![]() ![]() So when I came upon Ser Teagan and Laurel Bay holding each other and confessing their affections to another player, it was very easy for me to slip into the emotional headspace of “The person I’m crushing on likes somebody else” pain. During the second game, I forced myself to remain conscious of this fact. Jay seemed like a perfectly nice person, but I really knew very few details about him. Immediately, I recalled the lesson I learned with Godhand: The character is not the player. At the second game, I was going to lean into that. It occurred to me after the first game that Stradha probably had a crush on Ser Teagan. These characters are played by two awesome people named Jay and Loryanna. One of them was a knight named Ser Teagan and the other a nomadic mage named Laurel Bay. In the first game, I befriended several people both in and out of game. I created a character named Stradha, a mysterious assassin who found herself liberated from her murderous career in this new world. Eventually, the stars aligned and I joined them for a few games of Twin Mask, an immersive, weekend-long, fantasy LARP. For two years, my friends tried to get me to go LARPing with them. A Story of Emotional Bleed Handled Correctlyįast forward to 2018. It was a hard, embarrassing lesson learned, but an important one. All this time, I allowed the emotions of our characters’ relationship to bleed into my reality because it was fulfilling a fantasy I wanted. The more she told me about the player behind Godhand, the more I realized that the character and the reality were completely different people. Had Godhand been straight with me from the start, we all could’ve been friends. The ironic thing about all this was that this woman and I ended up really liking each other. I was providing the emotional support Godhand wasn’t giving her after he basically cheated on her with someone online. The two of us ended up talking on the phone for several weeks. She found out about me and she was furious. We continued a few months longer until the day I received a phone call from Godhand’s girlfriend. Yes, it was selfish, but I developed an emotional connection to this tall, handsome, hunter with white hair. Despite learning this knowledge, I still wanted to roleplay our relationship. He knew about my boyfriend when I started the game and our subsequent breakup. He asked me, “Did you know Godhand had a girlfriend this whole time?” I was stunned. ![]() One day, I was out to lunch with a real-life friend who played with us. We played together for about two years before we ever told each other our real names or spoke on voice chat.īut I didn’t know that Godhand was keeping some huge secrets from me. We became friends and moved from guild to guild together over the years. At that time, I was currently stuck in a bad relationship that made me miserable, and the game was my escape. Godhand was the embodiment of my ideal, fantasy-era male. To this day, I remember seeing a tall, handsome elf with long white hair and his bow and arrows standing atop a hill on La Theine Plateau. After a few short weeks of playing, I met a player named Godhand. A Story of Emotional Bleed Gone Wrongīack in 2003, I started playing Final Fantasy XI, the MMORPG. Personally, I find romantic bleed to be the most dangerous. ![]() ![]() Or when character conflict makes the players want to cease playing with each other. It can happen when we start feeling affection for another player whose character is linked in a romantic storyline. Sometimes these emotions can affect our relationships with other players out-of-game. When these feelings persist after the game is over, that’s when bleed occurs. When we play a character for a long time, it’s easy to get swept up in the highs of victorious battle and the lows of character death. Part of the joy of roleplay comes from diving into the fantasy of being something we’re not. It’s a phenomenon where the emotions from a character affect the player out of the game and vice versa. Bleed is a term I only heard about recently, mainly among live-action roleplayers (LARPers). ![]()
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