How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response)

[Pavel]

Mitigating bleed is impossible, in my view and experience. It’s like mitigating an emotional response to music or a good book. The whole point of the exercise is to transmit and receive emotion to the player, not the character. Sure, writing and plotting and planning is fun, but the point when you boil it right down is to express emotion.

A critical difference between LARP and MUing in this respect is that although you will be called your character’s name and even referred to by your character’s pronouns, you’re not physically acting as your character.

The point at which bleed becomes a problem is something that can be mitigated. The reaction to the emotion, rather than the emotion itself. You can be annoyed at Player P for messing with your character’s plans, because they’re also your plans - you put the effort in, so it’s perfectly reasonable to be annoyed at the disturbance. It’s not reasonable to then go about lying about Player P, or otherwise acting out against the Player.

While I can appreciate the intention behind wanting to teach emotional processing strategies and the like, I can’t see that happening on MUs. Game runners have enough to do, along with their own lives to lead, without managing their players’ emotional processing.

That’s a thing that can probably be done at a LARP, because LARPs are occasional and fairly dedicated - that is to say, people do the LARP and aren’t necessarily going to work later that day or having anything else to do (YMMV of course). When a MU is up 24/7, operating around the rest of life, with potentially hundreds of players? That task becomes so arduous as to be impractical.

The only effective strategy, that I can think of, in the event of negative bleed is exclusion.

[Faraday]

@Roz said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

A resulting behavior, rather than bleed itself.

I think it gets murky when the resulting behavior is a direct result of the bleed. It becomes kind of a chicken and egg thing to some degree.

If I get overly invested in a 'ship on TV to the point where it’s adversely impacting my emotions and behavior, I would say that it’s the investment–the bleed, if you will–that’s the root of the problem.

Can you have emotional connection without any adverse impacts? Sure. Not saying it’s inherently evil. But blurring the lines too much is unhealthy IMHO, regardless of whether you outwardly behave badly or not.

[sao]

@Rinel Aureth just turned fifty, the poor bastard

I have nothing useful to add to this discussion, carry on all.

[Pyrephox]

One of the things I do to help keep my characters and real me separate is to always choose something in my character’s personality or moral values that I’m opposed to. It’s surprising how much it helps me.

Having a character who acts/believes in ways that you, yourself, are opposed to also helps mitigate the sting of failure (inevitable in any game) when it happens.

Other things: one thing I notice a distressing amount in the MU* community (including in myself) is the temptation to turn to RP to have a “better” life than your stressful real life - somewhere you can feel more in control and successful. The problem tends to come in that setbacks, reversals, and failures (the things that drive progress in a game) will cut deeper than they really should. This can be in romantic areas, as mentioned above, but it doesn’t have to be. And it not only hurts individual players, but it can kill games - it breeds risk avoidance and stagnation, as well as a tendency for any attempts by GMs to build meaningful conflict to be read as “attacking” or “ruining” the accomplishments of players.

I honestly tend to fall into the camp of keeping as much of yourself as possible out of your characters. They’re pieces in a game, and having good barriers is essential to getting the most play out of them before they’re discarded.

[mangosplitz]

@Pyrephox That’s a VERY effective tactic, actually, and kind of goes along with what I mentioned about Alibi.

A lot of times players might use a LARP character to get some kind of catharsis about things they went through but on the other side, and it lets them work out some feelings. Particularly if they fail.

That’s, I think, one of the main things that separates the Nordic style of LARPing from conventional RP (like combat LARPing or more common RP) - there seems to be a lot more willingness or even emphasis on losing. I have a philosophy that I teach when I am doing a workshop that losing can lead to better RP, and one bit of guidance that I give players is “If your character is presented with a choice and you as a player know one is the wiser one, pick the other choice and have some fun with it”.

I haven’t had enough experience with MUing to draw any kind of real conclusion, so take it with a grain of salt, but it SEEMS to me like there is a greater emphasis on winning and characters coming out on top (as you mentioned) here. Which isn’t surprising because your character winning is a core element of almost all RPGs. It’s not a BAD thing, per se. We all want to be the heroes of our own stories.

But what I think about is that if we want to win, we have to succeed at various things and other players may be opposed. If we want to LOSE, we can make sure we lose on our own, and failure is more often guaranteed.

