In 1999, just before the millennium, the movie Galaxy Quest was released. In the movie, you follow a group of actors as they try to save the world of the Thermians by becoming the heroes they were in the TV show Galaxy Quest. But there is a caveat to this – when the Thermians saw the show, they thought they were watching a documentary, and they recreated everything from the spacecraft to the uniforms.
So, try to put yourself in the mind and body of the clueless actor: You are transported eight lightyears into space and are now on a working space craft, the Protector II. So how do you become the hero of the story, when you know absolutely nothing about how to fly a spacecraft or negotiate with an alien enemy?
When you larp you are often expected to do just that. But what can help you as a player to enter that space in your mind where everything becomes real? Is it the design, the space, the scenography – or something else entirely? To answer this question, I talked to Esperanza Montero of NotOnlyLarp, and player/designer, Sandy Bailly.
Inge-Mette Petersen at the larp Demeter. Photo by Larson Kasper.
I first met Esperanza Montero in 2018, when I played her Westworld-inspired larp Conscience in Fort Bravo, Almeria, Spain. Conscience is a large sprawling monster. Montero called it five larps in one with layers of reality that can be switched by a few select players, who play the plot writers that make the stories wanted by the guests happen. Playing an android host, the powerless doll in their plot, you are totally at their mercy. Conscience deals with the consequences of the choices you make on a political, moral, and ethical level, something that interests me. This is not a coincidence as Montero has a long experience as an LGBT+ activist and Pride organizer.
The next year, 2019, I went to Matera in Italy to play The Trial of the Shadowcasters, an urban larp by Bjarke Petersen and Mike Pohjola dealing with history and philosophy. Matera is a very special place, partly a cave city, so the scenography was a big part of the larp. I played with Sandy Bailly there in the caves and on the streets. I talked to her about the importance of locations for the players, and she had some interesting thoughts about this.
Both Fort Bravo and Matera are fascinating locations. But the perfect location does not exist. A larp can be built around a location or the location can be adopted to fit the larp design. The location and scenography can help the story and the players. A castle with lots of nooks and crannies is perfect for larps with a lot of secrets and politics. A small room for meetings is great for building up tension. And as Bailly says – it is great to have a space where you can see the world go by as your character. I have certainly done that.
The location is not enough, no matter how magical it is. A designer needs collaborators – prop makers, character writers and safety personnel. They need the organization for logistics and production, for catering, and administration. They need supporting characters to help move the story along. And they need to make the players understand the vision and the ideas behind the larp before they arrive on the scene. Then the larp starts, the players arrive – and all the plans of the organizers change. Bailly interprets larp as a framework for co-creation. If it is clear and well defined you can let people loose in it, so they can move around in it much more freely and securely.
Montero has a similar definition – larp is a collaborative art form where you all have a story to tell together. The players always have the power. The moment they get their character they start to make backstories, playlists, costumes, and relations. All that will also be part of the final game. But when the location, the design and the vision, and the characters as they are portrayed by the players all converge, larp magic happens. You truly believe in the story you are telling together.
And then the larp ends – or does it? For an organizer like Montero there is important work to do after the larp. Every aspect must be evaluated, the persons who have helped in realizing the project must be credited and the experience gained before, during, and after must be collected. Maybe the organizer wants to reiterate it, to take the players on the journey again.
The larp has been documented by photographers that captures a fleeting moment in the game. This picture becomes part of the players’ memory. Montero found it interesting how larp inspires creative people. She has seen essays, short stories, songs, comics, and even videos done by players after the larp has ended, a testimony to how real the story has become to them. For some it has been a deep personal experience that has changed their outlook on life. For others it was a great rollercoaster ride. And when they meet again at a larp, a convention, or a party, they will share memories. Maybe a catchphrase (“By Grabthars Hammer….”) or a ritual will be repeated. And why not – just as the actors in Galaxy Quest, they have been on a journey together and survived.
And maybe you want to join them. If you do – may you live long and prosper.
This article is published in the Knutpunkt 2022 magazine Distance of Touch and is published here with permission. Please cite this text as:
Petersen, Inge-Mette. 2022. “‘Never Give Up, Never Surrender’.” In Distance of Touch: The Knutpunkt 2022Magazine, edited by Juhana Pettersson, 116-117. Knutpunkt 2022 and Pohjoismaisen roolipelaamisen seura.
Description of role-played and simulated rape scenes. Graphic or suggestive images of rape, assault, and trauma. Minor spoilers for some French-speaking games.
Foreword
This article is the amended translation of a piece that was originally published in French within the context of internal discussions within the French-speaking larp scene regarding emotional safety tools and calibration. I have since come to consider that it could be of interest to a wider audience. However, It should be noted that many of the examples that I will present may only be understood within the context of the French local scene. Furthermore, this article will only focus on rape depiction and simulation within the game’s fiction, not off-game incidents of assault.
Introduction
Why is rape such a specific issue in larp?
Depicting rape in larp is often used as a prime example to demonstrate the importance of organizer communication and emotional safety in larp. When we role-play violence in larp, physical violence can be more easily dissociated and put at a distance. As horrible as the perspective of murder can be, it is rare enough in most of our daily lives that we can accept it as part of the fiction and, in most cases, without thinking that it might happen to us.
