Editorial note: This article was originally published in the Knutpunkt 2026 book Seasons of Larp. It has been reprinted from there with the editors’ and authors’ permission. It has not been edited by Nordiclarp.org.
Bleed has become one of the central concepts in larp studies (Jeepen, 2007; Montola, 2010; Montola, 2011; Bowman, 2013; Kemper, 2017; Leonard and Thurman, 2018; Hugaas, 2019), and for good reason.
First defined by Emily Care Boss (2007), bleed captures how a player’s inner life and their character’s experiences can influence one another during play (Hugaas, 2024). Because roleplaying naturally blurs the boundary between fiction and everyday life, players often find that the experiences they enact are not easily separated from their real-world selves (Järvelä, 2019; Kapitany et al., 2022; Hartyándi 2025).
Quick recap: different kinds of bleed
Many players are familiar with the phenomenon of emotional bleed (Montola 2010; Bowman 2015), in which emotions and feelings transfer between the player and the character. A related concept is relationship bleed, of which romantic bleed is the most frequently discussed form (Bowman and Hugaas, 2021). However, the concept of bleed encompasses far more than merely having a ‘larp crush’. For instance, Hugaas (2019) outlines a wide range of forms, including ego bleed, memetic bleed, procedural bleed, and emancipatory bleed.
Hugaas (2019) also introduced the concept of ‘identity bleed’: “Identity bleed happens when a player is able to experience a so far underexplored part of their own identity through play. This experience can further impact their sense of self by facilitating for commitment to this newly explored part of their identity”. Exploring hidden sides of your own identity, that would make bleed a great tool for learning and development.
Consequently, over the past years, ‘bleed’ has gained attention from a developmental perspective: if larp affects us so deeply, might (identity) bleed itself be used as a tool for learning and personal growth (van Bilsen and van Barlingen, 2025; Hartyándi, 2025)? Following Johanna Koljonen (2019): should bleed be a designable surface?
Our expert opinion
We frequently use role-playing methods and techniques as full-time trainers, leadership consultants, and psychodramatists. In our experience, serious larp designs and ap-plied larp implementations are often not goal-oriented or focused enough in their character design to act as an efficient tool in this regard.
Counterexamples exist, like our own designs (Hartyándi and van Bilsen, 2024). What these counterexamples have in common is a deliberate move from story-centered toward human-centered design: characters are intentionally crafted around the developmental needs of the participant, often in collaboration with the designer or facilitator.
Leading to the question…
This, in turn, raises a fundamental question: if developmental larp design increasingly revolves around the player rather than the character or story, are we still designing for bleed? Or do we require more precise terminology and more nuanced models to describe what is actually happening?
We therefore present a framework – Jacob L. Moreno’s role theory – that we believe offers valuable additions to developmental larp design. Building on this, we will explain the differences between human-centred and story-driven design, and discuss the implications of these approaches. We will compare Moreno’s perspective with the framework of bleed. Finally, we will explore how a more nuanced model may offer different insights in designing for development.
What if your personality is just the roles you play?
Moreno (1962), the founder of sociometry and psychodrama, had a radical idea about personality. He believed that the self isn’t something fixed or hidden deep inside us (Diakolambrianou and Bowman, 2023). According to him, our identity is shaped by behaviour patterns we act out in different situations: being a friend, a daughter, a manager, a lover, a rebel. It’s built from the different roles we play in life. These social roles are the crystallizations of all situations that occur to us in a given field of activity. And these roles do not stand alone, they influence one another and often come in groups, or what Moreno (1962) called role clusters.
For example, the role of ‘woman’ often coexists with and shapes other identity-defining roles such as ‘daughter,’ and often ‘partner’ and ‘mother,’ creating a dynamic ripple effect across the individual’s role system. Take the example of Kai from Gijs and Anne’s previous KP article (van Bilsen and van Barlingen, 2025). Gijs played a bold character which unexpectedly helped him to better cope with his fear of heights. Social disinhibition and courage in the face of falling are all parts of a role cluster in his personality, so a liberating experience in one might be translatable to the other. Moreover, becoming more like Kai using a mental technique might also work when climbing a tall ladder. Moreno believed that all the roles we’ve ever played leave a trace, and together, they make up who we are as a cluster effect.
