Bleed: Emotional Design in Roleplaying Games

Roleplaying, acting out the part of a character other than yourself, is a very popular pasttime. There exist a wide range of possible experiences from friendgroups playing Dungeons & Dragons around a kitchen table, to players going on weekend trips where they don costumes and act out being elves and wizards with like-minded people, and many steps in between. It is possible for a player's emotions while playing to affect them outside of the game as well, and the other way around too. This phenomenon is called bleed, and is the subject of much discussion in roleplaying design circles, with creators actively designing their games with bleed in mind. A game might intentionally seek to invoke bleed, which can create powerful emotional experiences, or seek to mitigate its effects by using a variety of common safety tools and good design practices. This talk will introduce Raymond Vermeulen's Professional Doctorate research project, which studies the mechanisms of bleed in analogue roleplaying games, the emotional design of this genre of game, and how this can be applied to the creation of digital narrative games as well.