Bleed - Exploring Psychological Transference in Games - Extra Credits

Have you ever played a game where you feel what your character feels? Maybe you had to set the controller down for a moment as you struggled with a complex moral decision. Or you cried out in joy when the dice gave you just the right result to defeat your character's long-time nemesis. Well, today we're going to be talking about the ups and downs of you as a player riding along your character's emotional roller coaster. Big thanks to Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring this episode. Wait, really? On the episode about bleed, we get the OG's of online shaving to help us out. All right, heck yeah. Check out their starter set for just $5 at the link below. When we play a character in a game, we step into the shoes of a different person and take actions we can't or won't in our daily lives. Once we're done, we tell ourselves we can set the character back down and walk away without any consequences. Because after all, it's just a game. But that's not quite true. Occasionally, we feel what our fictional avatars experience as the

emotions and exhilaration in this fictional setting seep into our minds here in the real world. We unconsciously hold our breath during a tense fight, lean left or right as we take a tight turn in Mario Kart, or tear up when a beloved companion we fought beside suddenly dies. This phenomenon is called psychological transference, or bleed, as the emotions of the fictional character are bleeding into the player's emotions. Bleed isn't inherently good or bad. Some experiences leave us feeling awful about ourselves, while others leave us feeling on top of the world. And some players experience bleed more easily than others. Case in point, Eddie finds himself mulling over a character's fate hours after he's finished the game, while his wife can more easily pick up and set down the character that she's playing. Myself, I fall somewhere in the middle, you know, depending on the story itself. But all that's to say that all people experience bleed differently. Not to mention, bleed can go the other direction as well. Maybe you've had a bad day at work and you're feeling aggravated. In that moment, it might be

harder to play as a character who needs to make peace with the nearby villagers. Not to mention the game you're playing might encourage you to use a diplomatic or cool-headed tactic. But really, all you want to do is whip out a sword and let your blade do the talking to some unwitting NPCs. So, emotions can both bleed out from the character as well as bleed into us as the player. To be fair, though, not all emotional reactions count as bleed. Sometimes, we're emotional for a character, like the way we would be in a film, rather than experiencing that character's emotions vicariously. But, bleed is a specific kind of emotional reaction, one of empathy, where the barrier breaks down a bit between who you're playing and who you are. Now, there are a few different ways to ratchet up the possibility for empathy in our games. The first is to duplicate or emulate the direct actions the character is performing. Games like Papers, Please and Her Story are excellent examples of this. In both, you're performing simple actions, like checking documents or reviewing interview footage, but those actions are

identical to the ones that the characters are also performing. They're designed to encourage bleed, requiring players to make decisions or take actions exactly as the character they're playing would. The more abstractions you remove from a situation, the more you empathize with it. In fact, involving your whole body can dramatically increase your emotional engagement. The term bleed was started in the Nordic live-action role-playing community, and that's not a surprise because they're great at this. It's one thing to watch a character move on a screen, but if you were to say wear the character's clothes and literally walk in their shoes, the potential for bleed skyrockets. It's close to what method actors feel when they talk about getting inside the heads of the characters they portray. And you know, I'd wager that the same will be true of AR games once we start building a few with a little more characterization than, say, Pokémon GO or Ingress. Another way to promote bleed is to communicate as the character. Just about any tabletop role-playing game does this because as the player, you're saying and narrating the actions on behalf of your character. However,

interactive audio dramas or games like Ace Attorney where you can talk to a game and have it respond also increases our emotional connection. And even dialogue choices in the first person can help with this. But the further those choices get from the character's direct words, the less connection you'll have to the options. It's like when you talk through a problem with a friend. The act of saying things out loud makes us connect with the situation more strongly, particularly if talking about it and getting a response feels like a real conversation. Humans are social animals and conversations tap into our emotional connections with each other. That's why board games like Diplomacy can end up provoking strong emotional reactions. Almost the entire game is conducted as a series of private conversations between world leaders. Inevitably, someone you thought was on your side will betray you. And sometimes, it'll really sting. And that's because there's not a bad dice roll or a computer AI between you and that betrayal. Lastly, you can increase bleed by presenting situations that are

recognizably human. Now, I'm not talking about genre here because let's be real. People have way more bleed in Mass Effect or Dragon Age than say a Call of Duty game that has a realistic setting. All those games are ultimately about killing enemies in a war. But while many of us, thankfully, don't know what it's like to really be in a war, many of us have fallen in love, been betrayed, and lost friends. When a character goes through experiences that feel familiar to us, that's powerful. That emotional resonance acts like a shortcut, bringing up all of our own memories of when we felt similarly. We end up re-experiencing some of our own emotional history and in doing so, we empathize with characters whose journeys, at least on an emotional level, echo our own. All that said, it's good to stay safe because sometimes negative emotions can bleed, too. You can find yourself becoming angry or being a jerk by staying too long in the heads of characters that are angry jerks. But if you can avoid that, bleed can also let us find catharsis, explore and comprehend our own emotional reactions,

or even just to the tiniest degree, help us understand what it's like to be someone facing struggles that are different than our own. And that is powerful. Perhaps one of the most valuable tools in games. So don't be afraid to let your games make you feel. Enjoy the bleed everyone. Oh, you knew what I meant. Big thanks to Dollar Shave Club for sponsoring this episode and also being the masters of preventing physical bleed on the face. Man, I still can't believe the word play kismet here. I've been a fan of these folks ever since this internet classic back in 2012 and they've only grown more awesome ever since. Beyond super comfortable blades, they've also got great shower, hair, and oral care products to boot. My personal favorite being the pillowy shave lather for an amazingly comfortable shave, but full disclosure, not good for sleeping on. Sorry sheets. And right now, you can get either their shave, shower, or oral starter sets for only five bucks by clicking on the link in the description below. If you got a body, they got you covered.