Bleed: The First Cut is the Deepest
Getting caught in commuter traffic the other day, my thoughts wandered off and I came back to the apparent thin-skinnedness of most other playing cultures’ I’ve seen outside of Scandinavia (now counting Finland, in case you were wondering). It is relatively clear to me now, that there’s a long tradition of playing “serious games” up here in the northern parts of Europe, which has made us numb, in certain aspects when it comes to bleed.
For (some kind of) concreteness, bleed is when the thoughts and feelings of the character starts influencing the player, or vice versa. Whereas immersion is about “getting lost” in the character/story/…, bleed is more about when “immersion is lost,” because something sneaks across the player/character boundary and ends up in the other half “as a raw thought or emotion”, rather than something transformed or translated.
In my first interactions with American players at American cons, I was surprised at how much the games would affect them. People would experience really heavy bleed in games like The Upgrade, which is intended to be a pretty funny comedy, where people leverage on jeepform techniques for a session of laughter, and to create intense (in the funny sense) game-play. Instead, I watched players asking for breaks, seeing (an hearing tales of) players getting confused as they had to be physical with players of the opposite sex, and whatnot. People were conflicted between their personal desires and their characters’ desires.
Fun. But a bit of a surprise to me.
A blunt but illustrative way of putting what I was seeing is this: if all you’ve ever seen is orcs, then any kind of realistic play, no matter how skewed, is going to be “close to home.”
I am probably the last person to realise this, but when you’re such a niched idiot as I am (I’ve been doing freeform/jeepform almost exclusively for the last 13 years), there is a lot that’s obvious to you that really isn’t all that obvious to most others. I suspect the Nordic larp community suffers from this too—at least the art-house larpers, my crowd—making it hard to appreciate many other larp styles. And, especially, and I’ve made this point before in relation to Happy Ends: we’re trained for finding tragedy in every possible situation, because that’s what makes for the nicest game play (for some value of nice). (Though I would claim it is getting a tad old.)
Anyway, back to the point. Thin-skinnedness. Stemming from not being exposed enough to realistic role-playing. And by realistic, I probably mean naturalistic—playing real characters, with real-world problems, etc. And with close, physical action and interaction. If you’re from a role-playing culture that never does that, then of course looking someone else in the eye while you play hard is going to make you feel a lot inside.
Put differently: not everyone is as casual dry humping Fredrik Axelzon as the last ten years have made me. (I’ll actually return to that later.)
In my usual way, I am playing with the phrasing of this stuff. You might as well say that our continuous exposure to serious (for some definition of that), realistic role-playing have made us thick-skinned. You could ask whether it is healthy (I say yes, of course!), or whether this affects our ability to feel and empathise with others (I would say, perhaps, if you’ve played something similar you might be able somewhat to relate, or you could have a wrong impression, as could anyone).
But bottom line, it matters a lot for game designers. And this issue was reopened for me two weeks back as I witnessed intense bleeding from Italian players at InterNosCon playing Previous Occupants, and was told similar stories by another GM (Ezio) of the same game for another set of players. To my mind, Previous Occupants really isn’t a bleed game, meaning that we’ve put ghosts in it, which is a big turn-off for me. So I don’t go into the game seeking that kind of experience, and it isn’t one where bleed forces itself upon you by design.
Except, of course, if you’re Italian, and religion isn’t just a spice thrown into the mix by two secular game designers to make sex a big thing for two young adults.
So, one person’s entry-level jeepform game is another person’s bleed game. And I need to remember that. Heck, we need to remember that.
When we played Previous Occupants at Prolog, we had a player in her 40’s playing hard with Fredrik Axelzon. And this affected her tremendously. She’d never played like that before, so intense and so realistic. Even though it was a dry humping defilement ten inches from two other players dry humping their characters’ first trembling attempts at sex. We have our fair share of Italians in Sweden too. They just happen to be blonde and from a different community and age group.
But I also fear that the jeep reputation that sometimes (yet far from ever) preceeds us is talking about playing close to home, bleed, and whatnot. And that’s going to shape how people are coming to the games, reading them, and playing them.
So while I don’t see the point of playing Doubt without doing it close to home, I think it is OK for a ghost to sometimes be just a ghost. Your call, really.