around modern-day Mumbai and an up-and-coming megaproject in Kampala, Uganda. By one person's count, out of dozens of playable characters, there are two white men. Gender is fluid in a world where body modification is the norm.

“There’s a very powerful thing, seeing yourself represented in a game,” says Serenity Westfield, NISEI’s community manager, who is a trans woman living near London. “So if you’re trans, if you’re black, if you’re female, if you’re nonbinary, being able to flip through the list of characters and see someone that looks like you helps you get invested in it.”

Popularized with novels like Neuromancer and film adaptations of Philip K. Dick stories, like Blade Runner and Minority Report, the cyberpunk theme has made a recent comeback with CD Projekt Red’s video game Cyberpunk 2077. The game is set in a California megapolis where there is somehow no street signage in Spanish, and a large percentage of the nonwhite characters are in ethnic street gangs.

Android: Netrunner has the same grandparents as Cyberpunk 2077, but it took a very different route, through an unlikely chain of events that includes noir novels, Dungeons & Dragons, and the art of baseball team management. It also represents a rare set of circumstances in which a design team passionate about diversity got to make the game the way they wanted, with the implicit message that everyone is welcome at the table.

Cyberspace Visualized

The idea of “netrunning” primarily originated in William Gibson’s 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” whose world was greatly expanded in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Neuromancer was a noir potboiler set in locales with names like Night City and Zion, about individuals who are skilled at "jacking in" to a free-form virtual cyberspace. There, they encounter corporate constructs and use "decks" of programs to break through "Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics"—ICE—a term coined by another cyberpunk pioneer, Tom Maddox. Like many stories in the genre, it takes just a few skilled individuals to bring down massive corporate systems.

Gibson's cyberspace was all dispassionate geometry—the novel’s characters often called it “the Matrix,” where “symbols of evil and bad luck tumble out along translucent planes.” It took another world-builder to make cyberspace visceral.

The role-playing game Cyberpunk, written in 1988, transported the format pioneered by Dungeons & Dragons to the setting of cyberpunk novels to date. Instead of playing an elf or wizard, you can play a netrunner, proficient in the C programming language but also able to jack directly into cyberspace. The virtual space became a hybrid of Gibson's abstract matrix and a modernized dungeon, and the manual touts the thrill of fighting characters rather than concepts: "What would you react faster to—the word Demon appearing in the air in front of you, or a living, breathing, 5-ton monster cracking a flaming whip over your head? You betcha."

Baseball Moves to Cyberspace

While Netrunner’s theme is the techno-future, the mechanics grew out of baseball team management.

Richard Garfield, a game designer, had no patience for baseball, but he was enraptured by Strat-o-matic Baseball, according to an interview with him in Tracy Fullerton's book on game design. In this game, you are a team manager who first plays the "meta-game" of building a dream team from a stack of baseball cards, then sends the team to play the ball game itself.

Garfield has cited this as an inspiration for Magic: The Gathering, a game where dueling wizards summon monsters from their deck of cards to battle their opponent. It was a home run for the makers, Wizards of the Coast. Players hoping to find just the right new monster for their decks would buy countless packs of cards. As it so happens, the booster packs look remarkably like packs of baseball cards and have a similar randomized distribution, where the most heavy-hitting cards are rare.

Netrunner was Garfield’s follow-up, released in 1996, merging the deck-building concept with the netrunning component of Cyberpunk. In a 2011 interview, he said, "In Magic often the cards play you, and with Netrunner I wanted a game where you play the cards … I wanted to make a game more like Poker, where you would bluff." Netrunner’s gameplay included one corp player with a row of face-down cards representing servers, protected by a column of ice (now lower case). When a netrunner breaks through the ice and accesses the corp player’s server node, they sometimes discover a card that scores them points, and sometimes discover a trap that breaks the virtual barrier and does “meat damage” to the runner.

