RPG Evolution: When Gaming Bleeds

Monte Cook Games recently released Consent in Gaming, a sensitive topic that addresses subjects that make some players uncomfortable. Central to the understanding of why there's a debate at all involves the concept of "bleed" in role-play.

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Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

Bleed Basics

Courtney Kraft explains bleed:
It’s a phenomenon where the emotions from a character affect the player out of the game and vice versa. Part of the joy of roleplay comes from diving into the fantasy of being something we’re not. When we play a character for a long time, it’s easy to get swept up in the highs of victorious battle and the lows of character death. When these feelings persist after the game is over, that’s when bleed occurs.
Bleed isn't inherently bad. Like actors in a movie, players sometimes draw on experiences to fuel their role-playing, consciously or subconsciously, and this bleed can happen organically. What's of concern in gaming is when bleed has detrimental consequences to the player.

Consent in Gaming explains the risks of negative bleed:
There’s nothing wrong with bleed—in fact, it’s part of the reason we play games. We want to be excited when our character is excited, to feel the loss when our characters do. However, bleed can cause negative experiences if not handled carefully. For example, maybe a character acted in a way that your character didn’t like, and it made you angry at the player too. Or maybe your character is flirting with another character, and you’re worried that it’s also making you have feelings for the player. It’s important to talk about these distinctions between characters and players early and often, before things take an unexpected turn.
There are several aspects that create bleed, and it's central to understanding why someone would need consent in a game at all. Bleed is a result of immersion, and the level of immersion dictates the social contract of how the game is played. This isn't limited to rules alone, but rests as much on the other players as it is on the subject matter.

One of the experiences that create bleed is a player's association with the game's subject matter. For some players, less realistic games (like Dungeons & Dragons) have a lower chance of the game's experiences bleeding into real life, because it's fantasy and not analogous to real life. Modern games might have the opposite effect, mirroring real life situations a player has experience with. There are plenty of players who feel otherwise of course, particularly those deeply involved in role-playing their characters for some time -- I've experienced bleed role-playing a character on a spaceship just as easily as a modern game.

The other element that can affect bleed is how the game is played. Storytelling games often encourage deeper emotional involvement from a player, while more gamist tabletop games create a situational remove from the character by their nature -- miniatures, tactical combat, and other logistics that are less about role-playing and more about tactics. Live Action Role-Playing games (LARPs) have the player physically inhabit their role and are thus provide more opportunities for bleed. Conversely, Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) might seem like they make bleed unlikely because the player is at a computer, experiencing the game through a virtual avatar -- and yet it can still happen. Players who play a game for a long time can experience more bleed than someone who just joined a game.

Dungeons & Dragons is a particular flashpoint for discussions of bleed, because while it is a fantasy game that can easily be played with disposable characters navigating a dungeon, it can also have surprisingly emotional depth and complexity -- as many live streams of tabletop play have demonstrated.

These two factors determine the "magic circle," where the reality of the world is replaced by the structure of another reality. The magic circle is not a magic wall -- it's porous, and players can easily have discussions about what's happening in the real world, make jokes derived from popular culture their characters would never know, or even just be influenced by their real life surroundings.

The deeper a player engages in the magic circle, the more immersed that player becomes. Governing the player's social contract within the magic circle is something Nordic LARP calls this "the alibi," in which the player accepts the premise that their actions don't reflect on them but rather their character:
Rather than playing a character who is very much like you (“close to home”), deliberately make character choices that separates the character from you and provides some differentiation. If your character has a very similar job to your ideal or actual job, find a reason for your character to change jobs. If your character has a very similar personality to you, find aspects of their personality that are different from yours to play up and focus on. Or play an alternate character that is deliberately “further from home”.

Bleeding Out

Where things get sticky is when real life circumstances apply to imaginary concepts. Bleed exists within the mind of each player but is influenced by the other players. It is fungible and can be highly personal. Additionally, what constitutes bleed can be an unconscious process. This isn't necessarily a problem -- after all, the rush of playing an awesome superhero can be a positive influence for someone who doesn't feel empowered in real life -- unless the bleed touches on negative subjects that makes the player uncomfortable. These psychological triggers are a form of "bleed-in," in which the player's psychology affects the character experience. Not all bleed moments are triggers, but they can be significantly distressing for players who have suffered some form of abuse or trauma.

