A long, long time ago, I had a regular feature on this blog called Sunday Morning Overthinking-It, where I spent too many words discussing the silly interaction of card theming and mechanics. This was pretty fun, and I wrote generally ignored posts about Sure Gamble, The Future Is Now, Team Sponsorship, Dorm Computer, Quality Time (my favorite), and others.
NISEI just released a bunch of new cards in the generally-interested Midnight Sun half of the Borealis cycle, and I was struck by Ghosttongue. A card that looks like it could be pretty useful to play — essentially, I guess, a kind of Pre-Paid VoicePAD (but more powerful, usable more than once per turn). And with a brain core damage cost and not completely insignificant 2-credit install cost. I like this card a lot, and when I start playing again eventually, I’ll definitely fool around with it.
But, what the living hell is going on here thematically?! It’s a cybernetic card, yes, and the title as well as the great art by Martin de Diego Sádaba clearly depicts what part of the body is being replaced: The tongue. It’s literally a robot tongue. A tongue made of metal. A new tongue. It’s a cybernetic tongue. I can’t get over how weird this is to me.
Forgive my ignorance of cyberpunk fiction, but I can’t recall anything where an artificial tongue gave anyone any demonstrable benefits. Of course, in the fiction of Netrunner, events are “things that happen” that are often the actions and activities that a Runner wants to make happen. Since I don’t really play with NISEI cards, forgive me as I use mainly old, rotated FFG cards for example — Easy Mark is, presumably, finding that poor guy with the backpack and convincing him to part with three credits; Inside Job is, presumably, about the Runner figuring out how to get themselves into that bathroom and hack past one of the Corp’s defenses; Jailbreak is about coordinating an attack on a... jail? That gets you... uh, more things (that were in the jail?), while giving you more resources from your own stash of things (that were also somehow in the jail?).
Okay, so that last one got away from me, but you get the idea. Often, Events have some kind of implicit verbality to them — you can talk your way into getting that money or inside the Corp bathroom. And the flavor of Ghosttongue seems to fit this as well: “Arming the resistance with disarming charm" implies that this cybernetic mouth muscle is going to help you, as the player, get to do what you want to do, but costing you a little less money.
So, let’s think about that for a second — what is the tongue actually doing? Is it a tongue that has a little AI in it and it will, I dunno, analyze the situation for you, moving itself around in your mouth to say the perfect word? Since speech is not just about the tongue moving to the right spot in your mouth, how does the rest of your, uh, head figure out what the Ghosttongue is trying to tell you to say? How does your brain keep up with this so that the Ghosttongue-to-brain lag doesn’t make you come off as more awkward?
Another interpretation might be that just flashing your metal tongue, as in the card art, might just confuse or instill pity in whomever you’re trying to give your money to. So, you go in to the Corp offices to use the bathroom, they say “Nah man, you need to give me two credits to do that,” you flash them your shiny tongue and they say, what, “Oof, sorry, you clearly spent your money on some bad decisions, I’ll let you in for 1 credit now.” Or something like that?
I dunno. Funny card.
