All right, welcome to our second talk of the day, and the role of open source in the
Netrunner revival by Ruben Peters.
Hello, everyone.
I hope you have a great time yesterday and today so far.
So I will be talking about another Netrunner, and imagine that you're part of a gaming
community, a very vibrant and invested into the game, when all of a sudden you get
to use that the publisher stops, you'll stop making your game.
The Netrunner community didn't have to imagine that, and 2018 that was what actually
happened.
And also came quite a surprise because a few months prior, a fancy play game, so the publisher
at a time, also announced the revised course set, which was a way to kind of get new players
invested into the game, and then several months later they announced the end, which was
very surprising and a lot of people were quite devastated about it.
So a lot of they were wondering, well, with no official support, like what will happen, there
will be no more new releases, no more organized play, will it the game just die out and
fail out into obscurity?
Fortunately, that isn't what happened, a few invested individuals, they started up this
community, or fan organization, which was called Nise at a time, called No Signal Games
right now, and it was basically a project to continue the game of Netrunner itself.
A few people, or one person that maybe might recognize is this person, designer of a game
that maybe you have heard about.
Today, so it has been, I would say, almost 7, 8, 8 years, it has been, I would say, a great
success, so the World Championship last year in 2025, in Edinburgh, had created 60 players,
which was the second largest tournament of Netrunner, besides the last fanciified games
World Championship.
So what I want to talk about today is kind of look back at kind of projects that happened
or start of started during the FNG days of Netrunner, open source projects that I think
helped in kind of this transition from essentially the fanciified games, the company that
published the game to the current community run organization of the game itself, and in a
way this was kind of, you could see it as a stress test for the Netrunner community in a sort of
unexpected way of applying the bus factor where an element that people would think would stay
stick around, actually didn't stick around and stopped existing.
So I've talked a little bit about Netrunner, but I suppose that maybe there are many people in
room that don't actually know what the game is about, so I'll give a sort of very brief explanation.
So to summarize it in a few keywords, Netrunner is a, it's a physical board game or card game,
so it's one versus one, it's AC metric, it's set in a cyberpunk setting, and it's an expandable
card game. So to explain it a little bit more, one versus one, so there are two players, you play against
each other, it's AC metric, the two players will have very different roles within the game,
they will, they have entirely different sets of cards, they interact with the game pieces in a different
way, the cyberpunk setting, so one player plays a corporation, so in this setting of
kind of futuristic world where it's ruled by mega corporations, one player plays as such a
mega corporation, and the other player plays as a runner, so kind of a hacker trying to steal
data and information from corporations. It's an expandable card game, so this is kind of to contrast
it with a trading card game, for example, in a trading card game you would have booster packs where you
get randomized sets of cards, you can trade them, an expandable card game is somewhat similar,
and as a trading card game, better or no booster packs that are just expansions, you buy an
expansion, you have all the cards, you have a play set of all the cards, so you just buy the
expansions, and essentially you have a full collection of all the cards. So to go into a little bit more
detail on the AC metric and the two players, so the corporation, I've already talked about it,
the corporation, what they do is they sort of create and protect servers, and from those servers,
they want to score agendas, and the goal for the corporation is to score seven agenda points,
so agenda points come from agenda cards, which are cards in the corporation stack,
and the runner or the hacker, the goal for the runner is to kind of run into these corporation
servers and find the agenda cards before the corporation can score them and get their points,
and the goal for them is also to reach seven points by stealing the agenda points or the agenda cards.
And so the goal for both players is to get seven points, but the way they do that is an entirely different way.
To go in a bit more history of natural and self,
is that because the net runner actually didn't even originate with fancy flag games, it originated
in 1996, it was designed by Richard Gordfield, also the designer of Magic Togethering,
and it was published in 1996 as a net runner by Wizard of the Coast.
Back then it was a collectible card game, so then there were both booster packs, the game was also slightly different,
but after a few years it was stopped by Wizard of the Coast, then in 2012 it was picked up
or sort of rebooted in a different way by fancy flag games, and released as Android net runner
because this setting was within their Android universe, and then in 2018 the fancy flag games announced
that they would stop, and then after that, and those signal games picked it up and has been
releasing new cards and supporting organized place since then, up until now, so we still still still live, of course.
So I also want to kind of go over a little bit more detail of what we are and what we do, so
in our signal games is a non-profits and volunteer organization, so we essentially act as
the publisher of net runner today.
So we do new card design and development, we distribute products, we do organize place supports,
so we organize big tournaments like the World Championship, for example, we maintain comprehensive rules,
we do format balance of creating analysts, stuff like that, and we also go to board game conventions,
like basically anything you would imagine, a game publisher to do, we do that.
