Roleplaying, acting out the part of a character other than yourself, is a very popular pasttime. There exist a wide range of possible experiences from friendgroups playing Dungeons & Dragons around a kitchen table, to players going on weekend trips where they don costumes and act out being elves and wizards with like-minded people, and many steps in between. It is possible for a player's emotions while playing to affect them outside of the game as well, and the other way around too. This phenomenon is called bleed, and is the subject of much discussion in roleplaying design circles, with creators actively designing their games with bleed in mind. A game might intentionally seek to invoke bleed, which can create powerful emotional experiences, or seek to mitigate its effects by using a variety of common safety tools and good design practices. This talk will introduce Raymond Vermeulen's Professional Doctorate research project, which studies the mechanisms of bleed in analogue roleplaying games, the emotional design of this genre of game, and how this can be applied to the creation of digital narrative games as well.
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Introducing the start of a new research project as part of the 2024 Professional Doctorate symposium.
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In 2007 at Ropecon, a large Finnish roleplaying convention, Emily Care Boss coined the term bleed to refer to emotional transference that sometimes happened to players of roleplaying games. Bleed describes an effect where emotions and attitudes experienced while roleplaying a character continue on after the roleplaying session was over, or the other way around, where a player brings their own feelings into the character they are embodying. For example, a player would roleplay a romance with another player's character, and then develop feelings for said player after the game was over. Bleed can create powerful effects in a roleplaying session, both positive and negative, which has resulted in the development of various best practices and safety tools that analogue game designers can draw upon, and roleplaying games frequently have mechanics designed around inducing and maximizing particular types of bleed in their players. Bleed mechanics lend themselves particularly well to exploring queer and otherwise marginalized identities, generating empathy, and exploring acts of political resistance. They are a powerful tool in the analogue game designers’ toolbox. Digital games make comparatively far less use of bleed in their designs than analogue games—the concept of bleed is not well-known among digital game designers. Consequently, there is little guidance for designing digital bleed mechanics, and insufficient safety tools with which to do so. With how powerful these effects can be, the knowledge and tools gaps for digital games needs addressing. This research project will create primarily digital narrative games that are explicitly designed to invoke bleed, and seeks to provide designers with new frameworks and safety tools to create bleed effects for digital games. Games will be created with varying themes and approaches regarding identity and storytelling to explore how, in particular, narrative design influences bleed in digital games.
This is a doctoral research project on the Professional Doctorate Arts + Creative pilot scheme. The project studies design and safety tools around 'bleed', a term used in roleplaying game spaces to describe emotions from a roleplaying session affecting the player outside of the game (and viceversa). Bleed design will be applied to the production of digital narrative games.