Rape or sexual assault, however, remains a very real risk to women. We might discuss specific numbers and statistics, but it can be said with certainty that among the participants of a larp, there will be former victims of rape or sexual assault. Most women have been confronted with the fear of sexual assault, including a whole series of measures meant to prevent it, from the way they dress to thinking about how they will manage returning home in the evening. And this is not limited to women either: men, trans, and non-binary people may also have lived through sexual assaults in their past or have reasons to fear assault in the present.
Consequently, depictions of rape in fiction — and for the purpose of this article, I will consider larp as a form of media — can be more impactful to a significant part of the audience than other forms of violence. As such, choosing to depict or allow role-playing rape scenes inevitably has a stronger impact, and will often fall under close scrutiny, owing to the fact that it is still an issue that impacts a lot of people.
I have found it interesting to observe the way that organizers and participants have handled allowing — or not allowing — role-playing rape scenes in larp. I have found these decisions to be emblematic of cultural changes both in larp writing and social perceptions surrounding rape. I will try in this article to present an overview of this evolution, and how, in my opinion, it can inform us of the interconnection between larp, media, and cultural representations. However, this article will only represent my own experience as a larper and creator, and does not aim at being exhaustive or impartial.
Jacques Stella, The Rape of the Sabines, mid-17th century.
Trivializing Rape
During my second larp, back in October 2001, which was part of a now-terminated Drow campaign, my character was knocked out by two other characters and robbed. Fair enough. That situation was written in the rules, and, as a beginner, I hadn’t learnt to walk with my back against the wall at all times. After that scene, right before leaving, one of the two participants in the scene added, “And before leaving, we rape you.”
As in many games of the time, there were no simulation rules for sexuality. In campaign games such as this one, sexuality was mostly managed off-game to produce offspring that could become playable characters if your own character died. Games that offered rules for sexual simulation usually used mechanical rules: dice; cards; marbles, oftentimes with some random draw that would determine the quality of the relation; and sometimes a “pillow talk” mechanic, in which sharing intimacy could lead a character to share an important secret to their partner. However, the issue of sexual violence or coercion was rarely broached explicitly — except in rare cases of complete prohibition, more on that later — and was considered, therefore, possible.
Here is another emblematic example. In the mass larp campaign La Faille (or The Rift, which ended in 2007), the orc faction would organize fictionalized rape of female characters. They would mark the victims’ clothes with green at the buttocks to signify what had happened to the character. While some of these scenes might have been discussed beforehand, it is certain that negotiation and consent was neither written into the rules nor systematic.
In the context of these early games around 2000–2005, integrating sexuality rules was an answer to the objective of creating a 360° realistic representation and mostly “sandbox”-type game. In this style of game, players had to be able to do any action they wanted. Rules only came into play when an action was considered impossible (e.g. magic) or dangerous (e.g. fighting). Physical contact was completely prohibited. In that context, depictions of rape simply represented something “that could happen,” just like in real life. The practice was acceptable because there was no physical contact and because rape was usually only mentioned verbally.
Rape scenes were usually performed by characters that could, in this manner, display their violence and could establish their role-play as a “villain.” Rape usually had no consequence in-game.
Rape as a Narrative Device
Meanwhile, we could also observe games that, while prohibiting rape in-game, used it as a narrative device in the game’s backstory. Rape, in this case, has consequences that take the form of in-game conflicts and dramatic outcomes. As illustrations, I will mention three examples from the so-called romanesque style. I played witness to the plot in the first game and the rape victim in the last two.
In Greenaway’s Feeling (played in 2007), a Victorian-era game, I played as the governess to a wealthy family. One of the secrets of the family is that the lady of the house was raped before her wedding by a friend of the family. The game ended with the rapist being killed in a duel. In the second game, Spirits (started in 2008, played in 2013) I played as Maggie, a girl from the working class falling in love with an upper class aristocrat. Maggie was then raped by her lover’s cousin in what constituted clearly a punitive action on the rapist’s part. This storyline was lifted directly from the novel that inspired the game, A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Fowlett, published in 1993. In the run I took part in, the rapist also got killed in a duel. The final game, Noces de Cendres (The Ashen Wedding, 2012), was set in Argentina in the years following World War II. My character was a famous socialite, raped as a young woman by her wealthy patron, and bent on getting revenge. The game invites a resolution where she poisons her rapist. In my run, he was shot to death by another of his enemies.
It must be noted that, in two out of these three cases, the resolution of the storyline resulted in a duel between two male protagonists, taking away the agency from the female victims, and that the “rape-and-revenge” trope was invoked in the last one. Furthermore, due to the historical context, a significant part of the story revolved around the victim being shamed and forced into secrecy.
Important note: I still consider these games to be good and I generally had strong experiences playing them. However, these games are a reflection of the fictions that inspired them – sometimes picking plots directly from books used as inspiration. In these stories, rape is the traumatic inciting event that kickstarts the narrative arc for the female characters or drives the conflict. However, It feels important to point out that, in spite of their qualities, these games reproduced some of the stereotypes around rape that also can be found in certain media.
Conscience 2.0. Photo by Stefano Kewan Lee.
The Criticism and Rape Prohibition
I think that criticism and changes in the way rape is depicted in larp appeared in conjunction with criticism regarding the depiction of rape in media and fiction, as well as demands for changes in that regard. The subject is regularly broached in the media, mostly regarding the use of rape as “shock value.” Regarding larps, two arguments were at the forefront of discussions: imposing rape scenes without the participants’ consent and using sexual assault as a cheap plot device.
