Frisco, you're well-known in the Netrunner community mainly as a prolific writer on various aspects of our favorite game. Your first post to the NR-L goes way back to 15 June 1996.

Right. My first post asked about how Olivia Salazar combined with Chester Mix, because I didn't know the difference between installation cost and rez cost.

Nowadays, a search of the NR-L archives for "Frisco" churns out literally hundreds upon hundreds of hits. Of the people who were around "back in the days", who doesn't remember your "unrezzed blood cat" signature fondly? I'll ask about some of your more influential writings in a minute; could you perhaps tell our readers something about yourself first?

I'm almost 40. I have always lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, now a few minutes north of Silicon Valley, where Netrunner is as close to real as anywhere else in the world. I work as a chess teacher.

I gather that you are also writing a lot of articles on chess. Would you care to elaborate on your thoughts about how Netrunner compares to chess?

I edit the California Chess Journal, which requires writing tens of thousands of words about chess per year. Both chess and Netrunner have the same fundamental requirement at each turn - make the biggest threat possible to the opponent unless his threat is bigger than yours, in which case you must meet it. At Netrunner, though, too many players become entranced by the idea of bluffing - there is less reason to bluff at Netrunner than people think; opponents will make enough mistakes on their own if we let them.

Can Netrunner players learn something from chess to improve their play?

Everyone can learn something from chess. Chess teaches critical and linear thinking, and above all, it teaches people that they must pay attention, the most important survival skill of all, maybe.

Every Netrunner player knows "The World Would Swing If I Were King", the deck that really tries to score with World Domination.

A few do. It's a notable deck because it does more than try.

Since it is your creation, would you mind telling us something about how that idea came to be and how it took shape?

It is directly descended from an old Project Babylon deck - it is an obvious scheme with Babylon to score two or three three-point Babylons before the runner can steal seven of them, and to keep them safe with Bizarre or at least be paid for their loss with Silver Linings.

When Proteus was released, the World Domination agenda got a lot of attention because it was an "I win" card, but its difficulty was supposed to be out of reach. One night the light bulb went on over my head, and I realized how readily the Project Babylon idea could adapt to World Domination. World Domination turns out to be a much better card for that scheme because six Dominations takes up much less room in a deck than a dozen or more Babylons.

I put together "The World Would Swing" the night before the SiliCon in Sunnyvale, Calif., so here was this crazy deck idea - one that's never been tested - in play at a tournament. I thought the deck was interesting enough that not winning one tournament would be no big deal, but in the great narrative scheme of things, it had to win all its games that day.

It's a simple deck. Install World Domination as soon as possible, and advance it twelve times. If it's stolen, cash in Silver Lining Recoveries, and use those bits for Project Consultants. It is unusual in that the Corporation sometimes doesn't care if an advanced agenda is stolen, and it does some amazing things - with 40 bits, plus three Project Consultants, one Overtime Incentives, and one World Domination, the Corporation can start its turn with no cards installed but win the game in one turn.

Wizards of the Coast published an article about the deck in The Duelist #18, and while the Netrunner community was happy to get some attention in the Wizards magazine for a change, it didn't send thousands of people running to the game stores to buy Netrunner like Wizards had hoped, perhaps. I was really proud of that piece, though, and when Wizards started publishing Top Deck magazine, they asked me to contribute Netrunner pieces regularly.

If I remember correctly, there used to be a website called "Frisky AI at the Cardplace.com" that used to feature some rather interesting articles by you. For me with my failing memory and for players who aren't around that long yet, could you please remind us what kind of material that was?

At the peak of the collectable card gaming boom, two friends - David Orr and Ed Chen - launched a small web presence where they hoped to sell their Magic collections, and publish some things about other games. I wrote a Netrunner piece for cardplace.com almost every week for about a year.

None of those pieces were groundbreaking, and some of them were just notes about cards I scratched into my laptop while eating ice cream. It was not such a great time for Netrunner, when the bad Proteus cards were ruining everything, and no help in the form of another expansion was in sight. Even so, the experience was a very good one, and sort of maintained my reputation as one of the game's busiest writers.

Is there any chance of making that material available to the public once more? Do you still have a copy of it?

The laptop on which those Frisky AI pieces were written is broken, and which creator really wants to recycle the old stuff, anyway?

