ETR: Interviews from #Netrunner Magnum Opus — Michael Boggs

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This is the last interview, and it’s taken me multiple days to get around to it. I think most players at Magnum Opus can understand why. When the story’s so good, when you’ve gotten this emotionally invested in it, you kind of don’t want it to end. You want to know what comes next. You want there to be a next.

But it isn’t a proper story without a conclusion.

The last day of Magnum Opus, and there’s an electrical tension that only exists when poor ambitious fools such as I have already faced the guillotine and found our prestige points wanting — leaving only survivors with a spark of hope in their eyes. Emotions are raw: a player had kicked a hole through a wall out of frustration from missing the cut by a single game, and was subsequently banned from the premises. I was privy to other wrought displays, if less public. Perhaps my miscall on the runner strategy required to succeed was a blessing in disguise — I am allowed to be happy enough with a solid 5–2 record on my AgInfusion homebrew, turbocharged by the nastiness of the Jinja City Grid and Rashida Jaheem interaction, while never knowing the bitterness of just barely missing etching my name on that final, historical list of contenders.

I did, however, have one more one-on-one before it was all over.

The cafe area has a staff door that, surprisingly, doesn’t lead to a broom closet. Instead, it’s direct access to Fantasy Flight Games’ offices, stretching down a hallway. To my left, I see a glimpse of three playtesters for a product whose details I cannot make out — and to my right, I am led by Netrunner lead developer Michael Boggs to a room with a long wooden table and a square green felt one meant for Star Wars play, illuminated by the afternoon sun streaming in from the left.

This isn’t the first I’ve talked with him, and it isn’t even our first interview. I’d attempted one before, under previous employment, but various circumstances led to the article falling through the cracks — until, ultimately, the publication folded out from under me. So, first on the agenda, to make sure that what I recalled of his situation prior to taking up the reins in Netrunner was correct.

“Yeah, I was in South Korea. I was there for a total… I think it comes to five years, just teaching and stuff, kind of living abroad and enjoying being out of the country,” recalled Michael. “I decided that I wanted to move back to the US, and the whole time I was in South Korea, I had done independent game development.”

While game design might have started as a mere side hobby at the time, it quickly blossomed into more. Boggs started a design group of likeminded tabletop gamers in Seoul, meeting every Wednesday to test each other’s designs and gather feedback — a process that eventually ended up with a sellable product.

“I’d always heard it never happened that people just sent their designs to publishers and they were bought immediately — I always heard that there was a process, or a lot of times publishers wouldn’t even look at them,” recollected Michael. “I think I kind of got lucky, in that the first or second publisher I sent it to was like ‘hey, we’re really interested in this; maybe we can take it.’ I think a big part of that too was that it actually had art I paid for, and got permission from the artist to use. On the publisher’s end, they were like ‘if we publish this game, we don’t have to buy art,’ and that is always crazy expensive for any company that’s publishing a game.”

While the prospective publisher did want a few tweaks to the overall rules, the core of the game ultimately remained the same — a big win for a rookie developer that spoke well of the care and testing he and the Seoul group put into the game. There was just one problem.

“It just ended up lining up that I had the interview with Fantasy Flight Games at the same time I was talking to that publisher,” explained Michael. “When I got offered the position, I told my manager and her manager about the game I was working on, and how it was going to get published. Pretty much the rule was, if you can get it published before you start working here, you’re fine.”

Ultimately, it wasn’t. Non-compete agreements generally prohibit a developer from selling a game for one company while working for another — an obvious conflict of interest that ultimately meant he had to shelve his original idea.

It was not, however, apparent at the time that he was choosing between his own game and Netrunner — at least, not fully so. “I just happened to see that Fantasy Flight had a position for a card game developer,” recalled Michael. “I had no idea it had anything to do with Netrunner, but I’d been playing Netrunner for the last five years, before I actually got to Korea — it was my favorite game. I applied for the position, and one sort of the test they had you do was related to Netrunner — you had to design Netrunner cards and talk about why a design worked this way, and so on and so forth.”

It was only after the interview process that he realized he might be working with predecessor Damon Stone. “Might” being the operative word. The truth of it, well…

“It wasn’t until I actually arrived on my first day that I was told ‘hey, Damon — he moved on. He decided to go and do different things. You’re the Netrunner guy now.’”

Suffice to say, the cold open was an exciting challenge for Boggs — though it helped that Stone left a solid foundation for him to work off. Michael’s first day of work under FFG was around the second week of January 2017 — right in the aftermath of the Flashpoint Cycle, leaving him scrambling to familiarize himself with the imminent release of Red Sand cards in order to lead development on Kitara.

But the Kitara Cycle, too, was originally Stone’s brainchild. “Damon had set up kind of the basis for what he wanted the Kitara cycle to be — he had a vision for each faction, and all of their cards and whatnot.” Cards obviously go through many iterations over the duration of its playtest — Michael states that the changes can range from a mere five or six, or upwards of 20+ iterations — but Michael’s focus was to “keep development of Kitara as roughly in line as I could keep it with what I saw as Damon’s vision as the individual factions or for the cycle as a whole. There were some cards that shifted pretty dramatically, but I think, at the end of the day, the core ideas within the cycle are really Damon’s, and I just helped guide them into place.”

