The Players Make
The Game
how a passionate group of volunteers saved their favorite game from death
What happens when a game stops, but the players don’t?
What happens when a community loses the very thing it formed around?
Those questions kept coming to my mind back in 2018 after I excitedly learned how to play the collectible card game Android: Netrunner and almost immediately thereafter found out the game was being cancelled after six years in production.
Netrunner is a two-player asymmetric expandable card game set in a dystopian cyberpunk near-future where elite hackers known as “runners” aim to thwart the control of mega-corporations by hacking into their servers (making a “run”) and preventing them from advancing their agendas. It was designed by Richard Garfield, who also created Magic: The Gathering.
While plenty of people might claim that they will do whatever it takes to keep their hobby and/or community alive, such claims usually exist only as wishful thinking. Netrunner players prove the exception that sometimes such a daunting task actually happens and perhaps becomes something even bigger than it originally was.
The players formed a non-profit, made up entirely of volunteers from around the globe, and started publishing compatible expansions to the game — card sets that take thousands of people-hours to design, play-test, and create custom art for — which they give away for free as print-and-play files.
Each new set quietly adds to the lore and builds on the foundation of the one before and now, seven years later, shows that people can do remarkable things and that profit isn’t everything.
Told entirely by the players’ own voices, The Players Make The Game demonstrates that while the players themselves are now making the game they so love, perhaps it is the community of players that actually make the game worth playing.
Genre: Documentary Film
Runtime: 96 minutes
Release Date: TBD
Production Story
Besides continuing to learn and play Android: Netrunner and bugging the players of the local game store, I filmed the official final three days of tournaments (Magnum Opus – 2018) at Fantasy Flight Games (the former publisher) where over 400 people from all over the world showed up to play one last game.
I interviewed 40 different players (with backgrounds as lawyers, pharmaceutical researchers, data analysts, and IT professionals, to name a few) and members of the group hoping to keep the game alive. All interviews were transcribed and an initial 30-minute unpublished short about the community of players was created.
In the intervening years since 2018, I’ve continued to casually play and the players formed their own non-profit (Null Signal Games) to support the game and to publish their own compatible expansions to Android: Netrunner. This led to wanting to tell even more of the story and to follow up, now seven years later, at Worlds 2025 in Scotland.
While in Edinburgh, I interviewed 40+ new and returning players and documented the multi-day tournament that was held at Dovecot Studios.
Status: Fine-cut editing phase.
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Updates
Oct 24, 2025: WORLDS 2025 FILMED. The trip to Edinburgh to film Worlds 2025 was a success and the event was incredible. Congrats to ZomZraft on the win! Editing prep has begun.
November 2025: All interview transcripts are complete and key moments have been highlighted.
February 2026: Deep in rough-cut editing now. Finding the stories within the story and weaving them together.
March 2026: Rough cut work-in-progress screening at Docuclub to gather feedback about what works or needs attention.
May 2026: Fine-cut from 104 minutes to 97 minutes (and hopefully more). Adding music and mixing audio. Title change coming. Custom art commission.