A game in the collectible card game format has room to tell its story via hundreds or even thousands of unique cards, each with a small window of art and a line or two of “flavor text.” But just as Neuromancer included a character who was disappointed that his flight to a space colony didn’t have a smoking section, Netrunner presented a future disappointingly similar to other mainstream media from the USA of the 1990s—still dominated by white dudes. Of 103 figures we could identify in the base set, 79 of them were clearly white men. Female cards include the Succubus and the "Technician lover," pictured in her bed; the “Shaka” card depicts a slouched African pygmy.

“It’s Punk First of All”

Netrunner was a success, but Magic was much more of a success, and Wizards of the Coast let Netrunner fall out of print.

The game got a second life when Wizards of the Coast licensed Netrunner to Fantasy Flight Games, known for tabletop games embedded in giant thematic universes like those of Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings (what the game companies call intellectual properties, or IPs). Fantasy Flight released its core Android: Netrunner card set in 2012.

The company merged the Netrunner theme with an in-house universe called Android. Kevin Wilson, then a game designer at Fantasy Flight, had been a fan of the cyberpunk genre since high school. In a van on the way back from a game convention, he and colleague Dan Clark dreamed up the basis of Android, with messages about the marginalization of workers and the cyberpunk theme of how ever-growing, ever-richer corporations are taking over our lives. “It’s punk first of all, so it’s gotta be about fighting the status quo," he says. Android became a cybernoir detective board game first, before Fantasy Flight paired this theme with Netrunner.

Zoë Robinson was the art director for Fantasy Flight across many product lines at that time. In the mid-aughts, she loved having a call with George R. R. Martin every Tuesday to go over the next set of Game of Thrones card designs, but working with licensers always meant playing by their rules. Since Android came from within the company, the team had more freedom to create.

A diverse and inclusive world “had been something that, internally, we’d wanted for a long time, but the IPs had never really allotted for it,” she said.

In a podcast, Damon Stone, who later became Android: Netrunner’s lead designer, described the world-building as "pointillism": Each card is a small piece of color that adds up to the overall world. Robinson had the job of directing the many artists who would contribute those small parts to bring about the big picture.

“If you send a text art brief, and you don’t specify things to an artist, especially freelancers, they’re going to give you what they think you want,” she said. “So if you don’t specify race/gender/age, you’re going to get a thirtysomething white man, with close-cut dark hair and dark eyes, sort of the anydude from video games.”

So the team got really specific with its art direction. Robinson said they even had “a spreadsheet to figure out who was overrepresented and who was underrepresented. It was incredibly deliberate.”

Fantasy Flight’s team made a good number of changes to the game they inherited from Wizards of the Coast, from bringing ICE back to all-caps to using fixed, nonrandomized expansion packs. But perhaps the biggest change was the addition of a card representing you, the player.

Instead of being an out-of-game manager equipping a team of misfits with day-glo hair and bionic limbs, you could be Chaos Theory, the school-age daughter of a Chinese-Irish father and Scottish-African American mother who does her netrunning via a console shaped like a stuffed dinosaur. Or you may be Valencia Estevez, "the Angel of Cayambe," fighting for the residents of a town in present-day Ecuador and a New Angeles slum in the new mythos. You could even be Whizzard, one of the few white cis-male characters in Android: Netrunner, based on Android designer Kevin Wilson.

And a game whose business model depends on regularly printing new expansion decks is a game whose cast of characters must constantly expand. “The world is so big, and there are so many different kinds of people,” Robinson said. “What does cyberpunk India look like?”

“I Hate That I Have to Call Diversity a Risk.”

The pressure to deliver games on tight schedules makes fighting for diverse representations tough at for-profit companies, says Jonni Trev, a volunteer designer for the Project NISEI fan organization, based in Oakland, California. He’s also a video game designer.

"External pressure to make money makes every game you’ve ever played worse,” says Trev. “There is no game you will ever play that has been made better by that."