First and foremost, some members of the community argued that imposing rape in the storyline was neither agreeable nor fun for many participants for the reasons already mentioned in the introduction. In cases where the possibility of rape was left open on the grounds of realism and 360° immersion, some argued that even a larp with an ambition for immersion has to enforce limitations on its players and some degree of abstraction, if only to accept, for example, that fake weapons will be real and wound the characters. Some participants claimed that letting players impose rape scenes upon others went against their own enjoyment of the game and sense of safety. Even a competitive player vs. player game could find ways for players to act against one another, including violence, without making rape part of the arsenal. Of course, in real life, rape is indeed a tool for humiliation and a weapon of war. Larp, however, remained a fiction, and even the most historically accurate larp makes choices in terms of what it can represent. Therefore, it was possible to contend that taking away rape from the larp wouldn’t change the narration in most cases, but would make the game experience safer and better for all.
The second argument criticized rape as a cheap and somewhat overused plot device. That critique was not as severe, but pointed out the fact that rape was too often used as a cliché, either to justify a dramatic conflict or to illustrate the cruelty of a character or the world. So it was not so much the existence of rape narration that was at stake as its treatment and recurring aspect, e.g. making it a staple of most pre-written female characters. These critics underlined that there should be other ways to establish the unforgiving quality of a world or set up a character as an antagonist. Additionally, it was important to diversify female narratives using other angles than rape. The use of rape as a “shock factor” to show how dark a situation is, if not used to bring an interesting narrative, tell a good story, or deconstruct prejudices, can simply become derivative; these stories can contribute to trivializing rape; perpetuating stereotypes about rape and sexual assault; or invisibilizing survivors’ experiences.
Because of these issues, larp design choices and communication surrounding rape depiction has significantly changed in the 2010s, with an acceleration in the wake of the #metoo movement. Sexual assault is frequently forbidden in games, with some games even banning any role-play around sexuality at all. If rape appears in the backstory, it will be explicitly communicated and only played with the participants’ consent.
Due to these changes, communication and participant consent have improved. Most organizations now present a design document stating which themes and issues can be expected in their games, explicitly asking participants to write down issues they don’t want to play. It must be noted that, when I have handled participants’ sign-ups as an organizer and what they didn’t want to play, I had many male players requesting not to play a rapist. I also know many people who prefer to pass on any game mentioning rape, which in my opinion is a perfectly valid position.
Can Rape Be Responsibly Depicted in Larp?
This last question will of course be open to debate. Many people state that rape should be forbidden in larp altogether, which is a very understandable position. However, I would like to give a couple examples of games that, in my opinion, use rape in their scenarios in such a manner that it brings a real narrative depth, avoiding the issues that I addressed previously.
The Swedish gameLast Will (2014) presents a not-so-distant dystopian future in which big corporations have re-established legal slavery. The game fiction takes place in a modern gladiators’ arena and depicts teams of fighters and the arena personnel. One of the categories represented in game is the Pleasers: sex slaves whose purpose is to exclusively serve the needs of the fighters. This game is a Nordic larp with clear expectations in terms of safety: the themes are clearly communicated well in advance, the character distribution is done according to participants’ requests, violent scenes must be negotiated, and any scene can be interrupted with safe words. Arsamandi was used to simulate sex and was practised beforehand during workshops.
My character was a fighter called Sol. She was forced to perform sexual acts in front of the medical examiners charged to evaluate her. As a reaction, she became in turn abusive to her own Pleaser, Eden. She was then forced to witness Eden’s rape by one of the guards as a punishment for her repeated insolence and transgression. In this game, the presence of sex slaves and the possibility to play rape scenes was part of the construction of a dehumanizing environment for the characters. After the game, discussions among participants and the viewing of a documentary on modern slavery were used to contextualize the whole experience.
My own gameFlowers of Maytakes place in a Parisian brothel in 1910. One of the prostitutes, Violette, is there against her own will. She has been locked up and blackmailed into accepting it before the beginning of the game. The game doesn’t allow the depiction of rape with violence, but the character being threatened and coerced means that she undergoes at least one rape scene over the course of the game. Using inspiration from Last Will, the game also uses ars amandi and follows along the same lines in terms of safety and communication. Sexuality and sexual violence are a central theme of the game. This character is used to show that rape happens any time there is coercion, not only through direct threat and physical violence. The game in general explores the interconnection between sexuality and power.
Finally, Conscience 2.0(2018, created by NotOnlyLarp in Spain, is another recent example. The game was inspired by the TV series Westworld and is set in a Western theme park populated by extremely realistic robots. Sexual violence and nudity were possible, but only in certain predetermined spaces, also called zoning. This practice has been recently introduced as a means to set up boundaries and allow players to steer towards or away the most intensive forms of role-playing (more examples in “The Larp Domino Effect”). As always, communication was extremely explicit about sensitive themes, with workshops and safe words. Participants who wanted to play on physical or sexual violence had to signal it by wearing a small white (physical) and/or red (sexual) ribbon over their costume. Sexual scenes were simulated in full clothing, while real intercourse was explicitly prohibited. Any scene of sexual violence had to be negotiated following a pre-scripted discussion. Here again, integrating sexual violence against robots sets up the action within an abusive context and, the more the robots were gaining consciousness, to question what makes a human being. Between characters who treated the robots as literal objects and those who wanted to defend their humanity and rights, the visible and brutal depiction of sexual violence could be a catalyst in these conflicts.