So (for example) if you are in a LARP set in high school and you want the catharsis of overcoming a bully, don’t play an analogue of yourself and hope to overcome the bully. Play the bully and make sure that someone else’s analogue of yourself overcomes YOU. You’d be amazed how well THAT leads to a Golden Moment or something like that where it helps you release your pent-up inner emotions.

(Yes, I realize this is a direct counter/parallel point to what you said about MUshers trying to have their characters have a “better” life than their players. I’ve found that having your characters have a WORSE life than their players can help exorcise negative feelings through proxy.)

[Faraday]

@mangosplitz said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

“If your character is presented with a choice and you as a player know one is the wiser one, pick the other choice and have some fun with it”.

I love that, and that’s something I try to do as well. I deliberately make my character screw up, make bad decisions, etc. just to make things more interesting. I think it’s good for game runners in particular to model that you don’t have to succeed at everything to have fun.

But what I’ve experienced is that because so many people view the characters as an extension of themselves, they start to judge you, as a player, for the things your character does. Like “OMG I can’t believe Faraday did that” versus “OMG I can’t believe Jane (the character) did that”. It’s like bleed-by-proxy, I guess, and it’s extremely frustrating.

[Pyrephox]

@Faraday said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

@mangosplitz said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

“If your character is presented with a choice and you as a player know one is the wiser one, pick the other choice and have some fun with it”.

I love that, and that’s something I try to do as well. I deliberately make my character screw up, make bad decisions, etc. just to make things more interesting. I think it’s good for game runners in particular to model that you don’t have to succeed at everything to have fun.

But what I’ve experienced is that because so many people view the characters as an extension of themselves, they start to judge you, as a player, for the things your character does. Like “OMG I can’t believe Faraday did that” versus “OMG I can’t believe Jane (the character) did that”. It’s like bleed-by-proxy, I guess, and it’s extremely frustrating.

This. So much this. And it even applies to things that the player actually has no control over - like dice rolls. If you have a bad luck streak, some players will frame it as your character being incompetent (and, sometimes explicitly, the player also somehow being a bad player). And that, in turn, contributes to a feeling of having to min-max to counter dice luck, or a feeling that you never want to put your character in to a risky situation, because what if they fail, and then people judge YOU.

[Evilgrayson]

There’s a small group I know with the maxim ‘If you come up with something IC and it makes you giggle RL for five seconds, you have to do it’. This has led to some of the most amazing and spontaneous moments of which legends are made; having seen the effect when people applied it, having seen the effect when I threw caution to the wind and went for it, I now apply it universally.

If one of my characters does something completely off the wall, both appropriate and hilarious, well, I was giggling for five seconds RL. It might horrify other people around my character, it might set back their plans for years, it might do all sorts of things that no-one sane wants to be near, but it is always appropriate at some level and it always leads to great story.

[Rinel]

@Pyrephox said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

One of the things I do to help keep my characters and real me separate is to always choose something in my character’s personality or moral values that I’m opposed to. It’s surprising how much it helps me.

I did this with Rinel–the woman was a raving fucking lunatic, a xenophobe, and a genocidal fanatic–and I was unhappily surprised by how little it helped. I think that mitigating bleed probably has less to do with alignment of morals and more to do with some other skill that I lack utterly.

[sao]

@Rinel Your ability to have empathy for positions that you find emphatically morally wrong is a different skill and one you should prize, but it does make avoiding bleed pretty difficult.

Emotions have always been the kicker for me, not morals. The areas where I am most likely to experience bleed that is a problem is where the character’s feelings and mine are too aligned. There are times when a failure is delicious and times when it hurts like I failed myself – the latter times are the ones where my behavior could become a problem and when it is often best to take a break. Self-awareness is really the most important skill to develop when it comes to any game of let’s pretend.

What’s really emotionally weird is crying over a character in the midst of a breakup while simultaneously enjoying the failure and mentally planning the really emotionally vicious vignette I wanted to write to process it all, but uh. I can’t tell you how I dealt with that one besides AVOID THE OTHER PLAYER KNOWING YOU’RE CRYING AT ALL COSTS at least until years later.

[Evilgrayson]

Bleed is a) an absolute bastard, and b) what we play the game for.

If we aren’t trying to evoke an emotional response in ourselves and others, really, what do we spend all this time typing at each other for? Laugh or cry, smile or rage, we do this daft hobby of ours in order to feel - and to fail to acknowledge that is to set ourselves up for insanity.