Consent in Gaming attempts to address these issues by using a variety of tools to define the social contract. For players who are friends, those social contracts have likely been established over years through both in- and out-of-game experiences. But for players who are new to each other, social contracts can be difficult to determine up front, and tools like x-cards can go a long way in preventing misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

Thanks to the increasing popularity of tabletop role-playing games, players are coming from more diverse backgrounds with a wide range of experiences. An influx of new players means those experiences will not always be compatible with established social contracts. The recent incident at the UK Gaming Expo, as reported by Darryl is an egregious example of what happens when a game master's expectations of what's appropriate for a "mature" game doesn't match the assumed social contract of players at the table.

This sort of social contract reinforcement can seem intrusive to gamers who have long-suffered from suspicion that they are out of touch with reality, or that if they play an evil character, they are evil (an allegation propagated during the Satanic Panic). This need to perform under a "cover" in their "real" life has made the entire concept of bleed and its associated risks a particularly sensitive topic of discussion.

X-cards and consent discussions may not be for everyone, but as we welcome new players with new experiences into the hobby, those tools will help us all negotiate the social contract that makes every game's magic circle a magical experience.
 

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Michael Tresca

Michael Tresca

"aside from the fact I agree with everything that says I disagree with what that says" ????

The linked essay runs to nearly 3000 words. Do you think that the whole of the essay can be summed up in just one sentence, or that the other content is so meaningless that no dissent from it is possible.

Moreover, I went on to immediately discuss three separate issues (of the many) that I had with the discussion.

To just reiterate and elaborate on only one of them, if the term is supposed to be neutral and have no positive or negative connotation, why select a word like "bleed" which is noticeably negative.

Moreover, I think that the way bleed is framed empowers the following conversation:

"Participant #1: I'm not feeling comfortable with this."
"Participant #2: Your just letting yourself experience negative bleed. It isn't actually you experiencing this, it's your character."
 
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This x-card thing reminds me of the "training timeout" cards that were starting to be used in the military when I was in. No one liked when we pointed out that the enemy wouldn't honor a "fighting timeout" so why would you train differently than you fight?

If you are an adult and playing a game with adult thematics, you need to deal with those adult themes. If you want to do them the Hitchcock way, fine. If you want to do them the Tobe Hooper way, that's fine too. But, no one person should be allowed to derail the game for everyone else because the subject matter makes that one person feel upset. In other words - if you are an adult, act like it.
you mean playing D&D was really an exercise in preparing for becoming a real adventurer? I guess you got a point, no mind flayer will honor my objection for not giving me advantage on a saving throw against a psionic blast :/
To just reiterate and elaborate on only one of them, if the term is supposed to be neutral and have no positive or negative connotation, why select a word like "bleed" which is noticeably negative.
they say multiple times in the article that bleed isn't an inherently bad thing. bleed is a word used because it literally means when one thing accidentally flows into another. "bleed" is used in printing to describe the margin around a an image that may or may not actually make it on the final page due to the possible inaccuracy in printing, and I'm not sure this is considered negative (except the part of the page where ink doesn't get printed lolololol)

Moreover, I think that the way bleed is framed empowers the following conversation:
"Participant #1: I'm not feeling comfortable with this."
"Participant #2: Your just letting yourself experience negative bleed. It isn't actually you experiencing this, it's your character."
okay, well for those of us who are able to comprehend how experiences shape future behaviors (and experiences in general) that's not what this article is trying to say. this sort of thing has been talked about in method acting, and method acting is basically an applied version of bleed. there's also been countless stories of how actors have been affected by studying and performing specific roles. roleplaying is basically a kind of long form improvisation so this really isn't anything new, just framed in a way that makes sense from a gaming perspective.
 

Just as I love it when people can't (won't?) comprehend the idea of humour.

Ah well, at least I tried.......
man we got people here insisting that this sort of consent in roleplaying is actually sexual in origin, I got that you were making a joke, doesn't mean it can't prop up the people who think we're honestly saying an rpg group is literally a government.
 