In that larp, I played an abusive character who was intended to enable others in engaging in violent interactions. My characters very routinely organized collective rapes and torture sessions. The strict safety rules of the game allowed me to constantly check the well-being of the players who performed as my victims. Playing as an oppressor was way out of my comfort zone; it was indispensable to me to know that playing these violent scenes improved the game experience of other players and was not only there to show my character’s menace and physical superiority.
I cited these examples because they have, in my opinion, common aspects. They all use sexual violence to show how the environment dehumanizes the victims of violence. They all try to deconstruct the way this violence operates, in particular how it can be trivialized. I believe that an essential difference from the examples I treated in the first paragraph is there: the rapists in these examples don’t see themselves as the “villains” and the characters themselves are not written as such. They simply consider using other human beings’ bodies as their right, whether as a client or simply from their position of privilege. Rape is not used for the mere “shock factor,” but to serve as a discussion about the type of society that renders the banalization of rape possible. I believe that the stories created in this context are all the more poignant for that.
In-game photo of the author’s character in Conscience 2.0 (2018).
Discussion
I originally wrote all of the above in a French context as a means to promote the importance of safety rules and mechanisms. My goal was to underline the necessity of building a culture of explicit consent whenever sensitive issues are portrayed. I especially wanted to debunk the all too common notion in my local community that implementation of emotional safety structures would condemn any game depicting violence or abuse by highlighting some games that treated such issues while putting participants’ well-being first.
However, the discussion surrounding that piece of writing and the general handling of controversial themes have also led me to the following reflections:
1. Larp doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Larp, among other things, exists as a medium and is therefore inspired by societal representations and the media we consume, sometimes explicitly by directly using existing franchises as a setting (e.g Wizarding World, Vampire, etc.) Even with a small audience, a larp will be part of the construction of a certain discourse and representation and should be analysed as such. The criticism that was levied against the abusive use and representation of rape in French larp stemmed from such media criticism approaches.
2. Change takes time. The evolution that I present in this article stretched over years. I can also personally recount how I deconstructed my own internalized prejudices over those years before taking a more active role in promoting emotional safety rules, creating guidance for prevention of harassment, and defending a culture of consent. Increased global exchanges and digital communication may accelerate some of this process of acculturation, media criticism, and change of opinion, but they still take time nonetheless.
3. Managing resistance. The cultural shift that is described in this article took time, and was met with quite a lot of resistant comments, one of the most frequent being that depicting rape was just “realistic.” In fact, I have yet to see any safety technique or communication that wasn’t met with some form of resistance. In this instance, change was brought about by a combination of communicating about the subject (e.g arguing why trivialized depictions of rape are problematic), valuing good practices (e.g organizing or promoting games with a clear safety policy), and, in some cases, avoiding games that do not have clear communication on these issues. I also believe that the issue with rape depiction was a good example and gateway to discuss safety issues, since the line between organizers’ freedom of creation and players’ safety was pretty clear in that case: trivialization of rape led players to feel uncomfortable or unsafe in the game, or even to avoid larping entirely. Taking the subject away didn’t hurt the structure of most games. Creators who wanted to handle rape as a sensitive issue could still do it, only with a better knowledge of the kind of communication and careful management that it requires.
Conclusion
By writing about the depiction of rape in larp, I hoped to highlight some important cultural changes that occurred in the media around these issues and subsequently in larps as well. Through these examples, I tried to show that you can absolutely handle sensitive issues in larps, but that a clear communication and safety policy is necessary. I used the example of depiction of rape to show how a design choice (or lack of consideration of it) could create a disagreeable, or even hostile environment for some players. Additionally, changes in communication and techniques have made the practice safer and more inclusive. Finally, I opened the discussion by affirming my belief that there are probably other issues and techniques that are still to be explored. My hope is that discussion on these issues will continue.
Bowman, Sarah Lynne. 2018. “The Larp Domino Effect.” In Shuffling the Deck: The Knutpunkt 2018 Companion Book. Edited by Annika Waern and Johannes Axner. 161-169. ETC Press. https://nordiclarp.org/2018/02/14/larp-domino-effect/
At Knutpunkt 2018, I somehow found myself holding a talk called “A Trinity of Consciousness.” This subject might seem an odd choice for someone who, although holds degrees in Nature Science and Public Administration, is pretty much void of any academic expertise on the subject of consciousness; I realize that my approach to the subject can be somewhat unorthodox as a result of this. As a trained actor with almost two decades of experience in Nordic larp though, I have spent a lot of time trying to understand the processes that are involved when we are shifting in- and out-of-character. If there are any concepts that can be considered central to these processes, they are consciousness and bleed.
This article is a write up of a couple of the subjects that I touched upon in my 2018 talk. Since then, some of my thoughts have changed, hopefully for the better. In the aftermath of my talk, which was primarily on the subject of consciousness, the one thing people seemed to want to engage me in discussion on was my suggestion for further categorizing different types of bleed. In particular, the freshly coined term memetic bleed, which I in all honesty described fairly briefly, was something about which I received comments and questions in the following weeks and months. I am grateful to the people who contacted me and for the discussions that followed, as they have led to a furthering of my own understanding of the phenomenon
A Brief Take on Consciousness
In order to understand a little bit more about the nature of any type of bleed, we must first very briefly touch on how we understand — or rather perceive — consciousness. This is a subject that seems to present us with several new questions for every single answer we find. Yes, even an attempt to reach a consensus on the simplest definition is challenging, as it is an ambiguous term commonly used to describe a width of different phenomena. For sake of clarity, it can be helpful to make a distinction between the parts of consciousness that are possible to explain and define with the help of standard methods of cognitive science and the ones that, well… simply aren’t.
