So does anyone have any actual practical suggestions that we could try in the real world? While I’m sure the debates about the definition of privilege are exciting for the philosophy majors, this isn’t really going anywhere for the rest of us.
I vote fluff theme deck tournaments!
Netrunner players are largely privileged. We’re predominantly male, mostly white, and most fairly comfortably middle class.
Unfortunately, this articles addresses none of that.
The top of the thread has a few suggestions, including @Brodie’s alternative tournaments. I like the idea of @spags’s KOS event and cited the SMC Final’s Challenge Decks and cosplay events as other cool ideas for moving forward. @camelCase’s idea for a win-a-game, lose-a-card league also sounded deviously fun, but would require long-term organization.
Sounds fun to me. Each deck has to be a variation on a pre-set theme, or you just have to have a theme in mind when you build?
I’ve found that alternate-format events are pretty fun. I have discovered, though, that one has to be careful when organizing the event: if it’s just “a regular tournament, but with restrictions on deck-building,” that can still leave players who aren’t interested in ‘our’ kind of competitive tournaments out in the cold. I’m still brainstorming ways to open up the event formats. It’s tough! Netrunner is a game where one person wins and one person loses, so “wins the most” is a pretty natural rubric to turn to. I’m trying to think of other schemes that don’t necessarily prioritize “wins all the games” but aren’t just “deal out prizes randomly” or what have you.
Then it sounds like you’re just spoiling for a fight, which @hypomodern was suggesting is counter to the interests of improving the community.
I was thinking the latter, with top prizes going for best use of theme, but there are plenty of good ways you could do it. It would open up fun stuff like Whizzard with Grimoire and Quest Completed, or you could go more complex and do something like tell the story of Thomas Haas across both corp and runner deck. Think of the fun!
Then your characterization of this thread as “smelling a whole lot of privilege” appears disingenuous, if you, like me, feel like this thread has in fact encouraged substantial discussion of the topic and issues around it 
Which, on a fair reading, I think it has. Very few, if any, respondents have denied that there is an underlying tension and power dynamic in the way communities form around the game and most have offered constructive feedback or further elaboration, or, at the very least, counterexample. I suspect, and hope, that it will continue in this vein!
Honestly, I struggled to tell if the article writer was being serious.
I think there are probably opportunities in going heavy on specific cycles once the full suite of cards is out since the cards usually have great in universe connections. I don’t think FFG covers the tech bases well enough for each faction to stick strictly within the cycle but requiring that >half the cards in a deck are from a given cycle could lead to very flavorful play. A full Haarpsichord studios deck sounds like a lot of fun, especially when you’re almost guaranteed to go up against a Film Critic or have your plans foiled by spoilers.
I feel like this article adopted the language of movements we should care about, of people that are systematically oppressed and then applied them to some slightly misguided cause about card game players. That is the definition of privilege.
The article makes points we should listen too and we should care about casual players too which I agree with but the language is extremely misguided and ruined the article for me.
My queer friend said “this sounds fucking stupid” when I showed her this
Also mtg makes entire product lines for casual players, there are hours upon hours of card design put into these games into cards that will never make the deck of tournament decks I think it’s a little over reaching to say that companies don’t care. Really liked dans post he sums up a lot of things well.
I was responding to this on Reddit… and the whole time… I should have been responding here…
the root of the problem is the stores get almost zero benefit from netrunner. they are just happy it doesnt sit on the shelves… most of the organized play falls squarely on the shoulders of fans of the game. its all well and good to want alternative/casual formats but that means rolling up your sleeves and laying the groundwork. in my experience very few people are willing to do this. its time consuming and pays nothing other than the warm fuzzy feeling of seeing other people have fun.
i have run 3 casual friendly leagues over the last year but laying the groundwork for those took 2 years. i had to first infiltrate FNM and demo netrunner for magic players, convince a store who didnt even carry netrunner they could move netrunner cards if i ran a league and distributed GNK prizes and then convince them to provide a play space after store hours for league play. I participate in the leagues but as the host i make sure everyone else can get in games often at the cost of my own league standing, take none of the store credit distributed as prizes and distribute the GNK prizes as flatly as i feel comfortable doing when the playmats say " winter/summer/spring" champion and the goal of netrunner is score/flatline the other player.
