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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.