93. Moves Snowball: Part III – Reading the Situation

Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs).

”I read the situation,” her player says.

”You do? It’s charged?” I say.

”It is now.”

”Ahh,” I say. I understand perfectly: the three NPCs don’t realize it, but Marie’s arrival charges the situation. If it were a movie, the sound track would be picking up, getting sinister.

She rolls+sharp and hits with 7-9, so she gets to ask me one question from the move’s list. (126)

First, it’s notable that we begin with Marie’s player pursuing Marie’s own agenda. The MC has not thrown an encounter or a crisis at the character but is instead responding to the player’s actions. It’s a subtle choice to have the extended example begin this way, but an important one to understanding the way the game was designed with character agency in mind.

Second, the first move we encounter in the example is Read a Sitch. It’s an interesting choice for a first move since it doesn’t have much fiction surrounding it. My instinct would be to start with a move that drives home the importance of “to do it, do it.” Instead, to make the move, Marie’s player just has to declare she’s reading the situation.

Well, that’s not really all she has to do, is it? The MC asks for clarification, not of the “cool, what do you do?” sort, but of the “let’s clarify the fiction” sort all the same. The only situations that can be read by the move are charged ones. “Charged” would have been a great word to add to my “natural language” discussion – post no. 90 – since the word is both consistently used and not technical or jargony in its use. What is a “charged” situation? That’s for the players to agree on among themselves, but to me it means filled with potential energy on the verge of becoming kinetic. So the MC asks how the situation is charged.

I read, “You do? It’s charged?” not as a challenge, but as a surprised inquiry. The scene the MC painted was not one of conflict, but one of relative peace. The three NPCs are having a quiet moment sitting in harmony and eating peaches. The player can approach this scene in any way she wants, so there is no reason to assume the situation is charged—and it’s not, until the player says it is. Remember, Marie is here “to visit grief upon” Isle.

Note that the MC does not say, “No, you can only read charged situations. How is it charged?” In other words, the MC is not making the player justify the triggering of the move, with the player making a case and the MC being the arbiter of whether the move was triggered or not. Instead, this is a subtle negotiation between the players so that they agree about what is happening, and with that agreement, the move can trigger. The MC’s inquiry is met with “It is now,” which is in turn met with “Ahh.” That “Ahh” marks the assent from the MC to the situation being charged. Everyone involved in the scene understands the fiction, “understand[s] perfectly” even.

Because the fiction of the situation is clear, Marie’s player rolls without further checking in or discussing what’s happening.

I don’t really know if this is the case, but in my head, the Bakers began the example this way because that relationship between players and the way the game structures communication and assent are critical features in the way Apocalypse World functions at the table. Before we can get to “cool, what do you do,” we have to understand that state of the fiction is determined not through MC fiat but through shared assent.

As a final observation, let’s take a moment to praise the MC for constructing a scene with the potential for conflict. Presumably, Marie’s player said she was going to find Isle. The MC could have had Isle alone in her quarters or anywhere else, but instead she created a scene in which Marie is accompanied by two other NPCs, one of whom is in Keeler’s gang, as we’ll later find out. Whatever Marie wants to see Isle for, having to deal with 3 people is a much more complicated affair than having to deal with one person. Not only that, but they’re all on the roof! Now Marie has to either shout up to them, or climb up on the roof if she wants to have a direct encounter with Isle. That’s a pretty brilliant construction for a scene.

(Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder what move the MC made to create the scene. Since she is surprised that the scene is charged, and given the peach-eating quiet of the whole thing, she almost certainly wasn’t announcing future badness. I suspect she was offering an opportunity (to talk to or confront Isle) with a cost (of having to conduct that exchange in front of Plover and Mill).)

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