That leaves just one set left: Reign & Reverie. If there is any part of Netrunner that can be said to be wholly Michael Boggs’s own vision, it would be the most recent and final deluxe box — his magnum opus, in a way, and that of the game as a whole. And while he wasn’t able to disclose when and under what circumstances that the development and playtesting team learned that this would be the end of the run, it was soon enough to affect how he chose to approach the project — as given away by the decision to mark its cards with the Omega symbol.

“All seven factions in there; all the factions gain an identity was another big thing,” said Boggs, renumerating the major design points impacted by the news. “Also: keeping the box relatively focused on core mechanics. I thought it would be a little strange if, in the last box, we introduced something totally new that people had to sort of learn or adapt to. I’m always a fan of exploring those core mechanics as much as possible — Kitara does a lot of that, and R&R was a continuation of that mindset.”

Also considered was how people might approach Netrunner now that it was, for all intents and purposes, a complete product. “Maybe if they were somewhat intimidated by the card pool before — because it’s always growing — now they look at Netrunner and, ‘oh, I can literally look at all the cards and know exactly what I need to get. I’m not going to buy this stuff and, in a couple years, they’ve rotated out, or these things aren’t powerful anymore. I know the cards I need to buy now.’”

The ultimate result of his efforts is a metagame that’s largely appreciated by the community at large — though there are a number of standout top tier decks like Valencia and Controlling the Message, and traditionally strong factions like Anarch continue to hold sway, the field was heavily populated by a range of creative homebrews and cunning strategies — from ten flavors of Shaper Bullshit in the form of Hayley Kaplan to a Silhouette player running an Aumakua engine, to the various ways that people turned new Jinteki identity Mti Mwekundu into lethal push-your-luck gambits.

And the fact that it was Val and CTM at the top largely meant that the decks with the most interesting moment-to-moment decision-spaces — a hallmark of what makes Netrunner so uniquely good — is perhaps proof that his development choices worked.

“I think everyone that I’ve spoken to on the FFG side wishes that the game could go on,” said Boggs. “At the same time — I’ve had this conversation a few times: if the game has to end, I’d much prefer it ends on a high note, when a lot of people are having fun, and there’s so much love for it, instead of dragging out and sort of fizzling out and dying and nobody cares. Magnum Opus, right now — there are so many people here, and it’s a testament to how wonderful the game is, and I prefer it have an end at that kind of point, where everyone’s really excited about it.”

Michael credits his playtest group heavily for accurately predicting where the metagame would swing, and for ensuring that the final releases would lend to the health of the game. And after two cycles’ worth of development, he’ll finally have a chance to pick up the game again himself, as just another player at the table. “Honestly, on some level, there is a little bit of appeal for me in that I can just be a player again. I can just jump in and pay and not have to worry about potentially spoiling anything — that always worries me! I always get nervous when talking about new things that might be coming up, but I can’t say too much about it. I’m glad that I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”

That’s not to say he’s completely free of worry, ironically. For one: Reign & Reverie is in extremely short supply. Even for FFG employees. “I think there will be enough products with the second wave,” assured Michael. “But I think — hah — we were a little surprised by how many people were so excited to get this product. To be totally honest, I don’t even have a copy of Reign & Reverie! I sort of made the mistake of saying ‘I’ll wait to order it.’ What a bad decision!” But he expects that the second wave will sufficiently satiate demands.

For now, and while he’s waiting for that shipment, there’s more work to be done elsewhere. “After Netrunner, I moved onto Keyforge. I’m helping Brad Andres with that; that’s been pretty exciting. Since I started with FFG, I’ve sort of been in the support role for Star Wars Destiny, and I still help with that from time to time. Keyforge keeps me pretty busy, but Destiny — it’s a huge game and needs all the help it can get.”

Finally: while Netrunner’s ending as a Fantasy Flight title is certainly hard to portray in a positive light, Boggs believes that the core of it, what made it so important to so many people, will survive the twilighting of its support.

“My friend taught me Netrunner; I would play with him, and it was a really fun thing to do,” recounted Michael. “I moved to South Korea, and I met a really cool group of people who liked Netrunner — whenever I got the opportunity to play it with them, I would take it because they were fun people to be around. It really was just a sense of community. And I love the mechanics, and I love the game, but I think — at the end of the day — if I did not have the people that I did to play with, I might not have played as long as I ultimately did.”

The crux of it is: Netrunner survives if its players want it to, by any means and definitions they might have for how that might work. “I know, as we go ahead and Netrunner has been discontinued for a long time and people fall out of it, I wholeheartedly expect to see people playing it in 10 years or 20. People still play the original Netrunner! And, in my opinion, Android: Netrunner — I don’t want to say is far superior, but I think that we took a lot of things and really iterated upon them and made them better. And made it a game that can continue for years and years to come.

Yeah, I think the community will keep it alive. And slo long as it’s alive with the community, I’m happy to be a part of it.”

If it wasn’t for Quintin Smith and Leigh Alexander’s writings on the game, I would never have gotten around to playing it myself, or known to join the community. Special shoutouts to them in particular.

James Chen is an editor for Infinite Esports & Entertainment, and directly oversees OpTic Gaming’s Greenwall.gg. He also really loves Jinteki mindgames. Tip him at https://ko-fi.com/obscurica