Bleed-In, Bleed-Out: A Design Case in Board Game Therapy

This paper explores design considerations for "Mind Shadows," a therapy board game aimed at helping players collaboratively understand and cope with emotionally complex real-life issues. The core thesis revolves around leveraging the unique opportunities of tabletop play to deconstruct personal problems, facilitate "bleed-in" of real-world issues into a framed play session, and enable "bleed-out" of insights back into everyday life. The design emphasizes creating safe spaces through malleable game rules and specific game mastering approaches.

The methodology involved a slow, reflective design process over three years, with ten game iterations and 18 documented participatory play-tests. Key design challenges identified include framing play sessions as safe spaces, balancing gamist (number-counting) and narrative (malleable rules) approaches, and managing the "bleed" phenomenon where real-life emotions and game experiences intertwine. The game, Mind Shadows, is designed for two or three players who trust each other and progresses through three phases: Set-up, Enactment, and Reflection, mirroring Hollander's Psychodrama Curve. Players describe a real-life difficulty as an opponent ("Shadow"), give each other "superpower" cards, and cooperatively use support cards and authored actions to diminish the Shadow's strength or significance.

The design principles for creating safe spaces include evoking "tend and befriend" responses to challenges, promoting cooperation over competition, and offering constructive rather than destructive player actions. Observations from play-tests indicate that a narrative approach, allowing rule malleability, fosters more meaningful emotional engagement, while a gamist approach aids initial rule learning. Players reported using in-game approaches in real-world situations, demonstrating the "bleed-out" effect. Future work will focus on further participatory workshops to experiment with rule variations, careful observation and data capture during play-testing, and developing instructions for game masters to ensure effective safe-space framing. Digital applications for tablet or cellphone are also planned to enhance playability and logging.