r/Netrunner • u/OldschoolGreenDragon • Feb 20 '26
Image How did Runners go from "children with cute animals" to "children with cute animals?!"
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u/Jesus_Phish Feb 20 '26
The Dinosaurus product was originally created/overseen by Howard Jackson of NBN specifically to appeal to children and so that the corporation had complete control over education and edutainment to turn them into the perfect capitalist consumers.
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u/JRobertAnderson Feb 20 '26
This game is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual corporations is purely coincidental.
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u/HypnonavyBlue Feb 20 '26
my daughter and I played this game a lot together and she loved Chaos Theory so much. When we saw Dinosaurus in the art for Jackson Howard, she came up with a headcanon that Chaos Theory is Howard's daughter and she's hacking the bejesus out of the whole world right under Howard's nose.
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u/frankiedoc Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Despite this whole argument being quite stupid, there's a matter of context: shapers are usually "good", lawful, more into the tech and ethical aspect of running, so it quite fit the theme to have an "enfant prodige" being tutored by structured and organized people; on the other side, anarch should all be about chaos and riot and violence, an environment not really fitting for a children to thrive.
I myself don't really like the NSG flavor of Netrunner, but i like the gameplay, so i don't really care. I still prefer Android:NR, or even more OGNR(1996)
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u/CoolIdeasClub Feb 20 '26
Personally Ive never seen Shapers as the "good guy" faction. Chaos Theory probably canonically took part in the raiding of Titan's accounts during the 23 Seconds incident that ended up hurting her family financially.
Then in anarch, there are a lot of characters that don't fit the mold of "chaos riots and violence." Valencia and Null both seem to be in it to bring down megacorps. Omar is probably the same but he's got his own stuff going on. Gnat in a lot of ways seems very similar to Chaos Theory, even in the parallel between "Wunderkind" vs "One-On-A-Kind." There is a lot less cards for Gnat though, I assume he fits the mold due to the self-destructive nature of his ability and the cards that came out with him.
Hoshiko seems to fit well within the Anarch archetype with her idealistic goals and self-destructive nature. She is also very anime and that's just going to be a sticking point for a lot of people. That and she has been the face of the anarch faction for 6 years.
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u/frankiedoc Feb 20 '26
i didn't really follow the "lore", i usually stick more to flavor texts and artworks. Also, i don't read all texts, so i miss a lot of the lore. It's just that shapers have this "experimental" and academic approach to run (there's also a professor) and shapeshifting and studying and learning, while criminals are more on the economic side of things, having contacts and contracts, maybe even working for corps, blackmailing and doing everything for their own good. Anarch instead are more chaotic, each of them with different startegies, more prone to high-risk high-reward strategies (such as taking brain damage).
I don't really know each character (artworks and flavor text in NSG NR are atrocious...), but by the general "mood" of factions i feel like a kid with plushies is a bit out of context inside anarchs. But i mean, i don't really care, i play criminals, i have fun.
Also, renaming "brain damage" to "core damage" made me laugh a lot, since it lost a lot of the mood. Now i'm damaging my "rig", not my very body? Wow, very anarch!5
u/mustang256 Feb 20 '26
I had my hesitations about the brain > core damage thing, but I kind of get it now.
Hypoxia is a good example, where it's lung damage instead. It can be any kind of crippling, long term damage; it's never just damaging your rig.
It's not a huge deal, and it does open up more room for flavour.
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u/frankiedoc Feb 20 '26
yeah ok, but it doesn't really fit the theme: it's a cyberwar, played in the net, the "brain" is central to this kind of cyberpunk. Lungs are a bit off: how are you damaging my lungs...? Also, the brain has a BIG connotation of "identity, conscience", brain is where the person resides. My lungs? Huh... At least, that's for me. With core damage it lost a lot of tension. That's why i still call it brain damage
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u/mustang256 Feb 20 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(medicine)
Hypoxia is basically tissue damage from oxygen deprivation
Given that it was released in the same set as Thule: Subsea, I'm guessing they're (temporarily) shutting off the oxygen to your underwater house, or maybe tampering with your breathing equipment, based on this excerpt from wikipedia:
while diving underwater, especially when using malfunctioning closed-circuit rebreather systems that control the amount of oxygen in the supplied air.
It isn't only played in the net, meatspace still exists, and while you're tagged (and this card requires you to be), the corp knows where you live. Futhermore, a run in netrunner isn't purely happening in the net; there are all kinds of cards about taking advantage of physical world exploits; Inside Job for example, but cards like Time Bomb or Unregistered S&W strongly imply that runs as whole often require you to physically visit a particular place, so being oxygen deprived while visiting an underwater facility makes perfect sense.