In Trev’s experience, games that demonstrate consideration for diversity and inclusion get that way because of a few people on the inside who fought for it. "Real inclusion is very hard work,” they say. “You can’t just be like, let’s get some brown people in here. It doesn’t work that way.”

Now a freelancer, Robinson has experienced firsthand certain backward industry views of what players want. She says she was “reprimanded once that there were more women than men in a product, and to never let them see that happen again.”

“There's always quiet pushback, even if you don’t quite see it," Wilson says. "They won’t come out and say they don’t want diversity. They’ll say, oh, the numbers show that a white male protagonist is going to get us the best return on our money. It’s always couched in these numbers that you can’t argue with because they’re often mysterious somewhere.”

With less money at stake relative to big-budget video games, the Android: Netrunner designers had more freedom to take risks. “I hate that I have to call diversity a risk,” Robinson said. But Wilson says he and colleagues enjoyed the full support of Fantasy Flight’s then CEO, Christian Petersen, to create the game world they wanted.

Damon Stone was the only person of color on the team but never had to fight the predominantly white male group over representation. In an email, he said, “The team talked extensively about our disappointment within the games industry and genre fiction, especially science fiction, about the erasure of people who were not cis heterosexual white men.”

Clark, cocreator of the Android universe and head of the Android story group, did point to two efforts that did not go as planned. The team designed and got final approval for a card depicting a trans man, Nero Severn, including a brief piece of fiction slipped into the expansion pack where he was introduced. But the piece that printed and shipped omitted the mention of being trans; neither he nor Robinson knows how that happened. The remaining text seems deliberately vague: Conservative India was “powerless to stop Nero, to transform him back to who he used to be.”

Both Clark and Stone said they had wanted to depict the character Ayla ‘Bios’ Rahim wearing a hijab, but because some team members were uncomfortable with it, she “came out with her hair uncovered and her scarf around her shoulders,” Clark said. It still bothers Stone that others deemed the hijab problematic, but he noted that other pieces of art and fiction made clear she was Muslim. “I've received so many thank yous for depicting a practicing Muslim as a talented and smart hero working for justice and freedom,” he said in an email.

Representation Matters

Trev used to identify as male, and before exploring their own gender identity they hadn’t noticed a lack of representation in card games. “I was just, like, a young white guy who just sort of didn’t really pay attention to a lot of these sorts of things in the games I played,” they said.

But when Trev taught their partner how to play Android: Netrunner, she got excited about feminine-leaning characters like Andromeda, the dispossessed aristocrat. “That was kind of like the moment for me when it clicked,” they said. “It’s like, ‘OK I get it. I’m totally sold, I understand why this is important.’”

Other cyberpunk media have gotten diversity wrong because they’re “not talking to the people they’re representing,” Westfield said. A controversial marketing campaign for the video game Cyberpunk 2077 featuring an image of a trans woman prominently focused on their genitalia, has dissuaded her from buying the game. “I don’t see the need to fund a company that chooses to fetishize my existence,” she said.

Westfield’s interest in Netrunner goes all the way back to the 1990s version. As a computer science student, she got so hooked that she failed a semester of college partly because of it. Going to tournaments and playing with friends got her through a difficult divorce period. She still remembers how stunned she felt in 2018 when she learned the game had been discontinued. “I felt adrift for five days.”

She then successfully applied to be community manager of Project NISEI. The organization, which prides itself on inclusion, now has about 60 people. The group is set to release a new card pack named System Gateway in early 2021, aimed at newcomers to the game.

“A lot of the people who care about Netrunner and are willing to invest the time to keep it going are the people who aren’t represented in other games,” she said.

The protagonists of cyberpunk stories are people with enormous will and enthusiasm but not much money. Like NISEI, with its trans-accepting culture, cyberpunk is at peace with a world where our identities can be revised. And rather than using technology so cutting-edge it doesn’t work yet, Android: Netrunner presents its dystopian world through playing cards, a technology first developed around 900 AD. Maybe we have to look to low tech to find the real cyberpunk.