WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:10.680 All right, welcome to our second talk of the day, and the role of open source in the 00:10.680 --> 00:13.400 Netrunner revival by Ruben Peters. 00:13.400 --> 00:15.400 Hello, everyone. 00:15.400 --> 00:19.200 I hope you have a great time yesterday and today so far. 00:19.200 --> 00:25.000 So I will be talking about another Netrunner, and imagine that you're part of a gaming 00:25.000 --> 00:32.000 community, a very vibrant and invested into the game, when all of a sudden you get 00:32.000 --> 00:37.320 to use that the publisher stops, you'll stop making your game. 00:37.320 --> 00:42.360 The Netrunner community didn't have to imagine that, and 2018 that was what actually 00:42.360 --> 00:43.360 happened. 00:43.360 --> 00:50.760 And also came quite a surprise because a few months prior, a fancy play game, so the publisher 00:50.760 --> 00:57.760 at a time, also announced the revised course set, which was a way to kind of get new players 00:57.760 --> 01:02.960 invested into the game, and then several months later they announced the end, which was 01:02.960 --> 01:06.040 very surprising and a lot of people were quite devastated about it. 01:06.040 --> 01:11.000 So a lot of they were wondering, well, with no official support, like what will happen, there 01:11.000 --> 01:15.960 will be no more new releases, no more organized play, will it the game just die out and 01:15.960 --> 01:17.800 fail out into obscurity? 01:18.680 --> 01:24.400 Fortunately, that isn't what happened, a few invested individuals, they started up this 01:24.400 --> 01:29.440 community, or fan organization, which was called Nise at a time, called No Signal Games 01:29.440 --> 01:39.080 right now, and it was basically a project to continue the game of Netrunner itself. 01:39.080 --> 01:47.080 A few people, or one person that maybe might recognize is this person, designer of a game 01:47.080 --> 01:50.960 that maybe you have heard about. 01:50.960 --> 01:56.680 Today, so it has been, I would say, almost 7, 8, 8 years, it has been, I would say, a great 01:56.680 --> 02:02.920 success, so the World Championship last year in 2025, in Edinburgh, had created 60 players, 02:02.920 --> 02:11.400 which was the second largest tournament of Netrunner, besides the last fanciified games 02:11.400 --> 02:14.600 World Championship. 02:14.680 --> 02:23.320 So what I want to talk about today is kind of look back at kind of projects that happened 02:23.320 --> 02:29.880 or start of started during the FNG days of Netrunner, open source projects that I think 02:29.880 --> 02:36.840 helped in kind of this transition from essentially the fanciified games, the company that 02:36.840 --> 02:42.040 published the game to the current community run organization of the game itself, and in a 02:42.120 --> 02:46.920 way this was kind of, you could see it as a stress test for the Netrunner community in a sort of 02:48.520 --> 02:55.640 unexpected way of applying the bus factor where an element that people would think would stay 02:55.640 --> 03:01.640 stick around, actually didn't stick around and stopped existing. 03:01.640 --> 03:06.840 So I've talked a little bit about Netrunner, but I suppose that maybe there are many people in 03:06.840 --> 03:11.400 room that don't actually know what the game is about, so I'll give a sort of very brief explanation. 03:13.400 --> 03:19.080 So to summarize it in a few keywords, Netrunner is a, it's a physical board game or card game, 03:19.080 --> 03:24.760 so it's one versus one, it's AC metric, it's set in a cyberpunk setting, and it's an expandable 03:24.760 --> 03:31.480 card game. So to explain it a little bit more, one versus one, so there are two players, you play against 03:31.560 --> 03:36.760 each other, it's AC metric, the two players will have very different roles within the game, 03:37.720 --> 03:43.960 they will, they have entirely different sets of cards, they interact with the game pieces in a different 03:43.960 --> 03:54.040 way, the cyberpunk setting, so one player plays a corporation, so in this setting of 03:54.840 --> 04:01.320 kind of futuristic world where it's ruled by mega corporations, one player plays as such a 04:01.320 --> 04:08.120 mega corporation, and the other player plays as a runner, so kind of a hacker trying to steal 04:08.120 --> 04:15.000 data and information from corporations. It's an expandable card game, so this is kind of to contrast 04:15.000 --> 04:20.520 it with a trading card game, for example, in a trading card game you would have booster packs where you 04:20.520 --> 04:25.880 get randomized sets of cards, you can trade them, an expandable card game is somewhat similar, 04:25.880 --> 04:29.960 and as a trading card game, better or no booster packs that are just expansions, you buy an 04:29.960 --> 04:35.880 expansion, you have all the cards, you have