Introduction

Bleed is a phenomenon in which psychological contents spill over from the player to the character (bleed-in) and vice versa (bleed-out) in games. These contents can include emotions, thoughts, relationship dynamics, physical states, ideologies and personality traits, among others. Although the term emerged from analog role-playing game (RPG) communities, bleed can occur in many different types of games that involve immersion into a fictional character and setting. A related concept is social psychologist Erving Goffman's (1986) notion of frames, as bleed involves contents from one frame of social reality spilling into the other, indicating a certain porousness of the magic circle of play.

While bleed tends to be an unconscious and unpredictable process, some participants play for bleed, meaning they intentionally steer (Montola, Stenros & Saitta, 2015) toward situations in role-playing games that they hope will produce bleed effects. Similarly, many role-playing game designers will create games intended to produce bleed. Notably, such games do not ensure that bleed effects will happen, but rather create circumstances where they are more likely to occur. For example, when participants play close to home characters – characters with personality traits, backgrounds and/or life circumstances similar to the player's – they have less alibi, that is, less psychological distance between the player and the fictional character as separate (Bowman, 2015). Regardless of the design goals or intentionality of play, some participants are more prone to experience bleed, whereas others claim never to have experienced it.

From the perspective of neuroscience, scholars have discussed the experience of bleed as a physiological process related to embodied cognition (Lankoski & Järvelä, 2012; Leonard & Thurman, 2018). As a phenomenon, bleed is neutral, although participants and/or communities might describe it as positive or negative depending on their circumstances and play cultures. Many players find bleed to be a powerful tool for learning and personal development when paired with off-game processing, reflection and integration of these experiences (Bowman & Hugaas, 2019; Kemper, 2017; 2020).

Forms of Bleed

The term bleed was coined by analog role-playing game theorist and designer Emily Care Boss during a presentation at Ropecon 2007. Boss' focus during this presentation was considerations around the introduction of romance and gender in games. Online, bleed was first defined and popularized by the Vi åker jeep (jeepform) collective (Jeepen, n.d.), a group of freeform designers including Boss who explicitly designed to induce bleed in participants. Building upon this work, in a 2010 academic article, Markus Montola interviewed participants of two freeform scenarios with heavy themes, describing bleed-out as a "positive negative" experience that some players seek. While the jeepform dictionary describes both thoughts and feelings, the emphasis in these games is emotional intensity. In 2019, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas termed this phenomenon emotional bleed.

Sarah Lynne Bowman's academic (2013) and popular (2015) articles on conflict in role-playing communities expanded the definition of bleed to include feelings, thoughts, relationship dynamics and physical states. Hugaas (2019) later described physical states as procedural bleed, when "gestures, bearing, ticks, or any other kind of physical action that originates in either player or character [...] then surfaces in the other." Hugaas also described memetic bleed, the spillover of a "process by which a meme – a unit of culture – carries an idea, behaviour, thought, belief, ethical conviction or similar cognitive construct." Ida Toft and Sabine Harrer (2020) have discussed ideological framing in their work on design bleed, where the standpoints of game creators can impact the design process.

Game studies scholar Annika Waern has discussed romantic bleed, which occurs when feelings of attraction, infatuation or love bleed-in to the character experiences or bleed-out to player experiences in daily life. While the term bleed was developed to describe experiences of player-characters in analog role-playing games, Waern (2010) has used romantic bleed to describe romantic feelings developed toward non-player-characters (NPCs) in single-player RPGs. Game designer Sanne Harder (2018) later expounded upon romantic bleed-out in an article for Nordiclarp.org entitled "Larp Crush: The What, When, and How." Harder discusses the phenomenon as a form of limerence, which she describes as "an often involuntary state in which you are emotionally attached to another person to the point of obsession."

While bleed tends to refer to short-term effects, some theorists emphasize its potential for longer-term transformative impacts. In 2012, depth psychologist Whitney "Strix" Beltrán termed ego bleed, which she describes as "mid- to long-term effects of mythic archetypal engagement as they relate to personality and personal development" (p. 89). In this context, Beltrán emphasized how ritual engagement with potent symbols through embodied fictional practices can influence the identities and personality traits of players after games.

