Bleed

Community Larp discussion
#1

Over on FaceSuck people are talking about Bleed again. Crucible is trying to put together a “Larpover surival guide” which wants to address the issue a bit, and people are responding to this.

(I assume here that you know what Bleed is. If not, read this)

One of the responses rightly points out that Bleed is something that some players are actively participating in and enjoy, and suggests that the way of “handling” it (insofar as it needs to be handled) is to talk more about the purposes of the game. “If we want [larp to] engage us emotionally that will mean both accepting and recognising the value of emotions we may describe as negative.” Which is great, except for one thing: most of the bleed in NZ larp is unintentional and undesigned.

Yes, there are games which deliberately set out to emotionally engage their players: Bad Dreams (fear), Face of Oblivion (guilt), Into the Woods (various), and most notably, 33AR. But most don’t. The emotional engagement comes from the players themselves, from the tight relationships they create during the stressful environment of the game. They roleplay well, they get immersed in their characters, and they feel things which can’t just be turned off when the GMs call game end. Which makes it difficult to talk to GMs about their artistic purposes because bleed isn’t really part of them. And since they really don’t want people to not be emotionally involved in their game, the best they can do is let people know how to cope with the side effects.

(Posted here because, as the OP noted, “discussion is something that seems to have suffered in our community lately”, and keeping things on faceSuck is part of that)

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#2

I haven’t really experienced bleed to any significant degree, so I can’t really talk much about it, but I do think it’s good of the Crucible GMs to address it.

#3

The idea of a “Larpover Survival Guide” is probably a good one. But I feel it could best be written by people with a background in psychology or counselling. It’s interesting to hear how different people are affected by bleed and what they do to deal with it but creating a survival guide from that advice doesn’t strike me as a great idea.

Where the bleed from larping is impacting on someone’s job, marriage, friendships and quality of life there is a real problem that should best be dealt with by an expert and I can’t help but think that in some circumstances the advice given may actually exacerbate a problem rather than make it better.

#4

Might be worth getting the NZLARPs to approach one of the universities and offering a study of LARP bleed as a thesis topic, with an aim towards the results being turned into a resource for the community. The society might even be able to put some funds towards the research, if they found that such a thing would be a good use for such funds.

#5

[quote=“Derek”]The idea of a “Larpover Survival Guide” is probably a good one. But I feel it could best be written by people with a background in psychology or counselling. It’s interesting to hear how different people are affected by bleed and what they do to deal with it but creating a survival guide from that advice doesn’t strike me as a great idea.

Where the bleed from larping is impacting on someone’s job, marriage, friendships and quality of life there is a real problem that should best be dealt with by an expert and I can’t help but think that in some circumstances the advice given may actually exacerbate a problem rather than make it better.[/quote]

I agree. As someone who has experienced Bleed, at times extremely, I don’t think I have any answers to coping with it. But it is a issue and I’m glad at least something is being done about it. I would like to try out some of the nordic debriefing ideas - I think having closure after the experience would be immensely helpful.

#6

I think that in some cases what works for someone (such as ritually throwing away a character possession or talking about the character in the 3rd person) may in fact not be what a player needs to get past their own issue. The best solution for them may be to spend the weekend with their family, play some sport or go to a concert.

#7

I’ve actually changed my mind about my earlier post, and would instead suggest that getting an expert in the field of psychology or counselling might not be what we need. After all, we have plenty of experts in LARP and in bleed already in the community, and we are capable, intelligent and well resourced enough to put together something ourselves. All a psychologist or counsellor can do is make analogies with their area of expertise - the specifics of this case still need to be worked out.

If we are to do it ourselves, how we go about doing that is important to consider, whether it is just one group doing all the work and putting together their opinions on the matter, or whether we get a broad number of voices to contribute and/or divide the work up. The former may well yield sufficient results for our communities needs (or it may not) and requires a lot of effort from a small number of people, but may alienate people that don’t feel represented. The latter is likely to get a broader range in the resource but require a lot of effort from a lot of people, and the potential for conflict over the input information and distribution of responsibility.

Of course the two aren’t mutually exclusive. If the Crucible GM’s produce something sufficient, there seems no need to go further. If someone feels that it isn’t enough, they can add to the resource. If we feel there is something unhelpful in there, we can discuss it and improve it.

#8

Yeah I agree with Walter.

Though I psychologist could possibly bring some good reasoning to the table in regards to why we feel the way we feel, I think collating the information of those who are able to cope, and the many various ways in which people cope, is the bet course of action. In this way, someone could propose something we absolutely didn’t think about, and we can try their method and see if it helps us. If it does not, then try the next method and so on until we find a resolution.

If a resolution is not found, then maybe the resolution at that point becomes something like seeing a counselor.

#9

Good idea. A simple table of collected personal accounts is easy to put together and populate with data (both now and in terms of updating it with new data over time), the only catch being we may miss some important types of accounts due to the personal nature of bleed.

There are some ways around this - people can get their friends to post things on their behalf and keep the identifying information to a minimum (e.g. avoiding referencing time, game, character, or significant/memorable plot events in the descriptions, focusing instead on the feelings and nature of the relationships, and what they found did or didn’t work with dealing with the bleed afterwards). It also doesn’t need to capture all the data from everyone - a sample should be sufficient.

If we are going to draw from personal accounts and try to get more comprehensive, confidentiality and anonymity become important - bleed can be very personal, and not everyone will be willing to share this sort of information publicly. We are also a very small community, so chances are even detailed anonymous accounts could be recognized. If we are looking to collect accounts and strategies from a wider range of people with an aim to capturing as wide a range of bleed as possible, some sort of collating, paraphrasing, or otherwise analyzing this may be helpful, with careful parameters around the collection of it too. All this does take a lot of effort and coordination, however, and also makes it much harder to add new data.

Overall, I quite like the idea of a table, and again if it and/or the Crucible GM’s guide prove insufficient, we can look at additional resources to add to these.

So, if we were to set up such a table, what data would we ask for, how would we advertise for data collection, and where would we put this table?