a play set of all the cards, so you just buy the 04:35.880 --> 04:44.680 expansions, and essentially you have a full collection of all the cards. So to go into a little bit more 04:44.680 --> 04:49.480 detail on the AC metric and the two players, so the corporation, I've already talked about it, 04:51.480 --> 04:58.440 the corporation, what they do is they sort of create and protect servers, and from those servers, 04:58.520 --> 05:03.720 they want to score agendas, and the goal for the corporation is to score seven agenda points, 05:04.440 --> 05:09.480 so agenda points come from agenda cards, which are cards in the corporation stack, 05:11.400 --> 05:17.400 and the runner or the hacker, the goal for the runner is to kind of run into these corporation 05:17.400 --> 05:23.560 servers and find the agenda cards before the corporation can score them and get their points, 05:23.640 --> 05:29.560 and the goal for them is also to reach seven points by stealing the agenda points or the agenda cards. 05:30.680 --> 05:37.320 And so the goal for both players is to get seven points, but the way they do that is an entirely different way. 05:41.160 --> 05:44.120 To go in a bit more history of natural and self, 05:45.240 --> 05:51.480 is that because the net runner actually didn't even originate with fancy flag games, it originated 05:51.480 --> 05:57.640 in 1996, it was designed by Richard Gordfield, also the designer of Magic Togethering, 05:59.000 --> 06:03.960 and it was published in 1996 as a net runner by Wizard of the Coast. 06:05.400 --> 06:12.200 Back then it was a collectible card game, so then there were both booster packs, the game was also slightly different, 06:13.560 --> 06:19.480 but after a few years it was stopped by Wizard of the Coast, then in 2012 it was picked up 06:20.440 --> 06:26.920 or sort of rebooted in a different way by fancy flag games, and released as Android net runner 06:26.920 --> 06:35.480 because this setting was within their Android universe, and then in 2018 the fancy flag games announced 06:35.480 --> 06:42.040 that they would stop, and then after that, and those signal games picked it up and has been 06:42.920 --> 06:50.920 releasing new cards and supporting organized place since then, up until now, so we still still still live, of course. 06:52.120 --> 06:57.160 So I also want to kind of go over a little bit more detail of what we are and what we do, so 06:57.720 --> 07:02.920 in our signal games is a non-profits and volunteer organization, so we essentially act as 07:03.640 --> 07:05.640 the publisher of net runner today. 07:06.600 --> 07:13.960 So we do new card design and development, we distribute products, we do organize place supports, 07:13.960 --> 07:20.600 so we organize big tournaments like the World Championship, for example, we maintain comprehensive rules, 07:20.600 --> 07:27.640 we do format balance of creating analysts, stuff like that, and we also go to board game conventions, 07:27.640 --> 07:33.080 like basically anything you would imagine, a game publisher to do, we do that. 07:33.960 --> 07:45.160 So since basically 2019, when the game was supposed to end by fancy flag games, since then we 07:45.160 --> 07:51.640 continuously support the game with, I guess, the easiest way is to show that in this way, 07:51.640 --> 07:58.040 so the World Championship has never gotten, was never stopped, so every year there was one during 07:58.040 --> 08:06.120 COVID, it was online, of course, and then since then we've almost like every 9-ish or 12-ish month, 08:06.120 --> 08:09.960 so around every year, there is a new set for players to play with. 08:14.520 --> 08:20.520 It is also possible to basically, so we release our sets also as print and play, that you can also 08:20.520 --> 08:25.240 feed me down from a website, so technically you don't even need to buy the sets to play the game, 08:25.400 --> 08:30.200 and we also have a translation team that translates our sets into many different languages. 08:31.400 --> 08:37.240 And basically, so no second game doesn't organization, so I mentioned it's kind of a volunteer, 08:37.240 --> 08:43.000 non-profit and volunteer organization, volunteers are not pretty much entirely from the 08:43.000 --> 08:50.680 net-runner community, of course. In my mind, it's kind of embodies a lot of the same things that 08:50.840 --> 08:55.320 the open source community, or typical open source communities, also have, although technically, 08:55.320 --> 09:00.600 of course a board game isn't open source in the same sense, I would say that the organization 09:01.640 --> 09:07.960 embodies kind of a lot of similar values as well. But the main thing that I would kind of want to 09:07.960 --> 09:13.320 go over in the presentation is look at certain projects, like actual open source projects, 09:14.280 --> 09:20.120 that are present in the net-runner community and how in my opinion this kind of aided 09:20.120 --> 09:28.120 this transition of the game publisher stopping, and then it being handed over in a way to the community. 