111. Confessions of My Own Ignorance -Threats & Themes

I covered threats a while back (posts #70-88), and at that time, I looked at the threats individually and didn’t really consider why these threats? Why this collection of threats for this particular game? If you had asked me those questions, at the time, I would have said, It’s all part of the post-apocalyptic genre. Of course you have warlords and grotesques and brutes and afflictions! You’d get those in a post-apocalyptic movie, so of course you get them in Apocalypse World too!

Earlier this week, I was rereading this post from Vincent’s Anyway blog from 2005, called “Creating Theme”: http://lumpley.com/creatingtheme.html. I had read it a while back, but being an English Lit guy, I just sort of nodded through it and went on to the next post. This time, it got me to thinking about the themes that an Apocalypse World game creates through play and what Vincent and Meguey put in the game to dictate the thematic content created by the game, or if not dictate, strongly influence.

To follow that thought through, I realized that I needed to know what possible endings the game sets up, or to put it another way, what are we playing to find out. As it says on the back of the book, what are these characters going to make of the broken-ass world they inherited? The game’s rules create a “fractured, tilting landscape of inequalities, incompatible interests, PC-NPC-PC triangle, untenable arrangements” (97) from the start, and play proceeds from this state of disequilibrium to the point that the characters find a way to stabilize their world in one way or another. What’s fucked up there at the beginning, what’s fractured and full of inequalities is the social world that the character’s inhabit. Yeah, it’s a world of shortages and need, but what that shortage and need shine a light on is how people come together or fall apart when there’s not enough to go around.

So what do the characters do? Do they find a way to build up a community? Do they protect their own by cutting others off? Do they run off and form a community of 3 or 4? What inequalities are intolerable to them and which ones suit them just fine? In short, it’s a game about society and government and relationships between individuals and between groups of people.

When you play a game of Apocalypse World, you’ll find your world teeming with people. Factions, groups, gangs, families, lovers, etc. That’s by design, yeah? You don’t fight sand monsters or mutated creatures for survival. You aren’t telling a tale about fighting the elements as the last surviving humans looking for some mythical city at which the rest of humanity has gathered itself. Other post-apocalyptic games might go that route, but not Apocalypse World. No, the game wants tons of people around the PCs, and it wants those people exerting pressure on our heroes to see what they’ll do. What society will they build?

So the game (and I would say any RPG) is defined by two things: 1) how the PCs interact with the world and 2) what opposition the MC put in the PCs’ way to create pressure on those characters. The first is of course determined in Apocalypse World by the moves. The second is shaped primarily by the threats. The threat lists and their related moves aren’t just handy tools for you as MC to always have something to say (though they are definitely that also); no, they give you specific types of pressure to apply to the characters, and how the designers define those threats directly affects the story created through play.

In fact, to MC the game, you are instructed “to create your essential threats” (107). The only essential threats that have nothing to do with people and society are the landscape and vehicles; every other threat is about the people co-inhabiting the world with the PCs: brutes, warlords, grotesques, and afflictions. Warlords force the issue of leadership and government organization. Brutes force the issue of mob mentality, a perverse and dangerous kind of unity. Afflictions are the pressure on an entire populace, forcing the issue of mass struggle and individual expressions of that struggle. Grotesques force the issue of the perversion of humanity living in a world of scarcity and disharmony. Each of these threats actively creates a volatile and fractured social environment, and when the MC plays these threats, we all play to find out what they PCs can make of this social order and disorder.

I never appreciated how vital and thematically central threats were to determining what stories are created by play in Apocalypse World. PC moves may determine how the PCs can interact with the threats, but the very issues and crises facing the PCs are born from the threats list. Change the threats, and you change the entire nature of the game.

The threat I sidestepped above is that of the world’s psychic maelstrom. I’m saving that for another post somewhere down the road.