152. Loyalty in Apocalypse World

This weekend, I came across a podcast that I was unfamiliar with called “Bear Swarm!”  Episode 121.1 of “Bear Swarm!” is an interview conducted by the host, Rob Justice, with Vincent Baker at GenCon 2010 about the then-recently-released Apocalypse World.  It’s a very short interview, just over 15 minutes in length, but there is something at the beginning of the interview that Vincent says about the origins of Apocalypse World that I had never heard before:

​“My wife really likes fiction about loyalty, but she doesn’t want to play games where we’re stabbing each other in the back all the time, so I wanted to design a game that was about loyalty that wasn’t about betrayal every single time, right?” (starting at about 0:02:55 and following, http://bearswarm.robjustice.net/episode-121-1-gencon-vincent-baker/)

I had never heard of the subject of loyalty discussed in the context of the game, so the idea that it was central to the game took me by surprise even as I thought, “Of course it is!”
 
There is plenty of talk of community when discussing Apocalypse World, and while I have always agreed that community is a focus of the game, it has never been a satisfying focus, mainly because it’s such a wishy-washy idea, and one that no individual can push for or create.  The question of loyalty and the idea of community are obviously related, insofar as you can’t have a community made up of people who don’t trust each other, but community is something that exists only as an aggregate, whereas loyalty is particular to each individual.  Who or what are you loyal to?  Which desires and things do you prize above all others?  Those are productive questions and questions that play can answer in a moment by moment way.
 
Once I had the concept of loyalty in my head, I could see how all the mechanics and structures are there to test the loyalty of the characters.
 
Let’s say you want to create a game that players play to find out the limits of the characters’ loyalties to each other.  What would you need?  You’d want to make sure that the characters begin aligned together; they don’t have to be best friends, but they need to be together in some say, or else the issue of loyalty and possible betrayal can’t be explored.  You’d need to make sure that characters have some kind of a shared past, a history, if you will.  You’d need to make sure that each character has their own interests and desires that can serve as handholds to be pulled on and shaken by the GM to test the character’s loyalties.  And for that matter, you’d want a GM to do the exploratory testing, to play the world of possibilities competing for the characters’ attentions and loyalty.
 
Once all of those things are in place, you’d need the game to create the pressures that test those loyalties.  You can see how creating a world of scarcity and need would be an ideal testing ground.  You can see how creating triangular relationships would be key for creating wedges between characters through opposed or orthogonal desires and pressures.  You can see how avoiding “party play,” shared missions and quests, would be essential to letting the character’s interests diverge.  You can see how spending a session exploring those beginning interests, conflicts, and NPCs would let you find out in what way the characters’ interests were aligned and in what ways they were at odds.  You can see how you’d want multiple sessions of play to both feel out the borders of the characters’ loyalties and to bring them into a productive tension with each other.  You can see how you’d want the characters to be skilled, capable of bringing things about for themselves in at least a limited way to be able to actively pursue their own interests and desires.
 
It’s not that the characters are pitted against each other, but that their interests are.  How will they negotiate those differences?  Will they come together or fall apart?  Will they betray each other, back each other up, or simply fall apart?  The whole range of outcomes is made possible by the design, and every aspect of the design seems set up to create possible loyalties and then test them.