09:29.000 --> 09:32.680 It's not, of course, the only factor there's many, I think, reasons why 09:35.640 --> 09:41.480 why the community has been able to continue in this way, but I think the open source projects 09:41.560 --> 09:46.040 that were being maintained by the community is a factor in this success. 09:48.840 --> 09:54.600 So, I'm going to go over kind of these five areas where if I kind of look back, 09:55.480 --> 10:01.320 I'm making the observation that a lot of these areas that kind of are things that 10:01.960 --> 10:07.160 happen within the net-runner community, just in its on a day-to-day basis, that we're already 10:07.240 --> 10:15.160 quite community driven. So, the first one is creating and sharing decks. So, the 10:16.680 --> 10:21.080 net-runner is a card game, so when a lot of like these types of trading or expandable 10:21.080 --> 10:27.160 card games, you don't just like pick or you don't just immediately set down and go play, 10:27.160 --> 10:31.560 before you actually set down and play, you need to create your own deck. So, you need to 10:32.200 --> 10:39.640 from your collection of cards, need to decide which ones you put together, how you make certain 10:39.640 --> 10:45.080 combinations and why you think that will be a strong thing to do in the game. So, for some players, 10:45.080 --> 10:50.120 it's not the actual playing itself of the game that's kind of the main thing, but really 10:50.120 --> 10:56.840 the spining of combinations, of cards that were together or don't work together and that's kind 10:56.840 --> 11:07.640 of pattern of figuring out. And so, that's a reason why a good sort of application to build decks 11:07.640 --> 11:14.440 is very valuable and also kind of sharing decks with the community, it's rating on ideas, 11:15.000 --> 11:22.920 things like that. So, in the beginning of, we say, in the very beginning of net-runner, 11:22.920 --> 11:29.480 there were quite, as quite common, there were very kind of early applications like people trying 11:29.480 --> 11:35.480 out ideas of like just making a deck builder and then releasing it saying, okay, here's my deck builder. 11:38.120 --> 11:43.960 But then after a certain point, it kind of consolidated into one more community accepted 11:43.960 --> 11:49.800 thing, which was called NetrunnerDB. But at a time, fancy-flight games was also kind of pushing 11:49.800 --> 11:54.840 their own deck building application across their products, which was a card game DB. 11:56.520 --> 12:03.480 So, much so, that at a certain point, the NetrunnerDB or the person that was hosting it and 12:03.480 --> 12:11.080 development it received the CS and the system in 2014. So, there were several projects that received 12:11.400 --> 12:22.200 such a CS and the system. It's not exactly clear, exactly why, but the idea at a time was that they 12:22.200 --> 12:28.920 were pushing card game DB, so they were kind of, being able to promote their own deck building 12:28.920 --> 12:37.400 application more than that was one thing that they did. But NetrunnerDB wasn't down for that long, 12:37.400 --> 12:44.680 because several applications received or such a CS and the system, but nothing actually ended up happening. 12:45.240 --> 12:52.120 So, after not even a few months, it was put back online and then it stayed online for basically 12:52.120 --> 13:02.920 up until now. So, until the end of 2018. So, this was like a small interaction with 13:03.880 --> 13:10.680 or a small clash of different in the community of different deck builders being present until 13:10.680 --> 13:19.480 eventually NetrunnerDB became kind of the de facto way to build NetrunnerDB. So, currently, it's hosted 13:19.480 --> 13:24.920 and it's kind of the ownership is more taking over by no-segment games as an organization. So, 13:24.920 --> 13:34.120 sometimes people within the community, they stop developing the project, maybe they're not interested 13:34.120 --> 13:39.320 in Netrunner anymore or they're not as invested into the community, for example, or sometimes there's 13:39.320 --> 13:43.880 so, sometimes there's still a investor that they just decided to join, and those the 13:43.880 --> 13:49.320 most games organization. So, NetrunnerDB is hosted as one of the projects that we maintain. 13:49.320 --> 14:01.160 And, NetrunnerDB also has a sort of interesting impacts on other FFG games. So, there are many kind 14:01.160 --> 14:08.280 of, I would say, forks of NetrunnerDB for many of other fancy flight games franchises. So, 14:08.280 --> 14:12.680 there's, here are examples of drones DBs for the game of drones game, 14:12.760 --> 14:19.240 brings DB for the, a lot of the range living car game, ArcMDB for the ArcM horror game, 14:19.240 --> 14:25.720 and Marvel CDB for Marvel game course. So, if you look at these websites, they look quite similar 14:26.600 --> 14:31.400 because they're all essentially forks and deviations from NetrunnerDB. 