So since basically 2019, when the game was supposed to end by fancy flag games, since then we
continuously support the game with, I guess, the easiest way is to show that in this way,
so the World Championship has never gotten, was never stopped, so every year there was one during
COVID, it was online, of course, and then since then we've almost like every 9-ish or 12-ish month,
so around every year, there is a new set for players to play with.
It is also possible to basically, so we release our sets also as print and play, that you can also
feed me down from a website, so technically you don't even need to buy the sets to play the game,
and we also have a translation team that translates our sets into many different languages.
And basically, so no second game doesn't organization, so I mentioned it's kind of a volunteer,
non-profit and volunteer organization, volunteers are not pretty much entirely from the
net-runner community, of course. In my mind, it's kind of embodies a lot of the same things that
the open source community, or typical open source communities, also have, although technically,
of course a board game isn't open source in the same sense, I would say that the organization
embodies kind of a lot of similar values as well. But the main thing that I would kind of want to
go over in the presentation is look at certain projects, like actual open source projects,
that are present in the net-runner community and how in my opinion this kind of aided
this transition of the game publisher stopping, and then it being handed over in a way to the community.
It's not, of course, the only factor there's many, I think, reasons why
why the community has been able to continue in this way, but I think the open source projects
that were being maintained by the community is a factor in this success.
So, I'm going to go over kind of these five areas where if I kind of look back,
I'm making the observation that a lot of these areas that kind of are things that
happen within the net-runner community, just in its on a day-to-day basis, that we're already
quite community driven. So, the first one is creating and sharing decks. So, the
net-runner is a card game, so when a lot of like these types of trading or expandable
card games, you don't just like pick or you don't just immediately set down and go play,
before you actually set down and play, you need to create your own deck. So, you need to
from your collection of cards, need to decide which ones you put together, how you make certain
combinations and why you think that will be a strong thing to do in the game. So, for some players,
it's not the actual playing itself of the game that's kind of the main thing, but really
the spining of combinations, of cards that were together or don't work together and that's kind
of pattern of figuring out. And so, that's a reason why a good sort of application to build decks
is very valuable and also kind of sharing decks with the community, it's rating on ideas,
things like that. So, in the beginning of, we say, in the very beginning of net-runner,
there were quite, as quite common, there were very kind of early applications like people trying
out ideas of like just making a deck builder and then releasing it saying, okay, here's my deck builder.
But then after a certain point, it kind of consolidated into one more community accepted
thing, which was called NetrunnerDB. But at a time, fancy-flight games was also kind of pushing
their own deck building application across their products, which was a card game DB.
So, much so, that at a certain point, the NetrunnerDB or the person that was hosting it and
development it received the CS and the system in 2014. So, there were several projects that received
such a CS and the system. It's not exactly clear, exactly why, but the idea at a time was that they
were pushing card game DB, so they were kind of, being able to promote their own deck building
application more than that was one thing that they did. But NetrunnerDB wasn't down for that long,
because several applications received or such a CS and the system, but nothing actually ended up happening.
So, after not even a few months, it was put back online and then it stayed online for basically
up until now. So, until the end of 2018. So, this was like a small interaction with
or a small clash of different in the community of different deck builders being present until
eventually NetrunnerDB became kind of the de facto way to build NetrunnerDB. So, currently, it's hosted
and it's kind of the ownership is more taking over by no-segment games as an organization. So,
sometimes people within the community, they stop developing the project, maybe they're not interested
in Netrunner anymore or they're not as invested into the community, for example, or sometimes there's
so, sometimes there's still a investor that they just decided to join, and those the
most games organization. So, NetrunnerDB is hosted as one of the projects that we maintain.
And, NetrunnerDB also has a sort of interesting impacts on other FFG games. So, there are many kind
of, I would say, forks of NetrunnerDB for many of other fancy flight games franchises. So,
there's, here are examples of drones DBs for the game of drones game,
brings DB for the, a lot of the range living car game, ArcMDB for the ArcM horror game,
and Marvel CDB for Marvel game course. So, if you look at these websites, they look quite similar
because they're all essentially forks and deviations from NetrunnerDB.
Next thing is playing online. So, Netrunner is a physical board game, so you might wonder where,
like, okay, why is playing online is such a thing, or maybe, well, remember when we had COVID,
and there were lots of people that weren't able to meet physically anymore. So, back then,
it was very helpful for people to then actually be able to still continue playing if they weren't
able to meet in person. But there's also other reasons, like there's many online tournaments happening,
where people can compete online, or you want to compete with people from different areas,
where you cannot meet in person. We also use it internally, a lot to accelerate play testing,
because we do a lot of play testing for our sets, and it's a lot easier to organize,
play testing when it can happen faster and online, or it can happen online, which faster than
asking people to meet in person. So, online play is very valuable, even for a physical board game.