Emotional bleed, in and of itself, isn’t the problem. It’s the failure to control that bleed that’s the problem. We can be in tears over what just happened, while at the same time relishing those tears. This is normal - for us at least - and this is good as long as we all stay friends, or at the very least cordial. There’s trust involved in giving people license to manipulate you, and if people break that trust it hurts, and that too is normal. Backbiting, whisper campaigns, releasing logs of private scenes on taboo/secret topics - all those are a betrayal of the trust we’ve put in others to allow them to affect us. We extend our trust to those we extend deep IC ties to - whatever that tie may be - and we can only hope that they have a similar understanding of what they’ve been entrusted with.

And if someone’s staffing, especially using NPCs to push story, that’s a position of special trust, because we’re giving them license to mess around with our emotions while they remain insulated. A game’s staff have many more ways to break our trust, which is why the good staffers are trustworthy - and why we react so badly if and when it happens. Trust is a fragile thing, easily destroyed and very difficult to rebuild.

[Faraday]

@Evilgrayson said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

If we aren’t trying to evoke an emotional response in ourselves and others, really, what do we spend all this time typing at each other for?

There might be different definitions here.

If I cry while watching Schindler’s List, or cheer in elation at the “on your left” scene in Avengers:Endgame, those are fairly typical emotional responses to moving stories.

But that’s not “bleed” as I’ve always seen it applied to RPGs.

I don’t feel like I -am- Captain America. His triumphs aren’t my triumphs. That kind of interaction does not involve the blurred lines that typically lead to the sort of misbehavior we see in MUs/LARPs where people become entirely too invested in the outcomes of particular characters, as outcomes-by-proxy for themselves.

[shit-piss-love]

This has been an interesting read as I’ve done both LARP and MU* a good bit. The experience of Bleed in both mediums has some overlap but has some great differences as well. MU you get a lot more time of exposure to other people in character and that allows for very deep, long-term bonds and conflicts. LARP isn’t as much time (longest events tend to be a weekend, usually only once or twice a month) but you get all the extra components of face to face human interaction that charges different parts of the mental and physiological system. This is I think a big part of why awareness of Bleed/Alibi are more pronounced in LARP; the consequences of people amped up in a high intensity scene can lead to serious consequences of emotional, physical, and even sexual violence. I’ve dealt with all three to varying degrees running LARPs in an era before these terms started being widely discussed and formalized.

MU definitely could definitely benefit from a more structured conversation about Bleed/Alibi.

[SpaceKhomeini]

One thing I’ve noticed that I do sort of takes a page out of something my SO has said about acting (she’s more or less a pro theater person) and for ages I’ve sort of just gravitated towards people I known for fuckingever and generally like/trust:

It’s easier to go to troublesome and potentially difficult places with people you just know and like. If I come across as a bit of a cliquefreak, that’s why.

[Gashlycrumb]

People who study this sort of thing observe that many forms of play involve practicing emotional regulation. You get worked up and then you calm down.

I suggest that what’s wanted isn’t to control the level of attachment players feel, but to support them in winding down.

One thing that never works is telling them they are too attached, or whatever form a “You are doing your own emotional life wrong,” proclamation may take. They can cool off faster and more easily if you have some respect for the reality of their feelings.

Yeah, it’s kind of inevitable that you’ll run into that player who genuinely objects to anything that leaves their character looking other than ultimate cool. They sulk at a failure, gripe at a botch, can’t think up their own botch-consequence without it being negligible, get mad or try to ignore it when they make an IC mistake or get outmaneuvered. I do not think this is usually attributable to their attachment to the character, though. It’s more likely a failure of imagination — such players readily make new characters with the same level of untenable supercool.

But also. Some of the time the ‘too attached’ accusation is rubbish, a way of dismissing another player’s concerns. Yeah, players do want their characters to win. However, if I’m pissed off ‘cause those involved knew that my PI PC was ICly staking out the Paper Thin Hotel, so they just had their Pervert Party while I’m at work instead of the usual time the group plays, I’m not mad ‘cause I didn’t win, I feel I’ve been cheated out of the chance to even try. If Baby Sharky the street-corner punk tries to blackmail my character into spying on Pablo Escobar and my character chooses not to, it’s not that I’m unwilling to be at a disadvantage with Baby Sharky, maybe it’s that Pablo is a lot scarier than whatever will happen if and when Sharky actually sends videos of my PC masturbating to everyone in City Hall and his mom. That kinda thing happens, some players make a habit of accusing other players of OOC motivations/bleed whenever said other players don’t do what some players want. Because Must Be Ultimate Cool Guy exists, people may take the accusation seriously even when the supposedly too attached and doin’ it wrong player has not displayed a pattern of objecting to sub-coolness and has in fact enthusiastically played out failures and flaws and botches and mistakes.