14:31.720 --> 14:45.720 Next thing is playing online. So, Netrunner is a physical board game, so you might wonder where, 14:45.720 --> 14:57.800 like, okay, why is playing online is such a thing, or maybe, well, remember when we had COVID, 14:58.440 --> 15:03.000 and there were lots of people that weren't able to meet physically anymore. So, back then, 15:03.000 --> 15:07.960 it was very helpful for people to then actually be able to still continue playing if they weren't 15:07.960 --> 15:13.240 able to meet in person. But there's also other reasons, like there's many online tournaments happening, 15:13.240 --> 15:18.680 where people can compete online, or you want to compete with people from different areas, 15:18.680 --> 15:25.000 where you cannot meet in person. We also use it internally, a lot to accelerate play testing, 15:25.000 --> 15:29.480 because we do a lot of play testing for our sets, and it's a lot easier to organize, 15:29.480 --> 15:35.480 play testing when it can happen faster and online, or it can happen online, which faster than 15:35.480 --> 15:44.440 asking people to meet in person. So, online play is very valuable, even for a physical board game. 15:46.840 --> 15:53.000 In the beginning, there was people used this project called Optagon, 15:53.000 --> 15:57.880 which is a sort of more general, I'm going to say, a card game or board game simulator, 15:57.880 --> 16:05.240 but nothing is kind of automated, it's as if you have an actual sandbox where you need to do everything 16:05.240 --> 16:11.240 manually. Nowadays, everything happens on what is called JaneNet, or JaneTech.net, 16:13.320 --> 16:19.560 where a lot of the interactions pretty much everything that you would commonly interact with is automated. 16:19.560 --> 16:25.320 So, if you play a card, this stage is automatically updated with how you would expect it to 16:26.040 --> 16:31.720 interactions are kind of automated. So, a lot of it's similar to how you would have like an 16:31.720 --> 16:36.920 actual digital board game, like hard stone, or magic arena, for example, it's a lot more similar 16:36.920 --> 16:45.560 to that than playing physically. There's also two more interesting, I would say, 16:46.520 --> 16:51.320 and I do, so I have to mention here. So, one interesting thing is that, so, there is 16:51.320 --> 16:58.440 JeanTechid.net, which is just, you can play in the browser, of course. Something that I recently 16:58.440 --> 17:07.400 learned is that in China, JeanTechid.net is a band, it's like non-language websites due to the 17:07.400 --> 17:13.240 like the whole great firewall thing they have going on there. I suspect to this, I don't know the 17:13.320 --> 17:18.120 exact reason I suspected this, because JeanTechid.net, when you go on the website, there's like this 17:18.120 --> 17:23.720 general chat thing, but it's not used at often, but you can, like, chat with other people 17:23.720 --> 17:29.560 and there, typically communities chat in other places. I think it's a band because of that, 17:29.560 --> 17:36.040 but this means that, like, the Chinese players cannot play online on the same place that we would play. 17:36.040 --> 17:40.520 So, they have hosted their own fork of netrunner, which is on snickedorbit.net, 17:41.480 --> 17:46.360 which has some adaptations, the chat feature, for example, is also something that's removed. 17:49.320 --> 17:55.880 And, another interesting thing that's one of the JeanTechid developers mentioned to me is that, 17:55.880 --> 18:01.480 so, in Borgue, like digital implementation of Borgames, or digital Borgames, there's often, like, 18:01.480 --> 18:06.680 people complaining about the shuffle or not being truly, truly random, like, sometimes, 18:06.760 --> 18:11.000 it's, of course, out of frustration, because they've had some bad luck in certain interactions. 18:11.800 --> 18:17.240 And, of course, because the implementation of JeanTechid is open source, people can have a look at what's going on there. 18:19.960 --> 18:24.920 It is, just for your random, there is no trick is going on there, because in other 18:25.800 --> 18:31.320 implementations of digital Borgames, like, an, for example, or to many understanding magic arena, 18:31.800 --> 18:38.680 there's some adjustments of removing elements of having an extremely bad hand and adjusting slightly on that. 18:39.800 --> 18:44.040 But, there's no tricks going on in the JeanTech implementation, and, of course, 18:44.760 --> 18:47.240 plainly visible in the open source implementation. 