Forty two – London Netrunners

I climbed a flight of stairs and then turned right onto the Millennium footbridge; my legs were complaining: they were gently but persistently reminding me about the hike I had been on two days earlier.

It was dark, and the bridge was busy. On the northern side of the bridge I could see St Paul’s Cathedral. On the southern side, I could see the Tate Gallery, Shakespeare’s Globe and some restaurants. I was starting to feel hungry. I stopped approximately half way to take in the view. I saw Blackfriars’ station. In the distance Tower Bridge and The Shard were gracefully illuminated. I looked towards The Shard; that was roughly where I was heading.

The description of the event was the shortest I have ever seen, a mere two sentences: ‘there is usually a lot of empty tables, come and join us! Have just increased the max size since this is getting popular.’

The event was to be held in a coffee shop opposite a replica of a galleon called The Golden Hind. It was easy to find; I knew where I was going. I walked past the Globe Theatre, past the restaurants, through some wide tunnels, and then picked my way through narrow roads that were overlooked by former warehouses that had long since been converted into luxury apartments.

When I saw the title, ‘Android NetRunner’, I thought the event might have something to do with mobile telephone software. I was wrong; very wrong. It was a card game Meetup, and NetRunner was the name of the game. I looked around. Players sat opposite each other. Tables were covered in sets of unusual looking cards. Tokens were involved.

‘Do you fancy a game?’ a friendly voice enquired. I turned around.

‘I’m, erm… I don’t know anything about NetRunner. I’m totally new to this, but I’m willing to learn’ I replied. My new friend, Tom, acquired an expression of gentle bewilderment.

‘The deck I’ve got isn’t a great deck for beginners… But, we can… I’ll talk you through what happens. Do you know Magic? It’s a bit like magic.’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, okay…’ Tom was obviously puzzling about how to explain the game to me. ‘Basically, one player is a corporation and there’s another player that is trying to attack the corporation and steal its secrets’. Tom explained that each player had their own set of cards which they customise; players, it seemed, become attached to their cards.

When Tom mentioned ‘servers’ the game started to make a bit of sense. I decided to chance my arm and throw Tom my tentative understanding of what on earth he was talking about. ‘So, is it like, what’s that Science Fiction author called…’

‘William Gibson…’

‘Yes, what was that book he wrote?’ I asked, struggling to remember.

‘Neuromancer’.

‘So, it’s like that, right?’

Tom nodded. I had read Neuromancer when I was in my teens, mainly because it was a cool and geeky thing to do. I found it a tough read; I found his writing dense and pretty impenetrable, and I barely managed to get the gist of what he was writing about. The emergence of a new ‘cyberpunk science fiction scene’ was fun and exciting, and spoke to my inner geek. I had largely forgotten about Neuromancer and Gibson, who popularised the term ‘cyberspace’. My copy of Neuromancer sat on the bottom of a bookshelf in my spare room, untouched for years, its pages yellowing with time.

‘So, what you’ve got are these piles of cards. Here’s your corporation headquarters, and you’ve got some money. Here’s your R&D deck, and over here you can have servers where you can have agendas. The runner, or ‘hacker’, can come over and steal your agendas, but you don’t want that to happen since the aim of the game is to collect seven agenda items, or to kill the runner. What you do is protect your piles by using ice.’

I was starting to get very confused.

‘So, is ice like, a firewall or something?’ I asked, throwing a technical computing term at Tom, to see if it would stick.

‘Yes, it could be, if you like… I’m not technical, so to me, it could be anything.’

The more ice (or layers of security) you have, the harder it is for a runner to get your secrets. To make things happen, you need money to do things.

‘A corporation gets three goes per turn, and a runner gets four goes’. I was a bit confused by this asymmetry, but I didn’t ask why. At this point, I was thoroughly overloaded with detail.

