I was asked, via Twitter, why I think Apocalypse World is such a popular game for hacks and remixes. I have my own opinions, but smarter and better informed people are weighing in right now on Twitter, in ways that might be hard to follow in just a few hours. So I’m asking the question here, too, so we can have a decent comment thread to sort it out:
Why do you suppose hacks and remixes of Apocalypse World are so plentiful?
We can also discuss how many hacks constitute a lot in the community, but that’s secondary. Let the discussion go where it will.
Off the top if my head
1. It is easy to skin so long as you stay within the themes of scarcity (and underserved theme)
2. Vinent makes it look easy.
3. Clearest and most explicit partial success rules I can think of, and doubly noteworthy for being very easily portable
4. Table based model means that “all it takes” is adding new tables.
5. Novelty of Sex Moves.
6. Book is intensely decentralized, with most of the rules in play spread out among handouts. Modular decentralization== Easy hacking.
7. Modularity of rules (characters) breaks down into further modularity (moves). Net result: many levels you can hack at without impacting bones of the game.
8. Social credit. Positively, there’s an interested and supportive community. Cynically, there is more to be gained by writing a hack than playing one. Both positive and cynical statements made here are false. And also true.
-Rob D.
The system is interesting as the system itself, absent setting cues. This is also true of Dogs. Vincent builds good TOOLS, and handyfolk look at new tools and think about what they can build using them.
The game is presented with a lot of templates. So there are a few design patterns which are very obvious. Once you can see a pattern, it’s hard not to think about how you could continue or alter that pattern for your own ideas.
Vincent includes a chapter at the end Apocalypse World showing you how to hack the game and gives examples of common hacks by his friends. The GM is encouraged to create custom moves, essentially move hacks, as part of their GM prep. He also has a sub-forum dedicated to hacking. Vincent is also open to people freely publishing new games based on AW hacks. Hacking is baked in to Apocalypse World.
Apocalypse World also has a strong player base that’s friendly towards hacking. Many people don’t just want to hack games, they want to share their hacks. AW’s community gives them an audience.
Apocalypse World is also an exception based design which makes hacking easy and immediately satisfying. Rob breaks it down here: http://rdonoghue.blogspot.com/2010/09/exception-world.html
Even with hacking baked into AW, as it obviously is, that isn’t necessarily enough to get people to actually hack it. The ground is fertile, but people still have to be motivated to do their planting. What is it about AW—the game, the community, the style, etc.—that motivates people to take advantage of this opportunity and not others?
Is it just the presence of a receptive community?
I don’t think so. I think it has to do with where Vincent set the water line for the game’s identity—hacks are seen as new games, rather than fan projects. The rising tide lifts all ships.
I don’t think, for example, that AW’s number of hacks is all that surprising compared to, say, the number of MONSTER: THE FORMULAE fan-made creations for the World of Darkness over the years. Some differences include the facts that (a) AW fans respect each other’s creations in a way that fan-made games for the WoD are not always respected, and (b) AW hacks are considered part of the play of AW, rather than some kind of meta-play.
But both game types—AW and the World of Darkness—have core structures that lend themselves to riffing on the formula. (The “custom moves” of AW also remind me an awful lot of actions from the SAGA System games of Dragonlance: Fifth Age and Marvel Super Heroes, but with some more interesting consequences built right in.)
I think citing the community is sort of a chicken-and-egg play, though. The community is there because the game is hackable and rewarding to hack, just as the game gets hacked for the sake of winning praise and play from the community. It’s a self-reinforcing structure, and both parts need to grow up in tandem for the relationship to be sturdy and effective.
Good games get fan material written for them, and bad games don’t. End of topic.
@JD:
Are you proposing the existence of fan material as a failsafe method for the detection of good games?