“St. Peter and St Paul’s church Fressingfield Suffolk: Stained glass” by David (CC BY 2.0).
Chalmers (1995) calls these first aspects of consciousness “the easy problems” and among others names the following: “The ability to discriminate, categorize and react to environmental stimuli; the integration of information by a cognitive system; the reportability of mental states;…” (Chalmers, s. 2) The list can go on for some time, but the common denominator is that all of these aspects can be explained reductively in terms of neural mechanisms. Personally, I find it helpful to consider whether it would be possible to replicate the phenomenon with computational programming, and if the answer is yes, it belongs on this list of “easy problems.” For these phenomena, “consciousness” might not even be the correct term. “Awareness” — or rather “functions of awareness” — would be a better fit. A system that performs functions will be aware of the parts of its surroundings that are relevant to perform the function in question, but this awareness would not equate to “consciousness” in the sense that human beings are “conscious” or “sentient.”
Then, what is consciousness? Good question. In fact, great question. British psychologist Stuart Sutherland’s attempt at an answer is one of the more memorable ones; the two last sentences went on to become rather infamous. Sutherland describes:
Consciousness—The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness . . . The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Many fall into the trap of equating consciousness with self-consciousness—to be conscious it is only necessary to be aware of the external world. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it. (Sutherland 1989)
Sutherland’s exasperation might be very understandable, although it does not really bring us any closer to an understanding. What it does do, though, is perfectly exemplify how our established scientific methods have not been capable of providing answers. So, while waiting for a future paradigm shift of thought, we will just have to accept that any work on this subject will have to contain a certain amount of subjective philosophical thought. Then again: what is human existence, if not a subjective experience of how it is to be the one who we are?
“Stained Glass Met” by Adrian Scottow (CC BY-SA 2.0).
I am writing this, sitting by a beach in Spain. The sun is shining over a perfect azure sea, the wind keeps tugging at my papers and the air is full of languages that I do not speak nor understand. Now… the functions of awareness are explaining all of this to me; the colour of the sea, the strength of the wind, the words that I don’t understand. What they don’t explain though, is how I subjectively experience these factors. A mere description of the functions themselves does nothing to explain the deep pull within me, the longing for foreign shores that this scene awakens, this song of the sea that the poets have written about since ever there was written word. Clearly there is something that is like “being me” in this moment that defies both objective description and reductive methods.
Chalmers (1995) calls this layer on top of awareness experience:
When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. (Chalmers 1995)
These musings into the fascinating field of consciousness could go on for some time. For the sake of this article, we can in summary say that while we do not fully understand consciousness, we can conceptualize it roughly in terms of external stimuli and our internal responses and perceptions to those stimuli.
Reality and How We See It: The Stained Glass Window
“Sagrada familia, stained glass window” by fry_theonly (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Personally, I find it helpful to think of the world as a large building. My own particular cultural background makes it easy to imagine an old European cathedral, but any building will do. It does not have to be any particular one, and can be made up in your head solely for this exercise. The important part is that the interior of this building represents reality as it can be objectively described using the terminology of physical science. The size, layout, materials, structure of surfaces, and such can all be described in detail, providing us with an objective take on the reality we inhabit.
In addition, there is a large stained glass window on one of the walls, like the ones you would find in many houses of worship that usually depict saints or religious scenes. This window is the only light source in the building and, in this exercise, represents the filter through which we experience the reality around us. Now imagine that every person that enters the building will have a personalized and different window from everybody else. So when I, for example, enter the building, my window is particular to me and is shaped by things that are particular to my life, like my long term memories, earlier experiences, skills, knowledge, and so on. When the light from the outside shines on the glass, the depictions and their colours will fill the empty spaces with sensory experience beyond the mere physical outlay of the building. The light will illuminate some areas while keeping others in the dark, in effect providing me with my very personalized experience of the seemingly objective reality. So, the world might exist objectively in a certain way, but the way we experience it changes from person to person.
Furthermore, the glass is not permanently fixed, but rather it exists to be changed by the present, the future, and reflections on the past. Any action I take in my life can to some degree change it and most of them will. In my everyday life though, where most days are similar in both rhythm and content, changes are slow and minute. How many times will I have to drive the same 12 minute commute to work before that experience makes me reach new insights or have an epiphany that changes something fundamental about how I experience the world? My guess is: quite a few.
Now, there are of course larger events in our lives that might change things both rapidly and oftentimes also violently: falling in love; the death of a loved one; sudden injury or loss of health; a new job in a different field; moving abroad; becoming a parent; and so on. Any event of comparable size to these is likely to bring more substantial changes in how I experience and see the world, and by that, what it is like to be me in any situation in the future.
