Exactly this. I’ve observed an increase in the level of smugness in the competitive community lately. I’d been hoping that was just perception, which is why I hadn’t said anything yet, but I don’t like it.
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Just blame it on Worlds coming up. People are puffing up their chest feathers for a confidence boost.
I remember similar levels of hubris surrounding Andromeda and the PE matchup this time last year…
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I’d like to echo @Frost_Duty’s comments that if there’s nothing that caters to your tastes the best way is to make something that does. I think the ANRPC is a good example, we didn’t think there was enough structured competition so we made more.
Maybe it’s because I’m competitive by nature, but I use Tournaments as an opportunity to play ANR for a day. I think people who want to play more, but don’t think tournaments are for them should be encouraged to go to tournaments. Play whatever and enjoy themselves. It’s less different to casual play than you think.
As for encouraging variety. I think people should be encouraged to bring 2 decks for each side to casual play. I like the suggestion of eliminating cards from the card pool as you progress through a league. I can’t really get to any of the evenings I go to often enough to be a proper participant in a league though. So that wouldn’t really work for me.
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I think this is what the article was really trying to highlight. This logic makes sense to us as competitive players (I treat tournaments the same way, really) but if you shift your viewpoint to consider that someone might be playing netrunner with a goal in mind other than Playing to Win, you realize that tournaments are actually a really bad way for that non-competitive player to get in some fun games of netrunner. More so than netrunner night, people are even more likely to bring competitive decks and play competitively in a tournament environment and if I’ve got a deck that I built because I like its themey interaction, or because there’s a cool combo space I’d like to explore or just because I think it can make funny games, I’m much more likely never to see what I liked about my deck in a tournament environment because my opponent is going to be trying to force me off my game more aggressively and win quickly.
This is really the crucial point I think the author was trying to get across: Netrunner’s standard formats of play can often result in environments that aren’t friendly to non-competitive players and don’t give them space for what they’re looking for from a game. Encouraging a non-competitive player to come to a tournament to get some games in could easily result in them taking several annoying and frustrating losses that resulted in them never seeing their deck do what they wanted it to do. For me, that was a cool moment because I took that as a sign that there were things I could learn and improve my play, placing higher in the next tournament. However, that reaction is one of a nascent competitive player, and not all non-competitive players react that way. For non-competitive players, those games at a tournament aren’t instructive or challenging; they’re just annoying and a waste of time.
EDIT: As a side note not directed at @MasterAir , the author addressed the complaint “If you want to see those events, start them!” on reddit by saying he was pretty busy building other communities and running other events and he felt that the way he could contribute to better quality casual play in Netrunner is by trying to start the conversation and encourage others to step up. I think that’s fair, and countering people raising a concern by saying that they should stop talking and start doing is fundamentally unhelpful. This thread has already generated several cool ideas for more non-competitive netrunner events; doesn’t that indicate that the words aren’t wasted and the article might have done some work towards achieving its goal?
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I am stunned that you would say that telling people to start their own initiatives is unhelpful.
Whilst the author is fine to say he doesn’t have enough time, and I totally understand that some people won’t be in a position to do more, I also believe that there are plenty of people who could do more if they chose to.
Because FFGs support is fairly poor (in my opinion) it is largely up to us to make of this game what we will.
Generating ideas is excellent, I totally agree, but what is really going to help is someone stepping up and trying to make this stuff a reality.
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My apologies; I think I’m being misunderstood. Encouraging people to start their own initiatives is VERY helpful. However, I felt like the tone here wasn’t “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to start something yourself?” and more “Maybe instead of writing/talking about it, you should just get off your ass and do something”. The second way, it’s used as a tool to shut down the conversation, but I feel like the conversation its self has value. Of course, running your own alternative events (thanks @Brodie!) is awesome on the next level.
I agree that it will fundamentally come down to players creating the casual environment for themselves. The article its self argues that, but it also encourages competitive players to care about the non-competitive environment and help out there if they can/desire to, because it will be good for the health of the community.
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This cuts to the heart of what I’m saying. You’re right that, for example, London netrunner has evolved organically. That’s probably true in most places (although as an aside I don’t think that means it isn’t “organised” because I don’t think they’re counter posed - I guess I’m meaning “organised play” as an alternative to kitchen table play)
So I agree we’re an organically evolved community, but we’ve evolved inside a wider society that places limitations on people’s access to stuff based on arbitrary criteria. Our organic evolution inevitably reproduces some of those limitations. It’s precisely the organic nature of the way we’ve set ourselves up that means a lot things that would be a problem for people aren’t addressed because they’re not a problem for the people best able to attend in the first place.
