Every time the topic of bleed in roleplaying games comes up, people polarize into one of two spectral ends:
A
Bleed is thrilling but dangerous, something games should be built to both foster (in the right ways) and guard against growing overwhelming in the wrong ways.
B
Bleed is a fairly prosaic phenomenon of emotional response to art, and in the case that it becomes a problem, it can generally be handled the same way you would other interpersonal issues.
We can pointedly dismiss the third possible perspective “bleed is fake and safety tools are useless” as uncivil and unconstructive – it’s not worth spending time on intolerant kneejerk reactions. Instead, I want to focus on the above two perspectives as equally good-faith responses to a meaningful topic of discussion. My thesis: both of them are true, but describe different kinds of people, and those two kinds of people tend to disbelieve that the other exists.
For those not already deep into the discourse, “bleed” is a term used in the context of roleplaying games to refer to emotions that “bleed” in or out between the imagined scenario of a game and reality: sometimes acting as a fictional character can carry that character’s emotions over into one’s real emotions. This phenomenon (sometimes divided into the positive, secondary type “catharsis”, but henceforth just called bleed for simplicity) can be exciting, delivering an aesthetic satisfaction similar to getting scared watching a horror movie or elated reading a romance novel. For some people, it’s the central reason they play roleplaying games, to experience powerful emotions under the controlled conditions of simulated situations. Yet, bleed can also manifest as inappropriate transfer of negative feelings about a character into negative feelings about the person playing them, the triggering of traumatic memories, and other stressful outcomes. Hence, the development of techniques (debriefing, X-Cards, and the like) to manage that kind of spillover.
Theory of Mind
However. At the risk of invoking the dread specter of GNS theory, it must be affirmed that, although great disagreement exists in how to delineate and subdivide the categories of desire, different people approach roleplaying games looking for fundamentally different kinds of enjoyment. In this particular case, we can reasonably assess that some people get into roleplaying games because they want to immerse themselves in the mindset of fictional characters to feel what they feel, while others look at their characters at a bit more of a remove, taking pleasure in them the way an author puppets a protagonist to tell an interesting story or a driver enjoys sitting behind the wheel of a car.
Advancing that a step further: different people’s brains respond to stimuli differently, and that affects their behavior. Not everyone gets the “runner’s high” from exercise, but it can be reasonably assessed that those who do experience that enjoyable mental state are more likely to exercise. We tend to seek those stimuli that our brains reward us for – if you like how a certain food tastes, you prefer to it eat over other foods less suited to your palate. Therefore, we can also say that the differing modes of enjoyment people seek in RPGs is based – at least partially – on which aspects of gameplay give them the most pleasure, or more generally the strongest aesthetic satisfaction.
To put it another way: the kind of person more invested in the concept of bleed is probably the kind of person who experiences bleed more intensely. Conversely, someone for whom bleed is a relatively academic subject probably doesn’t experience very much bleed innately. These aren’t RPG-specific tendencies: I hesitate to pin down definitive correlates due to my lack of psychological credentials, but in my (limited) experience bleed-sensitive people tend to be attracted to theater, possess facility at entering meditative states, find that rituals create distinct moods, and find live performances more engaging than recordings. Those less susceptible to bleed usually get less out of those things, because they don’t lose themselves in roles, nor do they get carried away with group “energy” to the same extent. I emphasize: neither type of person is wrong, and neither type of person is better than the other.
Bleed-sensitive people will tend to seek out styles of roleplaying game that generate engrossing emotional experiences: among other things, Nordic LARPs are crafted precisely to accomplish this goal. Meanwhile, a person relatively unsusceptible to bleed might play a game like that, think it was pretty fun, but not have the same kind of strong psychodramatic experience the former person did, and thus gravitate instead towards (for example) OSR/NSR play, which focuses on clever problem-solving as the primary fun of game. Likewise, this type of adventure game may bore the bleed-sensitive person due to its relatively low degree of immersion in character headspace.
All of these are generalities: individuals can show idiosyncratic blends of these traits, and by the general law of bell curves we can expect that most people fall somewhere in the middle rather than at the extremes. Even so, when discussion of bleed comes up, people tend to polarize into one camp or the other – and start talking past one another. It’s difficult for someone who barely experiences bleed to neutrally state “debriefing after a session doesn’t do anything for me” without it being interpreted as an unsympathetic, reactionary position, and feeling isolated when their accurate experience isn’t acceptable to express. On the other side of the aisle, bleed-sensitive people can grow frustrated when their concerns and desires receive indifferent dismissals or even implications of pathology.
Conclusions
You, the reader, may already be fully cognizant of this axis of psychological variance, and find all of this obvious. However, it is well worth saying as many times as necessary, when this divide regularly manifests in RPG community discourse. Distrust in one another’s motivations hampers meaningful discussion and fosters resentments. Arguments can flare up over even minor points of disputation, which end with no one feeling understood. It’s not healthy and it’s not productive. We ought to be able to collectively agree that different people require different frameworks to have fun without getting hurt, and address those specific sub-groups without stigma attached to any of them. We don’t have to leave anyone behind.
To put my own cards on the table: I don’t experience much bleed. I wholly accept and respect that other people do, and can happily play games (LARPs, dungeoncrawls, and otherwise) together with them, but I recognize that we’re experiencing those games (and, perhaps, the world in general) in profoundly distinct fashions. Certainly, I can get into character, and feel some of what my character feels, but “immersion” isn’t something I’m capable of sinking deeply into. I feel my own emotions as strongly as anyone else, but the throughput of vicarious ones is low. As a result, I’m resistant to the harmful excesses of bleed, but also locked out of its highest joys. It is of possible relevance that I sit somewhere on the autistic spectrum, but all conjectures about matters of the mind are murky. Honestly, I wish I could get caught up in acting, audience, and ceremony, that I might feel the ecstatic catharsis others seem to be able to, but alas, I am the person that I am – and the same goes for everyone else.
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