On Consciousness of Character: Altered and Othered
When we larp, we consciously subject ourselves to simulated events like the life changing ones mentioned above. In fact, a lot of the time, the simulated events to which we subject ourselves will most likely be substantially more dramatic and intense than any we will ever experience in our own modern lives. In addition, most of us subject ourselves to these events at a rate that will probably be much higher than even the most dramatic life one could ever imagine. Of course, for the most part, our minds will know perfectly well that these events are just simulated, but the body and senses that we experience it with do not. In their article in the International Journal of Role-Playing, Leonard and Thurman (2018) present a overview of the neuro-psychological processes that might lead to stronger bleed-out, stating, “These processes are fundamental, biological, and often outside of conscious awareness and control, which likely makes direct influence over bleed-out a fleeting or even illusory concept” (Leonard and Thurman 2018). I describe bleed-out in more depth later in this article.
“Palau de la Música Catalana” by Alvaro (CC BY-SA 2.0).
In regard to the stained glass window, what we are doing is changing, substituting, or moving pieces of the filtered consciousness that belongs to us as a player in an attempt to create a distinctly different one through which our character experiences reality. The players’ window will of course never be fully substituted, but the simulated changes will affect how we see the world, even if it is just for a limited time. And as it is never completely static and fixed, changing with our experiences, it is safe to say that what we experience in character would also have an effect on us as players. In other words, when we simulate alterations to our glass painting, we will almost certainly also subtly alter it permanently, and thus we change what it is like to be ourselves. In summary, when we temporarily change the filter through which we see the world, we are adding a layer of altered consciousness. When the stained glass window of experience is sufficiently changed for the immediate experience of functions of awareness to overwhelm long-term established frames of “what it is to be you,” temporary states of “othered” consciousness can be experienced.
Which Leads Us to Bleed
The term bleed was coined by Emily Care Boss in 2007, and has since been generally accepted to describe when emotions “bleed over” from character to player and vice versa (Montola 2010). In the following years, the addition of thoughts and physical states were done by among others Sarah Lynne Bowman, who states, “Role-players sometimes experience moments where their real life feelings, thoughts, relationships, and physical states spill over into their characters’ and vice versa. In role-playing studies, we call this phenomenon bleed” (Bowman 2015).
At my talk at Knutepunkt in 2018, I proposed a way to further structure the phenomenon by classifying it in three distinct sub-categories: emotional, procedural, and memetic. I also briefly touched on a potential fourth category that I named cognitive bleed, but the more I have studied it, the less I am sure that it merits its own category and as such I am leaving it out for now.
It is also important to note that even though it might be useful to categorize the different types of bleed, any actual bleed situation will most likely be a case of these categories both overlapping and clustering. It is also quite possible that such overlapping could be a catalyst for increasing both the duration and the intensity of the experience. For now, we will content ourselves with saying that the act of categorizing bleed might be useful, but it is important to remember that it is just a framework imposed upon a chaotic reality. In larping, as in the rest of the world, black and white are seldom the only colors.
“San Francisco, St. Louis, New York” by Eugene Kim (CC BY 2.0).
Emotional Bleed
Emotional bleed is when emotions or feelings belonging to either the player or the character affect the actions and emotional state of the other. It is well-known, documented, and has been thoroughly described in theory over the last 10 years and more. It is the most easy to recognize and therefore its existence is not widely questioned in the Nordic larp communities. However, as a workshop that I conducted together with Jost L. Hansen at Knutepunkt in 2017 showed, there are players that report that they have never bled like this. Not even once. This workshop was partially the reason I started looking deeper into the concept of bleed, as the idea of exposing your body and mind to larping and not being affected by the consciousness of the character at all seemed very strange to me. I might not be the heaviest bleeder, but safe to say, I have bled a lot during my years a larper. For some time, I might also have been someone that actively steered my play to increase the chances of experiencing it.
Bleed-in:
Emotional bleed-in occurs when the state of the player’s emotions affect the actions of the character in the game. It is probably most easy to recognize when characters are exposed to things in-game that closely resemble experiences that the player has had out-of-game, be they loss, love, or other strong emotions that can be difficult to control.
Bleed-out:
Based on work done by among others Bowman (2013) and Leonard and Thurman (2018), out-of-game animosity and feelings of real life exclusion seem to be among the most common bleed-out phenomena. In “Social Conflict in Role-Playing Communities: An Exploratory Qualitative Study,” Bowman discusses how this form of emotional bleed-out can lead to negative effects on game communities:
Participants explained that when overinvolved, the player assumes in-character interactions correlate with out-of-character personality traits and feelings. In addition, players may possess underlying psychological problems that events within the game world trigger or intensify. (Bowman 2013)
Other well-known emotional bleed-out phenomena are commonly known as “larp crushes.” These are instances where the love played out between two characters are transferred to one, both, or all of the players that played said characters. As Sanne Harder (2018) describes, “Larp crushes are definitely real experiences of being in love. Larp crushes are real in the sense that the barrier between you and your character’s emotions are eroded to the point where you really, truly are going through limerence” (Harder 2018).
In summary, emotional bleed is the sub-category that is most widely recognized. To me, the availability and quality of research and writings on the subject are sufficient evidence of the existence of this phenomenon.
“Stained glass 1: Seen in the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Veletrzni (Trades Fair) Palace, Prague” by Tony Hisgett (CC BY 2.0).
Procedural Bleed
Procedural bleed gets its name from procedural memory, more generally referred to as muscle memory. Basically, it refers to gestures, bearing, ticks, or any other kind of physical action that originates in either player or character and then surfaces in the other.