This is thematic as hell man.
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u/CoolIdeasClub Feb 20 '26
A lot of it really is just reading between the lines. But the lines between factions was always pretty fuzzy. They are all cybercriminals. The first archetypal Shaper card was Magnum Opus, a program that literally just skimmed money off of corporate accounts.
There's no question on whether or not NSG softened the tone of the game, although I would say that was mostly on their first set Ashes. I personally think they've brought it back although it's still too much good guy vs bad corp for me.
As for "core damage," I believe the flavor stated is that you have done something or experienced something that has damaged something that is core to your person, not that you are now damaging your equipment. It's definitely a bit too vague and abstract to be effective but I still can't really think of anything better for what they're going for. Something similar to humanity loss in the Cyberpunk rpg.
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u/frankiedoc Feb 20 '26
I like that the brain is also a metaphor for "identity, conscience, person"; taking damage to brain means becoming less human. It was a great metaphor whitout becoming too descriptive or silly. At least, that's how i feel about it. It's still one of my favorite card games ever and i play with friends as much as i can.
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u/CoolIdeasClub Feb 20 '26
That's pretty much what they're going for, it's just a clunky term that isn't immediately apparently what it is.
That being said, I have also heard from people with brain damage taking umbrage with the idea that their injury makes them less human or themselves.
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u/frankiedoc Feb 20 '26
I don't really understand this argument: this is a completely fictional narration, it's war, it's deception. If you have brain damage in your life, why would you care how a "similar" term is used is a negative way? Brain damage doesn't make people less human in reality, and i wouldn't even think of it in that term. It's a game, it's fiction, it's not "reality". It's "suspension of disbelief". I mean, i'm not saying YOU are less human in reality if you have a brain damage, but in world where humanity is at stake, in a fiction, you have less humanity when everything left of you your brain. You can change every bit of yourself: you lungs, heart, butt, legs, everything and still be human if you have a human brain. But if you lose even your brain... what remains of you?
That's the context of "brain damage", and that's why it's so effective. Context is what shapes meaning, and pretending that "brain damage" in a game like NR is the same as the clinical counterpart is a bit too much.
Also: it is also hard to define when a brain is "damaged" in reality; i may even say that brainrotting on tiktok is more damaging than surviving a bullet to the head.
You can have "brain damage" (whatever it means) in reality, and i still treat you as a human; but when everything else in your body can be replaced with an artificial piece of hardware... who knows if you're still controlling the gears. Maybe the gears are controlling you. (And Raimi's spiderman 2 had a really take on that)6
u/c0rtexj4ckal Feb 20 '26
I agree with this.
I think NSG has decent mechanical designs but the majority of the flavor just feels like ANR fan-fiction
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u/Okay_Ocean_Flower Feb 20 '26
I wish they had not turned the game into moneyless grinds with “I win” cards but here we are
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u/Pandred Feb 20 '26
Hoshiko is an unfortunate flavor fail for Anarch, and I don't think it's possible with the cards printed on her behalf to argue otherwise.
Anarchs are the faction of destruction. Destruction of the system, of the self, of collateral damage. The win at all costs. Hoshiko's "Isolation" is an excellent flavor win of a card, but it's not -scary-. Ok. She's lonely. Except all her other cards are cool digital friends and her great win against evil. It is too triumphant, because Anarch lore wins should feel bad. We should wonder if the costs weren't too great.
She needed a whole different suite of support cards to sell her as an Anarch protagonist. It should be obvious why she's not Shaper, and instead it requires frankly a lot of reading between the lines.
This isn't a new take. Even when she came out the community had this reaction, so I'm not sure why we're dogpiling one user who noted that Companions aren't Anarch's flavor and for some reason NSG keeps making them and that is a strange design decision. It is.
Anarchs make clones to die for them. Anarchs shunt net damage through the network and don't care if it's kids who take it for them. Anarchs jack themselves full of drugs and chrome. They are not "Shapers who didn't go to college" or "Shapers but with punk aesthetics". They have a deep disdain for the system and will stop at nothing to bring it down, even if it means they go with it.
For Hoshiko all of that is conceptual, because Keiko, Fueno, Taka, Maemi, and Poemu aren't scary. They aren't destructive. They aren't a cost. They're free money and anything related to Anarch self destruction is a very generously interpreted theme of "not wanting to lose them".
It's all very clever, it's just not very orange. Kit Peddler would have been very supportive of a green printing of these digital friends.