18:49.160 --> 18:54.840 There's also organizing and joining details. This is kind of a small thing, 18:55.560 --> 19:02.280 or, well, I mean, the open source project isn't that big, but the main thing that I want to highlight here is that 19:04.120 --> 19:10.040 small tournaments are run by the community, and they were run by tournament organizers from the 19:10.040 --> 19:14.840 community, even during the fancy flight game, so that is also one element that I would say, 19:14.840 --> 19:21.320 help it transition. So, people would, or, and still use this website called always be running, 19:22.200 --> 19:29.400 where they post when a tournament happens, what the details of the tournament are, like, entry, 19:30.360 --> 19:35.800 which price get they're using, what the entry fee is, where the location is, and so on. 19:38.040 --> 19:44.760 And this is one thing that really also helped it transition is that tournaments were already 19:44.840 --> 19:50.840 organized in this way in sort of people taking initiative in organizing their tournaments, 19:50.840 --> 19:56.520 and then, as no sign of games and took over, this is just something that could continue happening. 19:59.800 --> 20:06.440 Then, as a tournament organizer yourself, how a tournament itself works due to time 20:06.440 --> 20:11.960 I will be going over this a little bit quickly, but you might wonder, like, oh, you know, 20:11.960 --> 20:17.000 like, in a board game, or like chess or any kind of other sports, you have this kind of system of 20:17.000 --> 20:22.360 Swiss rounds, and then elimination rounds at the end, there's lots of software for that, 20:22.360 --> 20:30.600 so you can simply just use any existing software, right? The short answer is no, it's not possible, 20:30.680 --> 20:35.480 and I'm going to go over all the exact details here, but basically the main problem, or 20:36.120 --> 20:41.720 think that makes it difficult to use any existing software, is that the asymmetric nature of the game 20:41.720 --> 20:47.160 means that there needs to be a special system of how people are paired against each other, because 20:47.880 --> 20:51.960 there is a corporation and a runner, I go show up to a tournament, I have two decks with me, 20:52.520 --> 20:59.560 another player also has two decks with them, we are paired for our first Swiss match, what do we 20:59.640 --> 21:06.360 actually do, like, do we play one game of and randomize the sides, do we play both sides? 21:08.840 --> 21:19.640 Yes, I'll go over the presentation, so there's, like, not going to go over the details, but basically 21:19.640 --> 21:24.920 what this means is that we need special software to run our tournaments, which is also something 21:25.000 --> 21:30.600 that was developed by someone originally in the community, and is now taken over by us. 21:33.960 --> 21:41.560 And then the last thing is consulting game rulings, so the, in the beginning of fan supply 21:41.560 --> 21:47.640 games was kind of organized a bit at home, because it was the game designer's responsibility, 21:47.640 --> 21:53.400 so it wasn't also always the first priority, and often there would be like Twitter rulings, 21:53.400 --> 22:01.400 and it wouldn't be collected in a specific place, I'm going to skip over this example here, 22:01.400 --> 22:06.920 but basically at a certain point there was a community member, Jaco Drago, that then 22:06.920 --> 22:12.760 collect, start collecting these in sort of a custom witty, for people to then kind of reference, 22:12.760 --> 22:21.320 and this often became like the resource for finding rulings on specific interactions, and so on, 22:22.280 --> 22:27.320 and that's then also the person that at the end of the beginning joined no second games together with 22:27.320 --> 22:34.040 some other people, I'm also part of this rules team, and so since then we've made the rulings 22:34.040 --> 22:38.840 available on that runer DB, so people can more easily find them, and we also have comprehensive rules, 22:38.840 --> 22:43.880 a comprehensive rules document that people can reference the actual full reference of the rules. 22:44.840 --> 22:52.440 So that's kind of the kind of conclusion, is for me, a lot of these projects really helped 22:52.440 --> 22:58.040 in the transition, the community ownership's altis project aid, it's the transition 22:59.080 --> 23:03.560 of losing the publisher, essentially, and having nostalgic games then take it over, 23:03.560 --> 23:08.520 and then the open source projects, the fact that they were open source also allowed us to kind of take 23:08.600 --> 23:16.760 over when community members left the community, and that's all for me, if that picture 23:16.760 --> 23:21.880 interests make sure to check out the discord, the community discord, and our website. 23:23.720 --> 23:25.080 I can take some questions. 23:32.360 --> 23:36.200 Yeah, unfortunately no time for questions for this one, and I'll speak up this come over. 23:38.520 --> 23:50.440 Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one, and I'll see you in the next one.