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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Speculative and critical design constitutes a lens through which researchers and futurists interrogate (im)possible scenarios. Artifacts produced in this way may provide insights by providing a provocative contrast with our own present society. However, speculative design struggles to reach and engage a broad audience. A transdisciplinary dialogue with narrative and ludic approaches may bring speculative practices to wider publics. To argue for this connection, I examine the contributions of narration and pervasiveness in constructing speculative visions of alternative realities. I propose that a playful approach may elicit curiosity, free exploration and engagement with speculative design, thus supporting more distributed and effective experiences.
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