That’s why I think the answer you give is necessary, but far from sufficient. It’s true we need to organise more stuff individually but I think we need to have a bit of a discussion about some of this as a whole community. Otherwise we risk effectively sounding like “You can’t get to our netrunner event with 40 regular attendees? You could always organise your own.” That would be a very unhealthy dynamic.
You’re right as well that a lot of the answers to some of this arent immediately obvious. I didn’t raise all this because I think we’ve got a desperate problem in the London scene that needs fixing. I was trying to say that there are genuine issues of privilege in the netrunner community that go beyond your favorite Iain Stirling Donut Tagenes econ denial deck losing a lot to Fastro.
Brb off to build an Iain Stirling Donut Tagenes econ denial deck.
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Obviously there’s no right way to play netrunner. But I think there’s a lot to be gained by playing in an environment where people are playing to win. Even if you’re trying to build a magical mystery machine with your cards.
I understand that playing NEH Fast Advance 6 times isn’t everyone’s idea of fun (it’s not really mine either). But I think if you completely ignore that space you’re missing part of the joy of this game.
I think if you’re only playing top tier net decks you’re missing something too.
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Respectfully, this seems like you’re missing the point. Sure, there’s no right way to play. And of course there’s a lot to be gained by playing in a play-to-win environment. But that’s basically off-topic from what we’re saying. When someone says “I feel like there aren’t any events ‘for’ me, because I don’t really like competitive tournaments,” it’s profoundly unhelpful to reply, “I think there’s a lot to be gained by playing in competitive tournaments!”
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Haven’t commented here; but I do believe there is some “entitlement/privilege” in the netrunner community. The one I saw the most often was complaints that competitive events and their prize pools were often pretty bad. And it often did revolve around better prize support (which to many but not all meant $'s). Which of course would mean taxing the people going to a tournament to pay for it which if you extrapolate ultimately means winners think they should be paid for winning. And I know that “that” is not what competitive people actually think (even if its what actually happens), that this is a boiling down of a lot of emotions and what not, but if you take the human intentions & feelings out you ultimately have this thing where any prize is coming from those who don’t win and for someone whose not competitive being told that they need to pay a higher entrance fee so that the guy at the top (which will definately not be them) can walk away with a larger wad of green may not be an attractive option.
And its a legitmate thing to say: go to the non $ tournaments. But I think its also legitimate to question whether the support for non $ tournaments would exist if those were the tournaments stores made the most $'s off of. Also, $'s to enter doesn’t necessarily mean “good at netrunner” it may be that a poor player who is really good at netrunner can’t go.
But, this isn’t what the article was on. And “classist” battles over netrunner prize support aren’t really something I want to engage in.
The point really was that about a year ago the competitive players were whining that there wasn’t enough support and that FFG in turn sucked. They expected and demanded more. Which brings us to this quote:
To be fair, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who said this, suggestions were made to those who were most vocal that instead of writing/talking about how much it sucked they should just get up and do something. And they did and now the ANRPC exists.
I’m not sure that ultimately asking casual players to figure out what they want and make it happen is a bad thing, so long as we’re ammenable as a community to figuring out how we can make those things happen and we’re willing to support and not deride those sorts from trying.
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I agree that it’s good to think about accessibility - although it might not result in direct action because of the paucity of play spaces in London. I think this thread has brought a lot of interesting points to light and also this (and other articles) have forced me to examine my own behaviour re feeling entitled.
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That sounds reasonable. I’m struggling a little to think of ‘events’ rather than a club meet or similar that don’t reward playing to win. That’s the point of this article and a lot of the discussion.
I’m going to say one more time that people who don’t think tournament netrunner is for them should try it before they dismiss it. Many people really enjoy it. Many of those didn’t think they would. But I’m not going to repeat that again, so as not to stifle any of the many good alternative suggestions in the thread.
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Echoing what has been stated here repeatedly, using the privilege and entitlement framework here is humorously awkward. This interminable article is nicely summed up with its closing advice: “If you care about the community’s overall health, but wish to cater your events/content/focus to the competitive community alone, try to do so only if it is in addition to any other content or events you might invest time in. Do not simply assume ‘I’ll do my thing, they’ll do theirs’.” Translated - your time should be spent building my vision of the netrunner community, which is less competitive.
I’m just thrilled that so many people are willing to spend so much of their time doing any of this at all, whether it be Stimhack, Jinteki.net, local tournaments, random play nights, or whatever. I find the criticism of how anyone spends their time doing any of this organizational work obnoxious.
Then again, I’m a grumpy old man with no free time.
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I think I might’ve just had an idea for an event that isn’t structured like a competitive tournament. I’m interested to see what people think. Maybe it can be refined a bit.