Bleed-in:
Getting rid of the physical things we do without conscious thought can be very difficult. Procedural bleed does not cover physical expressions connected to ability, but rather the ways of moving and carrying ourselves that come from for instance cultural conditioning and force of habit. For instance, the culturally coded language of gender will tell us as players how to stand, move, and walk. Players that play other genders than their own will often have to make considerable conscious efforts to change their body language, a task that is made harder by the existence of procedural bleed-in. For my own part, years of being a competitive powerlifter has made procedural bleed-in something that is sometimes very hard to overcome. For instance, I am unable to hunch my shoulders forward in a subdued stance for some period of time without substantial conscious effort.
Bleed-out:
Procedural bleed-out is for all intents and purposes the exact same as bleed-in, only with the roles reversed. The biggest difference would probably be related to the force of the phenomenon. It is natural to assume that the years of physical conditioning of a player would exert more force on the character than the few days of portraying a character’s physicality could ever exert on the player. There might be some exceptions, though.
For instance, right after the larp Conscience (NotOnlyLarp 2018) ended, I could not stop drawing my phone from my pocket and twirling it as I had done for days with the gun that I carried on my hip. A more horrifying example would be how my portrayal of a Nazi officer at the larp 1942 (FLH 2017) seem to have removed the issues that I had with the Nazi salute as a movement, which for me had caused a considerable amount of physical cognitive dissonance in the past. It would seem though, that in general, it is common that procedural bleed-out burns itself out within a relative short time of the larp ending.
Some players have told me of lingering procedural bleed-out, which is something I myself have experienced as well. For instance, I carry myself with an air of authority, sometimes quite military in nature. This has lead to my (for some reason) numerous interactions with police officers and military personnel in my travels around the world always being quite enjoyable. However, there is very little in my life outside of larping that could explain the ease with which I interact with (and subtly command) gun-carrying soldiers and officers. Now, I was in the military when I was young, and even dabbled with command, but this was too low level to fully explain my current tacit skill. So to me, at least part of the explanation might be my numerous military and law enforcement commanding characters forming some sort of feedback loop originating from my original military experience over the years. These experiences have provided me with the physicality of someone used to command and having their orders obeyed.
“Stained glass at Bristol cathedral” by Heather Cowper (CC BY 2.0).
Memetic Bleed
In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins presents the concept of the meme as a noun that “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” (Dawkins 1976). Since then, the concept has of course been popularized and redefined a number of times. For the sake of understanding memetic bleed, we can say that a meme is an unit of culture that carries an idea, behaviour, thought, belief, ethical conviction, or similar from person to person. In this definition, a catchy pop song on the radio would be a meme, as would the idea of the earth being flat, although paradigm shifts over time as a result of the scientific revolution have rendered the second meme somewhat less successful in recent centuries. On a side note, this example also shows us that the potential successfulness of memes is dependent upon environmental factors and as such will be subject to change.
This leaves us with the following attempt at a definition:
Memetic bleed describes the process by which a meme — a unit of culture — carries an idea, behaviour, thought, belief, ethical conviction, or similar cognitive construct between player and character and vice versa. In addition, it describes the process by which memeplexes — complex structures of memes — are transmitted in part or in whole between players and characters that are part of a group, scene, or subculture and vice versa.
Bleed-in:
Since memetic bleed at least partly deals with societal and political structures, it seems to happen on both individual and structural levels. In the case of the latter, the most well-known phenomenon might be what some know as larp democracy, where the players, mostly without communication, “agree” to handle situations in ways that are more in tune with the values of the players than the characters. For example, characters in scenarios involving historical systemic oppression may “solve” the situation through democratic means, a political structure with which their players are familiar and appreciate, but one that might also be entirely alien to the characters themselves.
A somewhat more subtle example might be how tacit cultural knowledge can affect the feel of a game. For instance, after the larp 1942 (FLH 2017), a larp set in a small village in occupied Norway during the Second World War, the organizers shared how the Scandinavian run and the international one had played out somewhat differently. The assessment expressed verbally was that the tacit cultural knowledge of the Norwegian players playing the bulk of the Norwegian civilian characters in the first run had moved the game in one direction, while the lack of said knowledge among the international players playing Norwegian civilians in the second had moved it in a different one.
Being Norwegian myself, I can quite clearly see the validity of this observation. Norwegians “know” how life in a small village in the bottom of a fjord would have been, because most of us will have family or relatives that actually lived those lives. Our grandparents would have told us stories and our history books would have explained the societal structures in detail. As modern and progressive people, we might not always like to think so, but concepts such as the low church Haugean movement and the Law of Jante are still deeply ingrained in the culture within which we as Norwegians have grown up. As a result, in the Norwegian run, the civilian play was reportedly quite subdued and low-key. International players, on the other hand, not having access to the same tacit knowledge, based their play upon other sources. What these sources were would probably be pretty individual, but as a result, the run was reportedly richer in both dramatic scenes and amplified play.
On a individual level, memetic bleed might affect our ability to play on certain traits or play out certain actions. The one that stands out to me is how some players report that they are, not from lack of trying, unable to play oppressors or antagonists of a certain type. The larp Conscience (NotOnlyLarp 2018) is a prime example of a larp where the oppressive characters are quite extreme; I have spoken to two players that more or less mid-larp had to steer their characters away from how they were written in order to be able to portray them. My opinion is that this impulse is at least partly a result of memetic bleed-in of ethical convictions that were too strong for the alibi of play to overpower. As previously noted though, any bleed might have aspects of more than one of the sub-categories; in this case, it is also probable that there was some emotional bleed related to, for instance, the players’ ability to feel empathy for the oppressed characters.
