As I've already mentioned, my view is not based on experience like
@chaochou's. It's based on reading the text, thinking hard about it, and putting some of the ideas to work in Classic Traveller play.
As I already posted, it happens at the start of Baker's own example of play, when Marie goes looking for Isle. And because players in AW don't have the authority to directly frame or push towards particular scenes as they do in some other systems (you won't be surprised that I'm thinking Wises and Circles in Burning Wheel as key examples), I can imagine it happening a reasonable amount:
I go looking for Isle,
I jump in my car and drive out onto the burnflats, looking for anyone from Dremmer's gang to shoot,
I've promised so-and-so the Savvyhead I'll bring them a trinket; what new stuff has turned up in the market?, etc. The example that gets discussed on the forum that
@andreszarta linked to is "I go to my garage, get in my car, and drive out to Holden's place".
I don't think it's a coincidence that that example, the Isle example, and the examples I've come up with, involve
going places (or trying to go places, as with starting the gyrocopter) and
looking for people - because there is no basic move that has
when you go somewhere or
when you look for someone as its trigger. It seems to me like deliberate design to have left these things open, as opportunities for the GM to do there bit in the conversation by
making Apocalypse World seem real and
barfing forth apocalyptica and
responding with trouble and rewards and
offering opportunities.
Another way to offer an opportunity is via the play of NPCs, and Baker gives this as another example of non-player-side-move-triggering action (pp 187-8 of 1st ed):
Asking someone straight to do something isn’t trying to seduce or manipulate them. To seduce or manipulate, the character needs leverage —-sex, or a threat, or a promise, something that the manipulator can really do that the victim really wants or really doesn’t want.
Absent leverage, they’re just talking, and you should have your NPCs agree or accede, decline or refuse, according to their own self-interests.
So this will require saying what prep and honesty demand, probably responding with trouble or rewards, perhaps announcing future badness or offering an opportunity or even - building on
@chaochou's example upthread where the PC asks Dremmer for diesel - the infliction of harm as Dremmer shoots them in the leg and tells them to "F*** off!" (And we already had a prior GM soft move in that example, where the GM has announced that "Dremmer is standing in front of the cabin used as the diesel store, looking mean with one hand on the little snub-nose .38 everyone knows he used to kill Mouse.")
For the reasons that
@chaochou set out upthread, these features of the system mean that players have an incentive to make threats or offers (ie to go aggro, or to seduce/manipulate) in order to have the chance to assert control over the fiction. But they don't have to, and it doesn't seem to me to be a
failure state that a player decides to have their PC just interact with a NPC. After all, the players too know that the GM has to say what honesty and prep demand, and maybe not every NPC is going to be like Dremmer!