The idea is, you’ve got Netrunner Day (or whatever you want to call it) from, say, 1 p.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. (I’m taking it as a given that players not interested in competitive tournaments will nonetheless want to play a lot; I think people for whom 4 or 5 hours of Netrunner is too much are probably outside the scope of gatherings/events altogether.) At 1 p.m., each participant gets 3 badges: an orange badge, a blue badge, and a green badge. Then, as you play people, you give out your badges. The orange badge goes to an opponent who does something cool or stylish, like play a neat or thematic deck you like, or make a clever play. The blue badge goes to the opponent who played the most exciting/hype match against you, like the highlight of the day. The green badge is yours to give out for whatever reason you want; maybe you already gave out your orange badge but then you play a guy who brought The Professor and you wish you had a second “cool deck” badge to give out, or maybe you just think one guy was a really nice and fun person to play with even though it was a bog-standard match against bog-standard NEH Fastro.
At the end of the day, prizes go out based on badges. I haven’t quite decided whether to give prizes for most blue/orange/green badges, or whether it’d be better to just have each badge count as one “ticket” and raffle off prizes, so people with more badges have a higher chance of pulling a prize but no guarantees. I think maybe I should do the latter, since my competitive instincts predispose me toward the former. 
Thoughts? It was the least “…and then we pair up by Swiss rankings and play” form of event I could think of.
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I think this is a cool idea (I like raffling, especially, since who doesn’t like to gamble?) and wish the original article was more direct at answering the question ‘if you consider competitive play to be defined so broadly how can you make non competitive events that are feasible given current logistical structures that are set up for competitive events’
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I like this a lot. Maybe have three themed prized for the most of each badge color, and then do the raffle approach for the more traditional mat/tokens/alt arts.
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I know Games Workshop tourneys usually do something similar. Granted, they are more of a ‘lifestyle hobby’ then ANR (but, Netruner consumes my life, spags! Isn’t that a ‘lifestyle hobby’??!?). However, I believe that gameplay is only 1/3 of their tournament. The painting/modelling is awarded, as well as sportsmanship. Everyone rates their opponents, and the top finishers get recognized.
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FWIW, when I was last involved in 40k, the schism between “narrative / hobby” players and “WAAC / netlist” players was much, much worse than anything I’ve ever seen in Netrunner.
Largely, I think, because the time and money investment in playing 40k is so great and the local communities so small that you can really only choose one way to enjoy the hobby, and any kind of social shift towards one pole or the other in your local community leaves you in real danger of being unable to find the kind of 40k game that you want to play despite your thousand-dollar investment, so tempers run high.
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Plus the 40K rules are a shitnado of duct tape and keywords so there’s lots of room for unfun cheesing and/or minmaxing.*
*Disclaimer: I have only played 40K using plastic army men and pirated rulebooks back in college so my experience is probably not as designed. The point stands that there are probably a lot more reasons other than the actual gameplay for buying 40K products as compared to Netrunner.
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Ok, Article Author here, I’ve finally had time to read all of this properly, yay! Thanks so much for the great discussion, first let me try and clear the air on something:
Competitive players are for the most part no different to any other kind of player. All of the negative aspects I ascribed to them in the article are limited to predispositions and tendencies when applied to them as a group. I feel that, knowing nothing else, a competitive player is more likely to have some of the negative traits I described than a non-competitive player. This is not saying that it is common, let alone ubiquitous. This discussion is pretty damn clear evidence of that, if nothing else. I feel there are such examples of such traits in the Netrunner community, but I actually feel that on the whole there are less examples than in any other competitive community I’ve been a part of and I’d like it to stay that way…
To those that feel privilege and entitlement are a messy fit to these problems, I understand. Not only because I’m using the constructs to examine something on a lot smaller scale than, say, systematic racism or heteronormativity, but because mostly we dive into communities of play to get the fuck away from all of those big, serious concerns and have some fun. I am exceptionally privileged in both my general life (able, intelligent, fairly well off, white guy etc. ) and my particular Netrunner scene (I suspect Melbourne has both the highest number of events and regular organized play sessions and the highest amount of prize support of any city in the world). I can assure you I didn’t write the article to bitch about my own circumstances. I used my own experiences to illustrate things because I feel profoundly uncomfortable putting other people’s words out there without attributing them, not because I feel I’m owed anything. I’m not. Others, on the other hand, may well be.
I love competitive scenes. I love high-investment competition. I also study these scenes and try and understand what makes them work. I have found that those companies and communities which aggressively and actively support non-competitive players have the most successful competitive scenes- MTG and LoL would be my two examples of this. Riot have always gone out of their way to respond to the desires of players who have no interest in ongoing competition and restrict their notion of winning/losing to single matches. Wizards have, in the last four or five years, increasingly focused their design and support on being welcoming and accessible to people outside the competitive scene. In both cases, they have succeeded in growing the scale of their active community massively. That, more than anything else, has contributed to the increasing scope and success of their high level competitive scene. In contrast, Starcraft 2, probably the community I have previously been most invested in, where Blizzard focused heavily on fostering a competitive scene with relatively little consideration to other kinds of player, has declined steeply and is in a quite unhealthy state at the moment.