Well, I see. A pity though that your hardware was trashed. Another thing: It's been almost seven years now, but how did it come about that you started playing Netrunner? What initially attracted you to it?

An old friend had opened a collectables store in our hometown, and I used to visit once in a while. There was always a table of Magic games going on, and then a dealer display of Netrunner showed up one day. The cyberpunk theme held a greater appeal to me than Magic's "dueling wizards", and there was something about Mastiff that made me think, "wow, all this tiny card text plus a glowing blue dog - this might be a great game."

I bought a Starter deck, and lost several games in a hurry, which is probably the best way to be inspired to learn to play any game.

Do you still play from time to time? Is there a player community left where you live?

We still get together around Halloween every year for the annual "Haunting Inquisition," and we still talk about getting together more often than that.

As you know, the NR World Championships 2001/02/03 are setting a record right now for being the longest World Championships ever. Still, they are happening. May I ask whether you participated at all?

I never participated, and probably never will. When the idea was new, I was against it because it seemed like the Netrunner community had resigned itself to a little unofficial online "world championship" when the Magic people were earning thousands of dollars. Also at the time, my ego was huge, and I didn't think a Netrunner world event had any legitimacy at all unless I was specifically invited as "the guy to beat".

What many Netrunner players find the most exciting thing at the moment are the developments at the CCG Workshop website, where an online adaptation of Netrunner for the GatlingEngine is about to be realized any day now. Would you give it a shot when it is finally there, and what do you think about it at all?

I hope it works, and I hope the people who use it enjoy it. I don't want to play Netrunner unless my opponent is across the table, and the mental energy being expended is palpable. People who play Netrunner with me like the fact that they cause me to work so hard at the table, and that will not be evident in the online environment.

When you play Corp or Runner, is there some sort of maxim that flits around in your head and determines your tactics?

In a Starter deck game, the Corporation should never take an action that does not directly aim for scoring agenda.

Poker writers tell players that the object of the game is not to win the greatest number of pots, it is to win the greatest amount of money. The Runner needs to know that it is not about making the greatest number of runs, it is about making a number of profitable runs - every run should be timed to coincide with another action, either another run or a prep that combines with a successful run.

I've written about these topics at length on the list, and will keep doing so when the mood strikes.

Do you have a favorite Corp card?

World Domination.

Of course. What about a favorite Runner card?

Blackmail. In both cases, my favorite cards are "I win" cards. Score World Domination, win. There is never a reason to play Blackmail unless it is the seventh agenda point.

I have lots of frivolous favorites, though. Reconnaissance has the best chess art in Netrunner; Terrorist Reprisal should be a crippling shot whenever it's played; Reflector should go into almost any Constructed runner deck because Shock.r and Bolter Cluster are such good pieces of ice; Newsgroup Taunting was the basis for my first serious piece of Netrunner writing; Too Many Doors is the best piece of ice there is in that one great instance where the Runner pays and the Corp doesn't.

Just a fun question: How many copies of Joan of Arc do you own (as it's the topic of this issue's trivia column)?

Five, one of them signed by the artist.

It's been around for some time, but I think that people haven't come to grips with Classic just yet. What are your thoughts on how that expansion (well, half of an expansion) changed the metagame?

They hoped it would make stealth more important, but they introduced the expansion too late for anyone to find out, or care.

Which of the new cards did appeal to you in particular, and why?

The first piece I wrote for Top Deck magazine was about Data Fort Remapping, and I've written more about the card since then. It is possibly the very best Corp card in the game, because it is the only card 100 percent guaranteed to end a run.

I was giving some additional thought to the fact that Remapping is a Gray Ops agenda. That should mean that Networked Center is golden in a Remap scheme. Networked Center has a tiny trash cost and screams at the Runner to run it, but after a Remapping has been scored, that's at least one run on Center that can be halted, and maybe Center can result in another Remap being scored easily, and so on.

What didn't you like about Classic?

I liked everything about the Classic expansion. It just came too late.

How do you see the future of Netrunner?

The future is whatever the players want to make of it. Maybe some will keep teaching others to play, and spreading some Starter decks around. Maybe others will like playing with "virtual expansions". It'll always be a great game.

That is an excellent closing statement. Thank you very much for your time!