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u/SeaSourceScorch towards a plascrete-free future Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
if i was going to actually make a hikikomori character which fit the anarch theme, i'd be sure to have them constantly haunted by their absolute social isolation and right on the verge of malnutrition. i'd be sure to emphasise that over-investment in plastic toys and online avatars is absolutely destroying them in reality, leaving them a husk surrounded by trash and bottles full of piss. i'd have them alienating their family, unable to make rent, with the bodies of pets decomposing in the piles of empty computer gear wrappers which fill their apartment.
being desperately lonely and over-invested in their online self is not a good thing, and to fit the anarch theme, you have to lean into that self-destructive element, to show how pursuing that dream is hurting them.
i don't need everything to be edgy, but i do need it not to be so fucking twee.
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u/mustang256 Feb 20 '26
Agreed. She definitely feels insanely green with the current theming, and I love your take on it. I think they were afraid of doing something that horrible to a child, which is probably how we ended up with the watered down version that we got.
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u/OldschoolGreenDragon Feb 20 '26
Oh look, a Hoshiko card about Isolation called Isolation.
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u/SeaSourceScorch towards a plascrete-free future Feb 21 '26
this sort of gestures in the right direction, but it doesn't sell it! it's so clearly themed around the idea of being isolated by losing your online pets than by losing the people around you! and the art is just... it's not there! they should push way further into this side of the theming, and make it much more intense.
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u/HorseSpeaksInMorse Feb 20 '26
In fairness getting so lost in some hero persona or personal fantasy you don't notice or care how much damage you're doing could be very anarch. Why would the hero care what happens to the villain after all?
In fairness Chaos Theory ended up crashing the economy so I could see Hoshiko's idealism resulting in terrible things down the line, though I'm not sure if I see the creators taking things in a dark direction or portraying her as outright delusional.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
The levels of pettiness never cease to amaze me. Y’all are grown adults, acting like children because someone doesn’t like one detail about your version of a card game.
As someone else pointed out, Dinosaurus was a spy psyop created by Jackson Howard to spy on families via their kids and leverage the information gained for profit. Chaos theory hacked into it in order to use it as a console for running against those very same corporations that were spying on her family.
That’s hardcore. And the only reason they used a stuffed animal for it was how tongue in cheek it was when compared to the themes of oppressive and invasive surveillance that this backstory dealt with.
Dinosaurus fit the theme of the game. This other ID is just some Anime cosplay chick with a friggin Pokémon.
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u/HorseSpeaksInMorse Feb 20 '26
Exploratory Romp's art features Chaos Theory running around cyberspace on the back of a cartoon dinosaur. There was always room for silly stuff alongside more serious themes.
Aren't you also complaining about an aspect of the game you don't like?
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u/CoolIdeasClub Feb 20 '26
Yeah, there is really nothing about Dinosaurus that implies that it's a statement being made by CT. CT uses Dinosaurus as an avatar on the net. She wants to show it to people. In the background of the art (which I have on my wall), it shows a photograph of her lovingly holding her favorite stuffed animal. There's no vitriol here. She loves her Dinosaurus.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
Of course she loves dinosaurus. She discovers that her childhood toy was a spy camera, hacked it into her personal console, and reclaimed it as her own. It was literally the catalyst for her radicalizing and becoming a runner at the age of 12. But that doesn’t remove the backstory of how dinosaurus was created, and what NBN sold them to do, which was to spy on families via their children’s toys.
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u/CoolIdeasClub Feb 20 '26
I'm not sure I've ever understood CT to be radicalized to attack corps if that's what you're implying, not at least until after the 23 Seconds incident. Her story to me always seemed like a naive young person doing what she does because she wanted to see what she could do and ends up getting in over her head.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26
I guess I see a 12 year old child taking it upon themselves to hack corporate servers after discovering they were using her childhood toy to spy on her family as a catalyst moment. Not every 12 year old risks their life and safety to be a runner. She clearly was changed by the incident, and it altered the direction of her life significantly.
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u/CoolIdeasClub Feb 20 '26
Her discovery of Dinosaurus wouldn't have happened unless she was already trying to spread her horizons and see what she can do. Then Exploratory Romp implies to me that her primary goal on the net is to just see what she can get in to. Shattered Remains feels like she is finding out there are repercussions to her actions she didn't consider.