Moreno made another important distinction. Your role inventory includes every (social) role you’ve ever played in your life. Your role repertoire is more restricted however, as it includes only the roles you’re able to access and use right now (Moreno, 1959). The good news is that your role inventory and repertoire can grow. Through life experiences, learning from others, or even imagination and creative exercises, we can develop them. One powerful way to do this is through something Moreno called surplus reality: fictional or imagined scenarios that let us safely explore new ways of being (von Ameln, 2013). This is the foundation of psychodrama, where people act out situations in the dramatic space to gain insight and flexibility in real life.
What follows from this, and how do activi-ties such as role-playing and larping actually support personality development? Here are two clear ways: expand your role inventory, and enhance your role repertoire.
Expand your role inventory!
The more types of roles a person plays, even in fictional settings, the more flexible and adaptable they become in real life. Each new role adds a potential way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. To some degree, every Nordic larper is aware of this. Over time, this effect creates a richer ‘toolbox’ of behaviours to draw from. Some studies even suggest that living out multiple role-played ‘lives’ can help people develop a healthier attitude toward deep existential topics, such as fear of death (Hugaas, 2023).
Enhance your role repertoire!
This is about the roles you can actively use right now. According to Moreno, what matters most is not how many roles you’ve experienced, but how spontaneously you can react in the moment (Moreno, 1975). Spontaneity, in this context, means two things:
- Giving a fitting response to a new situation, or
- Finding a new response to an old, familiar situation.
In other words, personal development is not about following a previous behavioural pattern, but about responding spontaneously and reaching an emotional catharsis. For Moreno, catharsis meant not only purification from negative emotions, but also the recognition of new opportunities for experience and action. (Moreno, 1959, p. 247). According to his original definition, Moreno (1943) also used the term ‘role-playing’ in this way: not as rigid as ‘taking’ a role in social situations, nor as free as pure role creation, but somewhere in between: it includes some spontaneity between expectations and behavioural patterns.
Beyond the general benefits of expanding your role inventory and enhancing your role repertoire, there are also more specific, transformative effects role-play can offer:
Fill in what’s missing! The ‘Barbara Effect’
One of Moreno’s most well-known examples comes from his early experimental theatre group in Vienna. Barbara, an actress in the group, was often cast in roles that were gentle, modest, and well-behaved. But in real life, her husband complained that she was often angry and harsh at home. In response, Moreno gave her the opposite roles on stage: fierce, aggressive women. The result was unexpected: by expressing these strong, repressed emotions in a safe, fictional space, Barbara became calmer and more balanced in her personal life (Moreno et al., 2013).
Moreno believed that acting out unfamiliar or hidden parts of ourselves, what some might call the shadow (Chappell et al., 2019), can unlock real personal change. “By depicting dimensions, roles, scenes, and interactions that life did not allow” (Moreno, 1979, p. 33), we can grow beyond rigid patterns and expand who we’re capable of being.
Psychodrama: exploring the inner cast
Psychodrama (Moreno, 1949) is more than just role-play. It’s a structured group method where people act out personal situations, often stepping into different roles (including parts of themselves) to gain insight and healing. In psychodrama, roles are not just characters; they represent parts of our personality, or even different ego functions. The process brings these roles to the surface and allows people to work with them actively and creatively.
Moreno wasn’t focused on abstract theories as he believed in action. Still, he made many important distinctions: different types of roles, stages of role development, role imbalances such as underdeveloped or overdeveloped roles, etc. His legacy was continued by others, especially Max Clayton (2005), who further developed role theory into practical frameworks for therapy and personal growth. Even though Moreno’s role theory isn’t considered mainstream in psychology today, its depth, prevalence, and action-oriented nature make it a powerful resource, especially for those designing or researching larp-based and or experiential methods of learning and development.