This x-card thing reminds me of the "training timeout" cards that were starting to be used in the military when I was in. No one liked when we pointed out that the enemy wouldn't honor a "fighting timeout" so why would you train differently than you fight?

If you are an adult and playing a game with adult thematics, you need to deal with those adult themes. If you want to do them the Hitchcock way, fine. If you want to do them the Tobe Hooper way, that's fine too. But, no one person should be allowed to derail the game for everyone else because the subject matter makes that one person feel upset. In other words - if you are an adult, act like it.

Funny, I would have thought acting like an adult meant approaching each other's hang-ups with maturity and respect.
But just because a GM bills his or her game as having adult thematics in a convention pre-registration list, that doesn't means that they've exhaustively covered everything that might be of concern. Being prepared for one mature subject-matter doesn't mean you're prepared to tolerate all of them.
 

they say multiple times in the article that bleed isn't an inherently bad thing

You can say what ever you like, but it doesn't make it true. I can say "GTFA" doesn't carry inherently negative and rude connotations all I like, and that it is meant to be an entirely neutral term, but if I wanted to create an entirely neutral term I probably shouldn't have started with that as a basis. The truth is "bleed" is a very loaded word, bringing to mind as it does injury and the like.

bleed is a word used because it literally means when one thing accidentally flows into another. "bleed" is used in printing to describe the margin around a an image that may or may not actually make it on the final page due to the possible inaccuracy in printing, and I'm not sure this is considered negative (except the part of the page where ink doesn't get printed lolololol)

Yeah, I understand all that but people aren't books or paints, and in the context of talking about people and emotions experiencing bleed, that's heavily loaded language that's going to be really easy to weaponize. There are plenty of alternative terms that you could use - "spillover" is I think a better term, especially as a shortened form of "emotional spillover" which is much more descriptive anyway and requires far less explanation to get where everyone understands the meaning of your jargon.

Or heck, let's try this term from 1983(!): "This issue is particularly problematic in campaign play, where long-term immersion into a particular character or fiction without distinct stopping points can produce what Gary Alan Fine calls overinvolvement, a phenomenon in which the players do not sufficiently shed the role and fail to fully reintegrate into their mundane lives."

There, that's a useful starting point. But not particularly interested in starting with the term "bleed".

okay, well for those of us who are able to comprehend how experiences shape future behaviors (and experiences in general) that's not what this article is trying to say.

I don't care what you think it is trying to say. I'm evaluating it not on its stated good intentions but what I think it will actually accomplish. And I'm basing that not only on my first impression, but actually having gone to read the links in the article, which confirmed my first impressions. There are some important concepts here but I don't agree with a lot of the framing of the discussion, which seems to me to provide way too much emotional cover for a manipulative person to abuse the system.

Now, there is part of this that I think is vastly more relative to LARPing than typical table top play. I'm not a big fan of LARPing because I find way to much self-identification with character going on, and there are a lot of negatives I associate with some of the aesthetics of play I find in LARPing - including what is here being described as "bleed". But I think in the context of a LARP you better be up front about the reality that people are "bleeding" all over the bloody place, and not think for a second that the rivalries and relationships that are intensely felt in game are just something that can easily be separated out by a "magic circle" that you can step in and out of.

this sort of thing has been talked about in method acting, and method acting is basically an applied version of bleed. there's also been countless stories of how actors have been affected by studying and performing specific roles. roleplaying is basically a kind of long form improvisation so this really isn't anything new, just framed in a way that makes sense from a gaming perspective.

You know, if this such a mature thing in the method acting community, then perhaps that should have been imported into the discussion rather than inventing this "bleed" term. When you start talking about method acting, I think how for the movie "The Breakfast Club" the actor Judd Nelson stayed entirely in character as "Bender" both on and off the set for the duration of the movie. And we could have an argument about how in a professional setting, whether or not that behavior is justifiable for the purposes of creating commercial art, but just my opinion here is that no actors should have to put up with you being a jerk all the time for the sake of your art, and that certainly should also apply to recreational roleplayers who are just doing this for fun and not getting paid to be a jerk.
 
