Running the Nets: SU&SD Newsletter #62

Tom: SHUX!!! It’s happening in person and we couldn’t be more thrilled. Three days bursting with board games, yes, but more importantly… human beings.

We’re open about the fact that it’s the human element of SHUX that really makes it sing - all of the delightful people who descend upon the convention center to bond over big cardboard. If you’re looking to spend a long weekend hanging out playing some games with great people, there is truly no better place to do it - with a colossal library of games available and ample (delightfully carpeted) space to play them in.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL! We’ll also have a tidy list of  exhibitors for you to peruse, live shows, large social games, merch and  so much more. It’s all the usual fare, back after a long hibernation! Come say hi!

That’s SHUX! Now… onto the rest of the newsletter…

Tom: It’s a fairly poorly-kept secret that I’m  working on a video about NISEI - the fan collective who are keeping the spirit of Android: Netrunner alive and kicking in 2022. I can say that fairly openly, because it’s not like the cards will be unavailable any  time soon - they’re print-on-demand in the US or available from “a guy” in the UK.

The video itself is getting a bit out-of-hand, and I’m now entering a chopping phase - to shrink it down to a manageable thing to watch and to make. Thank you for your patience! I’ve been listening to a lot of The Back Page Podcast and their chat about the stresses of magazine writing have made me ferociously grateful to have time and space to let a project like this  turn into something I can be really proud of. I am very excited about this video, and I really, really hope you enjoy it once it’s done.

The disadvantage of ‘The Choppening’ is that loads of stuff is, of course, getting left on the chopping-room-floor - but the advantage (?) of being a Shut Up & Sit Down Donor (thank you!) is that you get one of those leftovers as essentially a crummy little half-formed article. Wahoo! If you’ll permit it, I want to share with you the  biggest chop of them all - the chop of the comedy of Netrunner. Netfunner.

Let me set the scene; I had a series of games of Netrunner with a group down in Brighton, a group of players who think of the game entirely within the competitive sphere. To play purely for pleasure is alien to them - the game is, in their eyes, a rich sinewed mass of ‘meta’ and ‘viability’ - their decks sleek bullets of cardstock that can  cheese-wire directly through the brain of a beginner. I was that beginner, and my brain was soft gouda. Oh no.

This is an environment I do not thrive in - I detest any kind of sweaty, competitive fog when it visits the games that I play;  but here, the storytelling core of Netrunner, the narrative that leaps  out from each decision, is enough to keep things breezy. It’s hard not  to laugh when your runner’s perfect rig is stopped short of breaking-and-entering by ‘a dude with a gun’. It’s easy to chuckle when a runner with nothing to their name somehow manages to pluck  agendas from every possible server without so much a scratch on them. It is deeply funny when the phrase ‘what is happening?!’ is being uttered every turn by both players, as two entirely conflicting styles of deckbuilding (off-meta experimentation and cold hard calculation) relentlessly smack up against each other.

But, of course, the blame for such joviality ultimately rests on the shoulders of the players. There was something truly delightful about seasoned pros being aghast at my successes and reassured by my losses. “Why did you put this in there?” was a question common of my decks, paired with a confused chuckle or genuine inquisitiveness depending on how I was doing in any given game. I didn’t expect to laugh so hard and  so consistently not only at the thematic nuance within the game itself, but also layered on top of the experience by players who are very good at taking a joke. Netrunner is a very, very funny game.

Quinns: Oh man. You’re giving me flashbacks. Back when I was playing a lot, they released an expansion of college-themed cards. One was a card for the runner (hacker) side called Off-Campus Apartment, and it basically gave you a free card draw for every time you played a card that was a “person” and placed them in the apartment.

The consequences for my local group were demented. People making whole decks full of random strangers who the runner would pack into this apartment like they were throwing a frat party. It was a strategy that  worked great! ...Unless the corporation found out where you lived, and  could destroy the apartment and liquidate half of the cast of Netrunner at a cost of one action and two credits. It was hysterical.

Tom: There’s something to do with this that’s  absent in NISEI, though. A seasoning missing from the flavour text. This criticism is vague, it’s noncommittal… and hence it’s been axed - But  some of the newer NISEI cards, especially, just feel less tonally consistent, more obvious.

You’ve got a garish young hacker with neopets as their gimmick, a card called Moshing, some truly cringeworthy adaptations of Loot Boxes,  Game Overs and Ganking. Oaktown Renovation adds flavour text to a card where the active text is already a joke! ARGH!

These aren’t bad, but they certainly feel like they are trying to be a punchline rather than building into one - the joke is spelled out rather than suggested. And this is fine, the human element is what greases the wheels on this - you’re playing a competitive card game after all, not Funemployed.

But the result of some of these cards that are funnier on the surface and weaker on the inside is that you end up with something that misses the darker, duller edge of Netrunner. Something that I think really binds the team of Shut Up & Sit Down together is that we don’t really like games that are trying to be funny - comedy writing in games is really, really hard! What we tend to prefer are games that are so dry as to wrap right round into being thematic again - games where mechanics create jokes in the heads of the players rather than in the text of the cards.

And further pushing you away from that molten core of theme is the art on some of these cards. Sometimes it’s not too much of a change -  comparing the new Sure Gamble to the old Sure Gamble and you can see  that this is a fan-run-project - it’s just not quite as shiny as it was, but that’s no deal breaker. But Archived Memories? Hoo boy.