Designing for learning or designing for development?
Learning and development exist on a spectrum. When designing for learning, the focus lies on subject matter and content, rather than on the learner as a person. Designing for development, by contrast, aims to change the learner through the process itself. When such change is not gradual but radical, it becomes transformation, implying a fundamental shift in identity (Hartyándi, 2026). Story-centred design is well suited for learning and can indirectly support development, whereas human-centred design is more effective for development as it directly catalyzes personal growth.
Story-centered design
Most recreational role-playing games have a story-centred focus. Designers aim to create a compelling narrative, and roles are written in service of that story. This allows for a wide range of characters and the development of rich story arcs.
Role-play can also be designed as story-centred from an educational perspective. In this case, the focus is on the experience or the narrative itself. Participants are invited to experience what something is like. For example: what it means to belong to a minority, or how it feels to live in a particular historical period.
Human-centered design
However, when the aim is genuine development of a participant’s talents or qualities, a different design approach is required. The focus shifts to the participant and their needs. This leads to the creation of characters that can influence a player’s self-image. For example: “I thought I could not speak in public, but through this character I experienced that I can. I now see myself as someone who is able to do that.”
When scenarios are designed with human-centred focus, participants are more likely to experience identity bleed. At the same time, role-plays of this kind tend to be less compelling from a narrative perspective. The setting is often less elaborate, and the storyline typically less engaging. The emphasis is on the relationship between the character and the player.
Bleed as a tool to make sense of it
We use the concepts of alibi and bleed to help participants in our trainings make sense of what is happening. To support them in understanding the different emotions, feelings, and insights they experience, we introduce them to the concept of bleed. This gives players a way to distinguish between desired and undesired consequences of the role. By emphasising that they are not their character, we offer them an excuse to experiment with unfamiliar behaviour during the training – and, if needed, to distance themselves from it afterwards.
However, this is where the concept of (identity) bleed starts to fall short. On the one hand, we want participants to see themselves as the source of certain behaviours (You are your role: “I can do this, because my character can do this”). This matches with Moreno’s way of seeing roles. On the other hand, we also want them to distance themselves from their role (You are not your role: “Don’t blame yourself, you are not your character”). These two positions are difficult to reconcile.
Points of view: Moreno and bleed
Moreno assumed that all roles, both fictional and real world, are part of the same whole: the self. From this perspective, there is no bleed, because everything already belongs to a single system. Moreno’s role theory assumes an internal source: you. Barbara herself generated certain patterns, and by examining these within a fictional frame, she was able to transcend them in real-world contexts.
If we imagine the self as a transparent vase (Fig. 1) filled with all the roles we have ever played, Moreno’s point of view suggests that there is only one vase. The roles floating closest to the surface form one’s role repertoire, while all roles together make up one’s role inventory. But this creates a highly undesirable implication: Excelling at playing an ‘evil’ character would, under role theory, indicate that such a role forms part of one’s role inventory. This role may not be accepted or useful in everyday life, but it is still part of the personality… the source is you.
The consequences of this implication make playing an unpleasant character far less appealing. The alibi of “this is not you, it is the character” no longer holds from Moreno’s point of view.
Yet this alibi is crucial. To preserve our own sense of psychological safety, it is important to maintain a distinction between self and character. Categorising emotions as ‘not mine’ and ‘belonging to the character’ enables players to disengage from them when needed.
Shifting the point of view:
So what do we do? In our training, we introduce the concept of bleed. We move our point of view, moving in the illustration to side Y (Fig. 2). We tell our players and participants that it is not a single transparent vase, but two vases placed one behind the other, connected by an open channel. One vase represents who we really are; the other contains all fictional roles. There is spillover between these two vases, but they remain clearly distinct and separate domains (Bowman, 2015). These vases seen from Moreno’s point of view seem to be one, but there are actually two.