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Funny, I would have thought acting like an adult meant approaching each other's hang-ups with maturity and respect.
But just because a GM bills his or her game as having adult thematics in a convention pre-registration list, that doesn't means that they've exhaustively covered everything that might be of concern. Being prepared for one mature subject-matter doesn't mean you're prepared to tolerate all of them.
y'know what's funnier is why he didn't insist they get shot by real guns as part of training, not getting shot is very different from how real fighting is, and it's not like the enemy is going to respect their need to not die lol (inb4 something about live fire exercises, I said shot, not shot at)
 

When I read the Consent in Gaming document it did come across a bit like what would be discussed between people who are negotiating a BDSM scene to eventually play in between consenting parties, only all references of BDSM were changed to Gaming instead...but that's just anecdotal.

I feel the real reason for all of this to be coming up now is more people want to be part of a game group that feels like it has more Integrity in it.

I also think the heavy handed way this document goes about it is offputting. The real purpose of it is to get everybody on The same page at the table, to help people become more Aware, to help with having better Session 0's, and create a space where everybody has a voice that recognizes then.

But this document is written in a way that it will probably cause an increase in misunderstanding, sow more chaos, and it will have (is having) the opposite effect... Which is its created dissension and argument. It's absolute focus on promoting the power one person can have over the group is an issue.

And nowhere does this document bring up the idea that if a person is having struggles at the table with some of the table's content that perhaps the player should leave the table... That maybe it's the wrong table for them.

I think part of consent is understanding your own limits. I will never play a game of Shadow of the Demon Lord for that reason... It's body horror isn't for me. So why would I go to a table to play that game and then try to use the X-card to change it for my own selfishness?

I much prefer Lines and Veils myself. I prefer having a good Session 0 where communication is important and everybody can feel comfortable. And I think starting in the future what I will do is hand out index cards at the start of the game so people can write their phobias down in secret so i know what not to put into the game.

It all comes down to Integrity to me.
 

Threads like this make me value face-to-face human interaction where we can observe the body language, facial expressions, and hear the inflection of someone's voice to receive immediate feedback on how well we're communicating. It might do all of us some good to take a step back for just a moment and consider that those you disagree with may be arguing in good faith, might agree with you on certain points, but disagree on the best way to go about handling the situation.

It shouldn't be difficult for us to remain respectful to one another in this forum. We all share similar interest and none of us want to hurt people.
 

I much prefer Lines and Veils myself.

We had lines and veils 30 years ago, we just didn't call them lines and veils. We tended to negotiate them as they came up, asking players how they wanted to play a scene out or if they wanted to play a scene out and "cut to black" and opting out of a scene were normal. We just talked about it, which seems to me a pretty functional solution among friends. (In larger groups, such as LARP communities or at conventions, you may need more structure, but bringing the structure you need in a larger group to a smaller group is likely to be counter-productive.)

I prefer having a good Session 0 where communication is important and everybody can feel comfortable.

Typically I hand out a questionnaire and then broadly discuss the answers with the players without calling out any particular player. I tend to run a PG-13 table, but I can adapt it down to PG or G for younger players. The sort of topics and descriptive devices that I employ we work out as we go, but I try to err on the side of avoiding things that are distasteful and throw veils over things that need veils thrown over them.

And I think starting in the future what I will do is hand out index cards at the start of the game so people can write their phobias down in secret so i know what not to put into the game.

I can definitely see that. I definitely prefer a secret voluntary open ended disclosure to checklists. I really dislike affirmative consent in this context because I think it puts too much pressure on a player to stick with a consent and not withdraw it. That is, I'll never ask a player for a list of things that they agree to experience and consent to ahead of time, which feels to me like the sort of thing that would validate someone in a position of power being abusive and pushing lines and barriers. In fact, I just think lists are abusive period.

But, just as a personal aside, I wouldn't disclose to strangers my phobias. I just not a self-disclosing sort of person, and I'm equally pretty sure no in game experience could mimick my sensory cues enough to make me uncomfortable, unless it was an actually dangerous situation - and handling that is not something you can handle in the context of rules around gaming. I don't want people to ask me what I'm afraid of, and if they did I'd just keep silent about it.

It all comes down to Integrity to me.

I wish. I don't get that impression.
 

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