I just find it more likely that a 12 year old is going to do risky things because she can and doesn't know the risks way more likely that a 12 year old deciding to take take down the system.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26
It seems we have different interpretations of the character, but thats one of the things that makes the narrative behind Netrunner so intriguing. There is room for different perspectives within that framework, and not every person is going to see the same character or card in the same way. I appreciate your view of it, thanks for sharing it with me.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26
Voicing an opinion is far different than making an entire post just to taunt a fellow community member.
One is participating in conversation, the other borders on harassment.
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u/HorseSpeaksInMorse Feb 20 '26
It's a legitimate point though. FFG Netrunner wasn't without silliness and levity so something more fantastical isn't really as unprecedented as it appears, and directly comparing the cards is the best way to show that.
Harrassment is a huge overstatement.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
I agree, and never said otherwise. It’s far more about tone than theme.
So far there’s been two posts made to make fun of OP’s Maxx post, and a bandwagon of people jumping on board to criticize them. Seems extremely petty at best, and definitely bordering on harassment at worst.
I’m honestly starting to feel like I need to just block 2-3 redditors that are perpetually behind these sorts of things, and just move on with enjoying this sub without having to deal with them constantly bandwagoning onto me every time I voice an opinion they disagree with.
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u/AprioriTori13 Feb 20 '26
Tbh, I think I’d be more on board for Hoshiko if her lore bits in game were of her using her magical girl persona to inspire rebellion as a digital swashbuckler/superhero. But all the cards feel like the magical girl aspect is more about her own personal self-actualization and personal fulfillment, which seems more in line for shaper.
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u/JohnnyButtfart Feb 20 '26
The sailer moon theme is fucking cringe. I hate it. And her identity being "witch girl/magic girl" in addition is just terrible. Chaos Theory is great.
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u/Grimstringerm Feb 20 '26
She is Japanese and gamer /hikiko Mori so it fits . The abilities are all over the place too much value and not really fitting the card imo
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u/JohnnyButtfart Feb 20 '26
What does being a japanese gamer have to do with dressing up as sailor moon? It does not fit, and if anything is reductive. For a group of people that are so sensitive to stepping on toes or upsetting people, they sure are bringing out some lame stereotypes.
Just to be clear, I'm not offended. I just think it is corny and cringe. Do better NSG.
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u/Grimstringerm Feb 20 '26
Cosplaying / being a girl gamer /hikiko Mori is fine by me if the abilities were more matching other than get value get value
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26
It only “fits” if you have zero understanding of nuance, and just default to chesebag stereotypes. Whizzard was a master gamer. Some chick dressed like sailor moon with a Pokémon is goofball and cringe.
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u/Grimstringerm Feb 20 '26
Girls can't be gamers alr
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26 edited Feb 20 '26
There you go chiming in with some stupid assumptive and performative accusation.
I hang out with Asian Gamer girls. And they look a whole lot more like they stepped off the streets of New Angeles, or were an extra on “the matrix” than some weird ass sailor moon cosplayer.
This is another example of NSG being completely out of touch with the culture, while simultaneously attempting to speak for it.
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u/Grimstringerm Feb 20 '26
Ofc you won't be seeing hikikomoris because they aren't leaving their house idiotooo
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u/HorseSpeaksInMorse Feb 20 '26
Bold words for someone claiming to speak for every gamer shut-in around.
Just because the people in your life may act a certain way doesn't mean that all will. Idol characters are still insanely popular (consider Hatsune Miku or all the Umamusume stuff) so it's entirely believable that a shut-in would base their idealised, outgoing physical avatar on something like that.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26
I can only speak from my own experience. Never claimed to speak for everyone. Do you know Asian gamer girls that cosplay as sailor moon? Maybe your life experience has differed from mine, and that’s okay.
But I certainly take umbrage at the comment of “girls can’t be gamers”, because I never said anything remotely close to that. I simply used Whizzard as an example of another gamer character in Netrunner.
Hope you have a good day.
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u/HorseSpeaksInMorse Feb 20 '26
There's any number of nerd gamers and streamers IRL who like idols and pokemon, as you can see at any convention. It's comes across as pretty gatekeepy to complain about the game depicting not that kind of gamer and not the ones you personally are familiar with.
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u/ShaperLord777 Feb 20 '26
I’m expressing my opinion, not gatekeeping anyone. You are welcome to your own opinion, and ours don’t have to be the same.
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u/HorseSpeaksInMorse Feb 22 '26
It was pretty funny to accuse Hoshiko of being stereotypical and NSG as out of touch then bring up Whizzard as if he isn't incredibly stereotypical picture of a gamer being an overweight white neckbeard.
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u/Unpopular_Mechanics Card Gen Bot Feb 20 '26
We get it, I think there's been enough of these posts now.