July 28, 2024

How high is your bleed threshold? And what are you bleeding anyway?

You know that clip of Brennan Lee Mulligan,

the one where he’s talking about his character Evan Kelmp? Wait, I’ll just link to it.

It’s a clip from an episode of Adventuring Party in which Mulligan and Aabria Iyengar talk about getting to know themselves through roleplaying. Mulligan references a moment during their Kids on Brooms campaign in which K., another character, says of his character Kelmp: “He seems to believe that if he can be of some material use to us that that validates his friendship with us in some way.”¹

The truth of that statement came as a surprise to Mulligan. This was not a flawed belief he was playing with. It was a personal belief that had bled into the character and the story, where it could be challenged and subverted.

Not all bleed is the same

I was reminded of this clip while reading an article about bleed in the Internation Journal of Role-Playing.² In it, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas gives an overview of several types of bleed and how they might relate to each other. Mulligan’s experience is not an example of emotional bleed—the type we often just call “bleed” in general—but might be memetic bleed, where ideas, opinions and ideologies spill over from player to character and vice versa. Like watercolors, they bleed into each other.

(As far as concepts go, I think bleed is both beautiful and useful.)

From the existing academic literature, Hugaas gathers three basic bleed components, as he calls them, which are:

• Emotional bleed—when feelings spill over
• Memetic bleed—when beliefs and ideas spill over
• Procedural bleed—when movements and perceptions spill over

You might experience these on their own, when you start to feel something you character is feeling, or when you involuntarily take on the posture of your character. You might also experience them as parts of what Hugaas calls bleed complexes:

• Relationship Bleed—when social relationships spill over
• Emancipatory Bleed—when experiences of liberation spill over
• Identity Bleed—when senses of self or identifications spill over

This isn’t a conclusive list, by the way. These are just a bunch of the concepts academics or hobbyists have already coined. There might well be more.

So, instead of memetic, some might say Mulligan experienced identity bleed, depending on how strongly that belief about usefulness and friendship is woven into Mulligan’s personality.

Not everyone bleeds the same way

To account for the fact that some players report more experiences of bleed than others, Hugaas comes up with the idea of a "bleed perception threshold":

the threshold at which bleed experiences are felt intensely enough to be noticeable to the player.

It’s similar to a pain threshold, in that it’s subjective, and similar to a threshold at which a noise becomes noticeable, in how the circumstances of roleplaying are also a factor.

In a way, Hugaas says that parts of players and parts of character are continuously bleeding together while we roleplay, even while we’re making conscious choices about our characters. That makes sense to me: if we’re not conscious about every little part of our behavior at the best of times, why would we be while we’re roleplaying? Especially since a lot of the enjoyment of roleplaying comes from not inhabiting our usual selves for change.

I like that the concept of a bleed threshold allows us to ask: what made this instance of bleed stand out to me? Or: why didn’t I notice this part of myself or the character spilling over? In Mulligan’s case, it’s a pretty complex event (which might be another reason for calling it a case of identity bleed): this idea of usefulness bled into the way Mulligan is playing his character and he only experiences it once another character comments on it and implies that the belief might be false.

Everyone could learn a little more about themselves

In a way, the availability of these conceptual tools might help players understand their experiences in a more nuanced way. I know that, while reading, I had the simple realization that I noticed emotional bleed much more consciously as bleed. Ideas and beliefs might creep in as well, but I experienced those most often as a kind of failure. Wasn’t I able to just imagine a more unique outlook on life on the fly?³

Hugaas goes on to write about the ways bleed could be a part of transformative play, ways of discovering or even changing your feelings, beliefs and identities. If you’re curious, you should really dive into the whole article. It’s very interesting stuff—there’s just so much I can still learn about roleplaying.

But this is it for now,
Hendrik ten Napel