A bunch of the other cards also have these strange deep-dream filters on them that I deeply-detest. It’s Ark Nova but in cyberspace! It gets messy fast, and puts interference between the text, the art, and the player.

Janky art and wonky theme aside; here’s what all this really boils down to. Here’s the feeling that sits at the core of the piece I've spent, indirectly, the past 4 months ‘researching’ and writing - Gonzo-ing myself into the world of a card game mid-resuscitation. Of all things, I feel a bit like an archaeologist.

The experience is one of drilling through layers - an initial soft sand that gives way easily, the game opening up elegantly in front of you from those deliciously simple starter decks. Then you might encounter sharper edges, harder dirt; rules you don’t quite understand, and interactions that you’re not quite prepared for. So you sift through  old forums, finding answers to questions asked by people attacking this game from a whole different perspective 10 years ago. You’re  watching a longer rules video using cards you don’t recognise and tokens that look far nicer than the poker chips you’ve used for every single game so far.

And then you’re in the muck, the peat bogs. Soon you’re dredging up cards that you can’t get hold of, you’re sifting through in-jokes based on art that isn’t being printed, you’re learning about rotations and datapacks - how Gabriel Santiago has morphed into Zahya Sadeghi and what that means for the meta. You’re in pretty deep and now you have to write a few thousand words on it for a review that’s swallowing up your  time and table space. But what you’re really reviewing, here, isn’t just trying to do better than itself, it’s also trying to do better than an imagined version of itself - one that you never experienced but can see traces of in every bit of media related to it.

What a weird game. I love it. Review; soon.

Quinns: I can’t wait.

What are we video games!  🎮

Tom: I'm  going to do a little bit more secret-hunting in TUNIC, but I think I'm fairly static on 'wot i think' about it now - I wish it got to those secrets just a little sooner and the ferocity of the combat dialed down a fair chunk. It's a lovely game, but shows its full hand  too late for me to really want to spend the time peeling away at its  layers. Still, a really neat game!

Streaming-wise, we've moved on to Teardown - a voxel-based-heist-destruction game that is truly electric. So, so worth playing - and if you need convincing... check it out right here!

What are we music!  🎵

Ava: My pop polls obsession hasn’t abated, and the next two look like they’re going to be stormers  (after the world cup of 1998 was a bit of a disappointment to my mind).  Coming up we have ‘Songs not in English’ and ‘Songs about Death’ which  promise to be weird and varied and hopefully full of stuff I’ve not  heard. So far today my ears pricked up at Yelle’s Complètement Fou,  a blistering bit of (ironically incredibly 1998 sounding) French dance  bop silliness. I’ve really needed a lift as I slowly recover from the  big cov, and having a bop to some excellent foreign pop is really going  to get me through. My favourite bit of music (like, to be honest, my  favourite bit of games) is discovery, so it’s just great to have more  routes for discovering tiny things that specific people are really  passionate about. I love it.

Tom: I’ve  been on a house trip! Leo Pol’s Uniile 2 is great for writing, as is  Session Victim’s Needledrop. Check them out if you too need constant,  repetitive beats to get literally anything done.

More importantly, though, the new Destroyer record came out this month - and in keeping with my experience of all his records I was lukewarm at first... then grew to like it. The singles on this thing rip. June has been in near-constant rotation - its build to soupy  spoken-word disco completely entrancing every time. There’s plenty of  variety on the record, though, and as much as I’d be happy with 10  tracks of that… the other stuff is also pretty compelling. The States, All My Pretty Dresses, Tintoretto, Eat The Wine, The Last Song, It Takes A Thief… just a very solid album from a deeply dependable  artist.

What are we watching? 📺

Tom: Watched Pig! It was really good! Near-exactly 90 minutes of perfectly considered cinema; well worth a watch.

Ava: I’ve been ill and isolated, so I’ve watched a lot of things and most of them have not really stuck in my head. The  Morning Show is significantly more interesting than I expected, but I’d  also muddled it up with a Netflix comedy about a news thing, so a hard  hitting Me Too and Covid themed drama. That said, it helped me realise I shipped the leads from Legally Blonde and The Good Wife a lot harder than I would’ve expected.

Speaking of ships, the real hit of the isolation was Our Flag Means Death, which starts off as a predictable but comfortable sitcom about  pirates but very quickly starts showing threads of the delightful, heartfelt, tender, queer and touching bundle of nerves and laughs it ends up being. Absolute delight. But don’t like anything about it on social media or your feed will flood with with fandom obsession. Though actually I don’t mind that.

Pontypool is also a lovely but hard bit of an indie horror, and it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible, so that’s all I’ll  say.

What are we reading? 📚

Quinns: I tweeted about this, but I had a really blissful time reading My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee. It’s a novel that evades categorisation and expectation, but basically you’re watching one of the most loveable protagonists I’ve found in a long time trying  to find himself. Along the way there are time skips, betrayals, some absolutely luscious food writing, approximately one thousand charming  jokes and a hundred surprises.

The book is kaleidoscopic in its range, but at the same time deeply, painfully human. I think I also found it really helpful to read a book with a protagonist who’s abysmally aware of his own flaws, but hell-bent on... not fixing them, but finding a way to live with them. I  need a little of that energy in my life.

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