Another player called Justin joined us. Justin was in his twenties, whereas Tom was quite a bit older; Tom was philosophy graduate who was now a train driver. They both decided to have a demo game for my benefit. Cards were shuffled, counters were moved around, and Justin assumed the role of the corporation. Justin started to rapidly take me through the game and the moves that he was making, but I soon got totally lost. As Justin got into the game, he became silent, his attention invested intently on the cards.

‘Fancy a game?’

I looked up. Someone new had arrived. I introduced myself and then confessed to being mildly baffled, which the new visitor accepted as a challenge. I left Justin and Tom’s game and went to join Kev at a new table. I told Kev what I knew about the game, which elicited a sagely nod. I sensed I was doing well.

‘So, when you get a card, you can rez it, which means that it’s running on a server’. You put your cards next to your headquarters card, and then turn it the right side up, to show that it is ‘running’: we were talking about imaginary computers doing imaginary things. Trying to make things real, I tried to imagine that we were talking about a multi-national corporation that had an insurance business (or ‘agenda’) which is powered by a huge data centre. Making it slightly more real made it slightly more exciting. Having your own cards meant you were either your own corporation, or you were your own ‘master hacker’ or anti-establishment rebel; I was beginning to see its appeal.

‘So, what do you do when you’re not playing this game?’ I asked Kev.

‘I…, erm, manage servers in a big corporation’ Kev replied.

Justin came over to see what was going on; his game had finished. We decided to collectively have another ‘demo’ game, with Justin being the ‘game narrator’ for a second time. Kev was the runner, and I was a corporation. I set down some ‘ice’ cards, and after a few goes, I found an agenda card. Justin helped me to get rid of some useless repeated cards, before Kev went in for an attack. Kev paid some money and got into my R&D operation, and managed to get a sneaky look at the next thing I might play (which was, as it turned out, pretty useless).

As I gathered more cards, Justin realised something: he knew how to win the game. He rezzed a resource card to accumulate more money, and then played two identical cards in quick succession to wipe out the runner’s hand: he had inflicted ‘meat damage’. Trying to make sense of everything, I imagined this was the equivalent of ‘sending the boys round’ to beat the hacker up.

The timing of Justin’s victory was perfect: the coffee shop was closing. Games finished, everyone packed up their cards, and we walked through the boisterous streets of Borough.

We ended up at a pub called The Sheaf, which was, in effect, a basement that had white washed walls and large expansive tables. It was the perfect place to play. As I bought Kev a pint to thank him for his very clear and helpful descriptions, new players arrived, unpacked cards, and settled down in pairs. Some players had specialist ‘vanity credits’. I saw another player with what could be described as a ‘play mat’ where they set out their corporations or runner cards.

The more I hung around, the more interesting it became. I discovered that Kev had set up a NetRunner podcast a couple of months ago, and mentioned that there were some really useful video tutorials on the internet. He then told me about NetRunner tournaments.

As I went to sit down, I noticed there were two huge fully occupied tables. There were approximately seven games happening at the same time. I asked Kev who ran the Meetup, but he didn’t really know; it didn’t really matter. There wasn’t any sense of hierarchy; everyone was there to have fun, to have a laugh, to mess around with cards. One thing that struck me was that every single player was male. I wondered whether this was because of the nature of the card game, whether it was the particularly strong cyberpunk metaphor that the game adopted, or the distinctly masculine imagery that appeared on many of the cards.

With a beer in hand, I sat in on another game, this time between Steve and Marco. Steve was clearly the more expert player, but the game didn’t go well for him. Steve, who was playing the runner, was easily defeated by Marco’s powerful corporation. Marco had installed several layers of ‘ice’ in preparation for Steve’s persistent attacks.

An hour or so later, it was time to go, although the majority of the games were still continuing. Kev had told me that everyone would be playing until the pub closed at eleven.

I climbed a couple of steps and returned to the street. I looked upwards to see where The Shard was: a site for real corporations. I found The Shard, and then started to walk towards it, beginning my short journey home.