In 2017, Jonaya Kemper coined the term emancipatory bleed, in which "players who live with a double consciousness or a fractured identity due to other marginalizations can use larp and the resulting bleed to mitigate the negative aspects if steered with pre-game measures, in-game steering and post-game evaluation." Kemper (2020) has emphasized that unlocking the emancipatory potential of bleed requires conscious activities before, during and after play.

Similarly, Bowman and Hugaas (2021) discuss the importance of bleed as a process that can lead to transformative impacts. They emphasize processing, reflection and integration practices as critical for long-term change. Such processes can lead to personal and social growth in educational, therapeutic and personal development contexts.

The experience of enacting a character in a fictional setting through spontaneous play creates a first-person audience effect (Sandberg, 2004; Stenros, 2013), meaning that the players are both participants and audience members in the unfolding narrative. This dichotomous experience of inhabiting the headspace of both "self" and "other," of both "reality" and "fiction," creates enough distance to perceive the spillover effects from one frame to the next. This spillover effect is not unique to role-playing; it can happen, for example, between the frames of work and leisure, where social roles, identities or behaviors bleed over (Homann, 2020). Stage and screen actors also experience bleed, especially when immersing into a particular character for long periods of time, including ego bleed (Bowman, 2015), where the personality boundary between actor and character blurs, and romantic bleed, where actors develop attraction toward one another due to enacting fictional relationships (Gales, 2021).

However, the spontaneous co-creative experience of role-playing games often allows for a unique degree of emergent self-expression and post-game reflection, key aspects to noticing bleed. Thus, researchers increasingly are exploring bleed as a means to describe experiences that role-players find important, surprising, overwhelming, alarming, illuminating and/or transformational (Bowman & Hugaas, 2021). In drama therapy, the degree of space between the client's perceived identity and the role is called distancing (Jones, 1996; Landry, 1983). This space is considered productive in therapeutic practice because it allows clients to experience strong emotions while also experiencing the role distance necessary for meta-reflection. Psychotherapist Elektra Diakolambrianou (2021) has linked this process to the transformative potential of bleed in larp.

Along these lines, researchers have also described role-playing as a form of "magic" (Cazeneuve, 2021; Diakolambrianou, 2021) or "wyrding" of the self (Kemper, 2020), pointing to bleed as a key factor in the process of empowerment. For example, Josephine Baird (2021) has described how bleed is particularly transformational for trans players, who often are able to explore gender identities through games in ways that are taboo in daily life.

Summary

Theorists have used the term bleed to explain a variety of play experiences, especially those occurring within analog and digital role-playing games. Terms that describe the spillover from player to character and vice versa include:

• Emotional bleed, involving emotional states;

• Procedural bleed, involving physical states and movements;

• Memetic bleed, involving concepts, paradigms and ideological structures;

• Romantic bleed, involving romantic and/or sexual attraction;

• Ego bleed, involving personality traits and/or mythic structures;

• Emancipatory bleed, involving the use of role-playing as a liberatory practice for marginalized players; and

• Design bleed, involving the standpoint of the designer impacting the game.

As evidenced by this variety of terms, bleed is a psychological phenomenon that can take many forms. As such, theorists are only scratching the surface of what bleed can teach us about the relationship between human consciousness, creativity, playfulness and role enactment.

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Author Information

Sarah Lynne Bowman, PhD, is a scholar, game designer and event organizer. She is a Senior Lecturer for the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland and the Coordinator for Peace & Conflict Studies at Austin Community College. McFarland Press published her dissertation as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity (2010). Bowman has edited for The Wyrd Con Companion Book (2012-2015), the International Journal of Role-playing (2016-), and Nordiclarp.org (2015-). She helped organize the Living Games Conference (2014, 2016, 2018) and Role-playing and Simulation in Education Conference (2016, 2018).

Citation Information

Bowman, S. L. (2022). Bleed. In Grabarczyk, P. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Ludic Terms (Spring 2022 Edition). URL: https://eolt.org/articles/bleed

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