I can justify this at length and less anecdotatlly if needed, but I’ll just say it like that for now. As others have pointed out, the idea that competition supports everything else is misguided as far as my understanding of industry dynamics goes. I’ve talked with designers and marketers in both Wizards and Riot about this. I run a local chapter that supports boardgame designers and I have a lot of exposure to the behind the scenes of the games industry.
My point is then that it makes sense for competitive players to invest some of their time and energy into not just growing their own particular part of the community, but to look at how they might encourage the growth of others without considering them to be a gateway to competition (even though they will often be). I want to make this clear. It’s not about guilt. It’s not about not stomping people. It’s not about who gets what prizes. It’s about what will actually succeed in creating an environment where competitive Netrunner can remain in a healthy state and continue to receive the ongoing support it does now, if not more.
I want to throw something new in here now: As a designer, I tend to think of games as a tool for players to achieve a variety of outcomes which we collectively understand as fun. I’ve written about these extensively if you want to read more about it. For me, what makes a ‘good player’ is someone who can use the tools provided to get the best possible experience for themselves. To become a ‘better player’ means breaking down the barriers that prevent you from enjoying the game you want to enjoy as much as possible- anxiety, perhaps, or a fixation on a particular outcome.
I imagine I don’t need to stress that this is a very different perspective on what ‘becoming a better player’ means to many competitive players, including many of those who’ve been part of this discussion.
The difference in perspective is that I see games as something that serves each individual player. If the game does not succeed in meeting the player’s needs, that is a failing of the game, not the player. Competitive cultures, on the other hand, tend to see the game as somewhat more of a puzzle or a challenge which the player must mould themselves to succeed at. It’s something to be beaten or overcome, and failure to do so is your problem, not the game’s. To me that is a perfectly valid subset of what a game can be- you can set it to challenge you, if that is what you enjoy. But that is not ‘the game’, that is one particular use of the tool to satisfy one particular kind of need.
To illustrate why that’s important, I want to share some feedback I got on the article. A netrunner National Champion (I won’t say who, I’m sure they will if they want to. I’d prefer if nobody speculated) wrote to me saying he felt it resonated a lot with him. He took the best decks at the time to nationals, but much of the time he was playing he was rooting for his opponent with a more personalized deck… He felt like he wasn’t really playing the game he wanted to and he didn’t enjoy himself to the fullest- I mean, he still won a national championship, which is going to feel good, but it was at the cost of something.
Instead of the game being a way for him to find enjoyment in the way he wanted to, he felt he had to spend his time working for the game, rather than making it work for him. I find this is a dangerous outcome of the idea of shaping a community around people becoming ‘better players’ in the competitive sense. This perspective can then lead to other harmful ideas- Since a part of being a member of the community becomes labour to just be at the level where one feels one can contribute, a culture of respecting that labour inevitably develops to incentivise people to undertake it, which then quietly shifts towards the idea that people who don’t put in that labour, whether because they choose not to or because, in most cases, they simply cannot, are worse/less deserving players of the game.
They are not. This is something I feel extremely strongly about because it is a space where the bigger privileges impinge on our spaces of play. I know Netrunner players who work hard, get paid little, have less education, have had less money to invest in games or time to invest in competitive play in their lives. If a community’s respect for someone who invests a significant amount of labour into a game (the kind of labour it takes to become a peer in the competitive community, for example) ever becomes something anything other than a supplement to a full and healthy respect for any player, that community becomes inherently exclusionary and those who are privileged outside the game import their privileges to its community.
To me, this is particularly poignant in Netrunner because the game’s shell and the objectives of its designers have been explicitly to support and encourage diversity and to critique privilege and hegemonic power. I’ve heard countless comments talking about how Netrunner is thematically welcoming to a diverse audience, and that the community has on the whole embraced and become invested in the idea that Netrunner is a game that welcomes everyone. I don’t want to see that be compromised. I think there is a real risk that it will happen, albeit slowly and quietly. This is the problem with privilege, its effects occur gently and are not as a result of any single or even any particularly bad thing. The only way to counteract it is to be keenly aware that it exists. Hence why I wrote.
I’m going to leave it there for now. There are a lot of good ideas in this thread that can stand on their own. There’s a lot of good discussion that shows there’s an appetite for these ideas. I’m going to try and research and write a followup article soonish that explores actual solutions and ideas in more concrete terms, rather than just trying to raise awareness of the problem.
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