i dont know how many hours of my own time ive spent and i dont care. im happy when i see other people enjoying netrunner and im happy when people who dont normally have access to playmats and alt art cards get one. i understand where the article writer is coming from but i’d much rather see an article that says " hey i started this alternative/casual league at my FLGS and this is how i did it and it may foster this super cool environment in your area" rather than call out a community that is basically free labor for FFG because they love the game that much.
When I was reading the article, I felt the language appropriate because I interpreted a lot of what the author discusses as the predominant preferences within the community as symptomatic of a traditionally boys club area. The heavy emphasis on competition, min-maxing, and numbers games is not exclusive to male behavior, but our culture at large has encouraged these preferences in men over several generations. As a woman with a creativity-oriented and humanities background, it’s kind of weird that I really took to this game, but now that I’m here, I do feel like play that’s more complementary to my inclinations is kind of unexplored. Your rhetoric also reminds me of discussions centering on “casual sexism”, instances of potentially harmful behavior that are easy to dismiss because 1) their relevance is on a micro-level and 2) they’re passively and systematically perpetuated, by no means a conscious act. Thus I can see how one can interpret the prioritization of competitive behavior as a privileged and casually sexist trend.
I mean, yeah. This is a game, but concepts from movements we care about trickle down to all aspects of how we interact with each other. It strikes me as very related to increasing diversity within the community, an issue that many here take seriously. And of course I gotta add: I by no means speak for Ladies Everywhere™, especially since I know there are a number of women who are highly competitive, content with how things are, and similarly found this article really dumb like your friend did.
Anyway! I really do sympathize your concern, but wanted to offer an alternative perspective regarding the article’s language. Also, for anyone reading this who thinks I’m calling the competitive community a bunch of sexists, pleeeeeaaaase don’t get it twisted because I generally like Stimhackers and really just want to think about potential sexism in context of behaviors, not ad hominem attacks. 
This post is inflammatory and bad. I won’t delete it, but I want this thread to steer away from pointless name calling and trying to claim some moral high ground.
I think this is important and perhaps being lost a bit. There are a great many barriers to entry to the netrunner scene but the nature of it as competitive is far from the most significant.
A lot of the concerns seem to me to be a by product of the stage we are at as a hobby. Most pastimes with a hobbyist base and a competitive element have much less friction between the two due to long term established conventions of participation that have evolved over time. No one wanting to play golf for a bit of a laugh on a weekend shows up to the US Open. Rory McIllroy does not show up to his local golf club and just ask anyone who happens to be there if they fancy a game. It has evolved as a pastime to the point where play of all levels is well supported and rewarded.
But using golf as an example points to a real problem the article fails to address. Maybe we do want to evolve as a pastime to a place where we have support for play of all levels and accepted standards of behaviour. However, almost all established pastimes have a history of exclusion and discrimination enmeshed in establishing those rules. Communities establish rules about how you have to act to be a “good” member of the community, and those rules vary depending on what level you wish to participate at. But there is very real privilege involved in establishing what those rules are.
I think whether we like it or not we are in the process of writing our own rules as a community precisely because of the success of the game. We’re establishing different levels of play with their own accepted standards of behaviour. That is inevitably going to generate friction and provoke discussion. As we establish those rules we need to discuss how to keep our community genuinely inclusive. I don’t mean in the rather odd way thus article is focused but actual by examining the way actual privileges have led us to draw up certain ways of operating.
E.g. Our London meetup is in the basement if a pub on a weekday evening. If you have childcare commitments or need step free access you are shit out of luck. If you don’t like pubs, and there are many legitimate reasons not to, you can’t really play netrunner in London. We’ve muddled on as a community but were going to have to start addressing things like that which inevitably throw out problems for some people.