[Pavel]

@Gashlycrumb Honestly, I’d take your point and run it a little further to say that some level of emotional attachment to the highs and lows of your character (and hopefully those around you) is required for good RP. We all know of actors who phone in performances they don’t care about but shine brighter than lime when they’re in a role they’re emotionally invested in.

[GF]

@Arkandel said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

I’d consider dividing ‘bleed’ into two separate categories.

One is simply having an emotional response to the character you’re portraying. <snip for brevity> The other kind of bleed though is more malevolent. It’s perpetuated by a specific kind of mindset and type of player who step over the line while leveraging - weaponizing, in a way - their real-life emotions.

I’d argue there’s a third kind, and brace yourselves, because I’m about to go off on one of my hot-button issues again: the unhealthy coping mechanism bleed. I see this so much in straight guys crossplaying as lesbians, who either truly think lesbians scorn verbal discourse and communicate exclusively via snuggling, or else are so desperate for physical affection in their real lives that they invent feminine personae in order to express that hunger in a way they think is socially acceptable in a way that isn’t acceptable for men, but that’s not the only example. It’s just the one most prevalent in my mind right now. I also see it in players who pretend OOCly to be small, cute animals for people to caress.

I don’t know how one solves that kind of bleed, because calling it out would probably increase the feeling of isolation that seems to motivate the behavior in the first place, so my best idea has always been to sigh to myself, limit contact with such people, and hope they figure it out on their own.

And hey, maybe it’s not even a form of bleed exactly, but just toxic masculinity trying to claim total ownership over women’s identities and sexualities by stepping into the role. There’s probably an element of that, but my vibe is it’s mostly bleed, wanting the vicarious emotional support of constant physical intimacy they imagine happens between women.

[Pavel]

@GF said in How to mitigate Bleed (player vs character emotional response):

And hey, maybe it’s not even a form of bleed exactly, but just toxic masculinity trying to claim total ownership over women’s identities and sexualities by stepping into the role. There’s probably an element of that, but my vibe is it’s mostly bleed, wanting the vicarious emotional support of constant physical intimacy they imagine happens between women.

While this is almost certainly true, and you’re far better placed to know it than I am, I want to expand your overall point about unhealthy coping mechanism bleed.

We’re all nerds of some stripe or another, many of us with social or behavioural issues that make real life socialisation difficult. I’d wager that a lot of the negative emotional bleed we see is as intense as it is due to the fact that MUing, for some folks, is more than just a silly little hobby and is a replacement - either in whole or in part - for a key part of their real-life socialisation.

So attacks against characters are more easily perceived as personal attacks because the player has, intentionally or otherwise, replaced part of their real-life identity with that of their character.

ETA:

For further reading on this topic:

Waggoner, Z. (2014). My avatar, my self: Identity in video role-playing games. McFarland.

Waskul, D. (2014). The role-playing game and the game of role-playing. In J. P. Williams, S. Q. Hendricks, & W. K. Winkler (Eds.), Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games. McFarland.

[GF]

@Pavel That’s a good expansion on and clarification of my representation of the phenomenon. Thank you for adding it.

[Gashlycrumb]

@Pavel It’s certainly something that I want.

I had no investment in the ultimate outcomes for the character I drew for last week’s table-top one-shot, but I did invest in the game and in trying to portray the character well. I had a great time as the mother bear of Goldilocks’ fame. But I miss the long-term campaign and don’t want to play one-shots all the time. And part of that is totally about the characters and even the thing where a character is a little infinitely detailed mind-sculpture you made and sometimes polish and gloat over at non-game times.

As a GM, I want players to be invested. And to be identifying with the characters. I hate LARPs but will go to lengths for mood at a table-top game, with music and lighting and metronomes and stuff. I want you spooked, I want your heart-rate to be affected, I want you absorbed.