Bleed-out:
With bleed-out, the most difficult part might be distinguishing between where memetic bleed ends and cognitive reflection begins. By this statement, I mean that not all changes in ideas, values, beliefs, and so on will be the result of bleed, but also that it can be quite a mixed experience where no single reason can claim to be the instrumental one.
For instance, on a structural level, I propose that the spread in our communities of ideas and values found in intersectional feminism is partly due to it being a memeplex that for years has been central in both content and design choices in a variety of Nordic larps that have, one way or another, set the contemporary standard. Of course, it might be a question of whether feminist larpers demand the creation of feminist larps or if feminist larps create feminist larpers; personally, I think that the correct answer is probably a mix of the two. There is no getting around the fact that we somehow seem to have gotten a lot better at making larps that incorporate these ideals though, and I for one believe that memetic bleed-out has played a part. For my own sake, observing the struggles of marginalized groups in general society on an intellectual level is one thing; routinely dealing with structures within which these marginalization issues are recognized and addressed as the most natural thing in the world is a lot more efficient with regard to furthering my understanding and evolving my progressive views and values.
On the individual level, memetic bleed-out can be quite hard to recognize. Why do we hum that particular song? Why do we hold that specific opinion on that particular subject? Why have our views evolved over time? Why do we “know” how to act and behave in certain social settings? I think it is safe to say that why we behave the way we do is rarely the result of one single defining reason and there is possibly no right answer to any of the questions above.
This is what makes memetic bleed such a difficult thing to grasp. In fact, the moment we become cognitively aware that we are affected by it, it might even be possible that the effect diminishes, maybe even disappears. The reason why it is important to understand though is that the memes with which our characters interact will latch onto and take advantage of the exact same functions in our consciousness that any meme that we encounter in our daily lives will. In addition, it might be that when subjecting our characters to ideas that we as players will find ridiculous or even harmful, we will without being fully aware of it have lowered some of our “shields,” thereby making ourselves more susceptible to them.
For instance, in 2017, to portray a German officer that was a true believer in Nazism in 1942, I read Mein Kampf as part of my preparation. My short review is that it was a jumbled together mess of ideas that were sometimes ridiculously easy to counter. Yet, when I read it in-game, my character hanging on to every word, and me using the same words to explain the ideas to my fellow German characters, it felt very differently. I am not saying that the experience turned me on to Nazism, but it felt uncomfortable enough for me to decide to actively de-role by rereading the arguments against the particular points to which my character had attached himself. I must also mention that I used this larp as one of a few to see if I could detect the elusive memetic bleed-out. To this day, I am not certain if I did detect it or if I just think I did because I wanted to do so.
“Cleveland Trust rotunda – pt. 2” by Chewy734 (CC BY 2.0).
In Summary
As larp continues to evolve and take ever larger steps into the realms of education, training, and therapy, so must we also seek to further our understanding of the phenomena connected to it. It is my opinion that better understanding bleed is crucial in order for larp to be as valuable an addition as possible in the mentioned fields. In that regard, in the last few years, important work that has furthered our understanding has been done by, among others, Jonaya Kemper who introduced the term emancipatory bleed, Whitney “Strix” Beltrán who introduced the term ego bleed, and Maury Elizabeth Brown who has written about the connection between player triggers and bleed.
As I add my thoughts to the ongoing discussion, let me make it clear that I am acutely aware of how we all tend to fall in love with our own ideas. As Dan Ariely puts it, “In the scientific world, the Not-Invented-Here bias is fondly called the ‘toothbrush theory.’ The idea is that everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone needs one, everyone has one, but no one wants to use anyone else’s” (Ariely 2012).
Let me then be the first to say that I am certain that there is a lot more out there to figure out, but I hope that my thoughts on possible structures can at least be useful as a point for further discussion. For all I know, there might be categories that are lacking or one of my proposed categories is only part of a larger one. And so let me end this little write up with a very familiar call for further research, and state my belief that either some of the great thinkers I have cited or maybe someone we haven’t even heard of yet will deliver it to us in due time. To me, at least, the future of bleed seems bright.
“Stained glass 2: Seen in the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, Veletrzni (Trades Fair) Palace, Prague” by Tony Hisgett (CC BY 2.0).
References
Ariely, Dan. 2010. The Upside of Irrationality. London: Harper.
Beltrán, Whitney “Strix.” 2013. “Shadow Work: A Jungian Perspective on the Underside of Live Action Role-Play in the United States.” In Wyrd Con Companion Book 2013, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 94-101. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con.
Brown, Maury Elizabeth. 2014. “Pulling the Trigger on Player Agency: How Psychological Intrusions in Larps Affect Game Play.” In The Wyrd Con Companion Book 2014, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, 96-111. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con.
Sutherland, Stuart. 1989. The Macmillian Dictionary of Psychology. Basingstoke: The Macmillian Press Ltd.
Cover Photo: Saint-Malo Cathedral in Brittany, France. “Pillar and pinnacle, arch and corbel” by Derek Σωκράτης Finch on Flickr (CC BY 2.0). Image has been cropped.