In the beginning, there was people used this project called Optagon,
which is a sort of more general, I'm going to say, a card game or board game simulator,
but nothing is kind of automated, it's as if you have an actual sandbox where you need to do everything
manually. Nowadays, everything happens on what is called JaneNet, or JaneTech.net,
where a lot of the interactions pretty much everything that you would commonly interact with is automated.
So, if you play a card, this stage is automatically updated with how you would expect it to
interactions are kind of automated. So, a lot of it's similar to how you would have like an
actual digital board game, like hard stone, or magic arena, for example, it's a lot more similar
to that than playing physically. There's also two more interesting, I would say,
and I do, so I have to mention here. So, one interesting thing is that, so, there is
JeanTechid.net, which is just, you can play in the browser, of course. Something that I recently
learned is that in China, JeanTechid.net is a band, it's like non-language websites due to the
like the whole great firewall thing they have going on there. I suspect to this, I don't know the
exact reason I suspected this, because JeanTechid.net, when you go on the website, there's like this
general chat thing, but it's not used at often, but you can, like, chat with other people
and there, typically communities chat in other places. I think it's a band because of that,
but this means that, like, the Chinese players cannot play online on the same place that we would play.
So, they have hosted their own fork of netrunner, which is on snickedorbit.net,
which has some adaptations, the chat feature, for example, is also something that's removed.
And, another interesting thing that's one of the JeanTechid developers mentioned to me is that,
so, in Borgue, like digital implementation of Borgames, or digital Borgames, there's often, like,
people complaining about the shuffle or not being truly, truly random, like, sometimes,
it's, of course, out of frustration, because they've had some bad luck in certain interactions.
And, of course, because the implementation of JeanTechid is open source, people can have a look at what's going on there.
It is, just for your random, there is no trick is going on there, because in other
implementations of digital Borgames, like, an, for example, or to many understanding magic arena,
there's some adjustments of removing elements of having an extremely bad hand and adjusting slightly on that.
But, there's no tricks going on in the JeanTech implementation, and, of course,
plainly visible in the open source implementation.
There's also organizing and joining details. This is kind of a small thing,
or, well, I mean, the open source project isn't that big, but the main thing that I want to highlight here is that
small tournaments are run by the community, and they were run by tournament organizers from the
community, even during the fancy flight game, so that is also one element that I would say,
help it transition. So, people would, or, and still use this website called always be running,
where they post when a tournament happens, what the details of the tournament are, like, entry,
which price get they're using, what the entry fee is, where the location is, and so on.
And this is one thing that really also helped it transition is that tournaments were already
organized in this way in sort of people taking initiative in organizing their tournaments,
and then, as no sign of games and took over, this is just something that could continue happening.
Then, as a tournament organizer yourself, how a tournament itself works due to time
I will be going over this a little bit quickly, but you might wonder, like, oh, you know,
like, in a board game, or like chess or any kind of other sports, you have this kind of system of
Swiss rounds, and then elimination rounds at the end, there's lots of software for that,
so you can simply just use any existing software, right? The short answer is no, it's not possible,
and I'm going to go over all the exact details here, but basically the main problem, or
think that makes it difficult to use any existing software, is that the asymmetric nature of the game
means that there needs to be a special system of how people are paired against each other, because
there is a corporation and a runner, I go show up to a tournament, I have two decks with me,
another player also has two decks with them, we are paired for our first Swiss match, what do we
actually do, like, do we play one game of and randomize the sides, do we play both sides?
Yes, I'll go over the presentation, so there's, like, not going to go over the details, but basically
what this means is that we need special software to run our tournaments, which is also something
that was developed by someone originally in the community, and is now taken over by us.
And then the last thing is consulting game rulings, so the, in the beginning of fan supply
games was kind of organized a bit at home, because it was the game designer's responsibility,
so it wasn't also always the first priority, and often there would be like Twitter rulings,
and it wouldn't be collected in a specific place, I'm going to skip over this example here,
but basically at a certain point there was a community member, Jaco Drago, that then
collect, start collecting these in sort of a custom witty, for people to then kind of reference,
and this often became like the resource for finding rulings on specific interactions, and so on,
and that's then also the person that at the end of the beginning joined no second games together with
some other people, I'm also part of this rules team, and so since then we've made the rulings
available on that runer DB, so people can more easily find them, and we also have comprehensive rules,
a comprehensive rules document that people can reference the actual full reference of the rules.
So that's kind of the kind of conclusion, is for me, a lot of these projects really helped
in the transition, the community ownership's altis project aid, it's the transition
of losing the publisher, essentially, and having nostalgic games then take it over,
and then the open source projects, the fact that they were open source also allowed us to kind of take
over when community members left the community, and that's all for me, if that picture
interests make sure to check out the discord, the community discord, and our website.
I can take some questions.
Yeah, unfortunately no time for questions for this one, and I'll speak up this come over.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one, and I'll see you in the next one.