Bleed as coping mechanism
This image holds when we are talking about the character’s experiences influencing the player, and the player influencing the character. Yet from the perspective of role theory, that distinction seems artificial. Bleed implies an external source of emotions and behaviours. It also implies a permeable wall between the self and the fiction, or a way to let the self resonate with the fiction. The model becomes complicated, if you want to keep the distinction between self and fiction. Here, the limits of (identity) bleed as an explanatory concept become apparent.
To us, distinguishing ‘self’ from ‘character’, and calling remnants of one or the other ‘bleed’ is a coping mechanism: a way to avoid incorporating certain roles into one’s inventory and to maintain a stable identity. It is a tool to retain agency! “I can decide for myself who I am, and who I want to be.”
What if Moreno is right: mixability
We know that roles designed from a human-centred perspective are more easily incorporated in the self-image of participants than roles that are written for the story. So, some roles blend more easily than others.
What if there is, in fact, no separation? What if Moreno is right, and everything ends up in the same vase, but the extent to which roles blend with a person’s self-concept differs from role to role? All roles may be part of the role inventory, yet some roles do not integrate with the coherent whole we experience as our self-image. Most of our roles are interconnected through different role clusters, but some in our inventory remain isolated.
This means that some roles are just more mixable: some roles mix very easily with your concept of self, some don’t (Fig. 3). Mixable roles integrate with existing role clusters, making them more accessible to spontaneity. Non-mixable roles, by contrast, are fragmented from the self, blocked from spontaneity, and excluded from the role repertoire, as integrating them into role clusters would shift the entire role system and thus the self itself in an undesired direction (Moreno, 1962; Clayton, 2005).
This makes designing for development more straightforward. To what extent is a role mixable with the player’s concept of self? The higher this mixability, the easier it becomes to integrate that role.
But what if we don’t want some elements to mix?
A player may have an experience that is not positive; an experience that can negatively influence their self-concept if it is accepted as part of the self. These may be feelings, thoughts, or actions that linger after play and have an unwanted impact. In such cases, bleed becomes an extremely useful tool. Explaining the concept of bleed, and introducing the role as an outside source, gives clarity.
This gives participants agency over their own learning process. Does this behaviour fit with how you see yourself, or with who you wish to be? Congratulations: you have just expanded your role inventory. Does it not? Then you are experiencing bleed: you are having feelings that are currently part of you, but which you do not accept as belonging to your inventory.
We introduce the concept of bleed as a coping mechanism to help participants engage with their emotions and feelings in a way that enables learning and reflection. So then, are we designing for bleed? No, we are designing for mixability. Roles that can be integrated relatively easily. We use the concept of bleed as a tool to give players and participants agency over their learning process.
Conclusion
We argued that while bleed remains a useful concept for describing player–character interactions, it is limited as a primary design surface for learning and personal development. For theorists of bleed, Moreno’s original role theory and our concept of mixability offer complementary perspectives by shifting attention from spillover to the degree to which roles integrate into existing role clusters and the self-concept. From this view, developmental effects are less about boundary crossing and more about integration.
For larp designers working with personal development, this implies a shift toward human-centred design and intentional character co-creation. Designing for mixability, rather than for bleed itself, supports learning that is both effective, efficient, and psychologically safe. In this context, bleed functions best as a reflective and coping tool, giving participants agency over what they integrate into their role repertoire and what they consciously keep at a distance.
Finally, this approach opens clear connections to established developmental frame-works that work with personal qualities, ego functions, and parts of self. Exploring these connections in depth lies beyond the scope of this article and will be addressed in future work.
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This article is republished from the Knutpunkt 2026 book. Please cite it as:
Hartyándi, M., van Bilsen, G., and van Barlingen, A. 2026. ‘Beyond Bleed: How ‘Mixability’ and ‘Human-Centered Design’ Help Design for Learning.’ In Seasons of Larp eds. Erlandsson, A., Svanevik, M., Holkar, M., and Brind, S. Gothenburg. Knutpunkt.
