Ralph Mazza – So I should have my players roll dice when they hail a cab or tie their shoes? We all do this: GMs decide where uncertainty lives in a system, navigating the constraints established by the designers. 

My issue with “bad hacks” is that they often don’t understand the function of moves and the roll of uncertainty in the fiction when holding an AW conversation. It’s possible that a game can be a bad hack and a good game, I suppose, but I think that’s really just a function of us having such a shitty word for this kind of game design to begin with anyway. Anyone who is “hacking AW” is really doing their own game design, and they can do that well or poorly by the expectations of the system they create.