E.g. Our London meetup is in the basement if a pub on a weekday evening. If you have childcare commitments or need step free access you are shit out of luck. If you don’t like pubs, and there are many legitimate reasons not to, you can’t really play netrunner in London.
Just to say: there’s a Tuesday meeting that starts in a cafe and goes to a pub. There’s a Wednesday meeting in a games store. There’s a Thursday meeting in a games store. There’s also some nascent Enfield group. Maybe if you did have a problem with pubs, you’d have found them 
(slightly off-topic perhaps).
I know what you mean, but this is plainly not a good enough answer to the problem. Thursdays is extremely small quite often, is also not step free, and is also on a weekday evening. I play a hell of a lot in London and even I didn’t know about the Enfield group. I played someone yesterday from Enfield complaining about the lack of playing groups near them in fact, so it perhaps isn’t as easy to find out about as all that, even when you’re actively looking.
The overwhelming majority of organised play in London is Tuesday nights at the Thameside. It’s been a great venue for a small struggling community but it’s plainly not sustainable in the long term unless we want to drastically limit ourselves.
But back on topic, do you agree with the main thrust of my point? I can’t tell if you’re just setting the record straight on London or if you mean I’m in general worrying about nothing.
I hadn’t actually considered disabled access, but you’re right that this is a problem - we play on the first floor of the shop and i don’t think there is any realistic way for someone in a wheelchair to access it.
I do actually think you make some good points, but I think you need to approach change in a different way.
Tuesdays is not ‘organised’ play. Nobody actually organises it any more, it is an entirely organic meetup at this point. It happens just because everybody knows that’s when and where we meet, but nobody is actually in charge of it. Initially this was not the case, but then initially it was 10 people in a cafe.
If you want to change things, you are going to have to do it yourself. If you want a venue with wheelchair access on a weekend in a place you like then go out, find a venue that works, make an event, and start inviting people. That is the only way your concerns are going to be met. As a community everything that happens is pretty much entirely player driven, because there pretty much isn’t an organisation to speak of which actually runs anything.
I would add that no one meetup each week is every going to work for everyone. The location or the time is always going to suit some people but not others. Tuesday clearly works quite well for a lot of people, but unfortunately there are going to be some who can’t do it for various reasons.
Just sitting on stimhack and making these points isn’t going to get you anywhere. Not because people don’t care about the issues you raise, but because nobody sees it as their responsibility to initiate any sort of change.
Nicely put; I found this a very insightful comment. Whenever I read one of these articles about casual and competitive play, it seems to me that what they’re fundamentally saying is “I’m scared that community standards are being written without my input.” And the reason they’re worried about that is that they’re passionate about the game, and don’t want to lose what they love about it.
I think that’s really important to bear in mind; most people are coming from a position of concern, even if unfortunately they express that badly sometimes. Reassurance is what they really want, even if they’re being inflammatory. This thread has been a nice example of how listening to people’s concerns can be productive: I was initially worried that people seemed to be getting defensive instead of engaging, but there have since been a lot of nice posts discussing how everyone would like to see more organised play support for casual league play or similar, even if it comes at the expense of GNKs. That wasn’t something I’d even seen discussed before, but a lot of people were seemingly thinking about it - and whatever its faults, this article has been useful in stimulating that discussion. So good stuff, all 
That said, I think it’s probably useful to touch briefly on a couple of reasons why causal players might be scared about not having a voice:
The first is that more competitive players are more vocal online: certainly the percentages of causal/competitive players I see in real life and online are very different. We need to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking online is representative of the larger community, especially those of us in a position of power.
The second is that it’s not super uncommon to see disparaging comments about the quality of discussion on other sites, dismissing out-of-hand the discussion of certain cards, or similar; the recent attempt to get deliberately bad decks to the front page of NRDB seemed particularly mean-spirited to me. I’d like to see us show more restraint with this kind of thing: even if just meant as a joke, it can make people feel like they’re second-class, or silence them through fear of mockery. We don’t want anyone to feel inferior or stupid for trying to explore ideas.