“My friend Adam feel that bleed, and games that aim for it, are ‘comparatively cheap, short-term pleasures… a bit like jump scares.’ My experience is so the opposite.

I think immersive, bleedy journaling games are act of purging ourselves of narratives that aren’t in our interests and enlivening ourselves for the temporal world.

I’m totally going to show you how.”

So writes Paul Czege in The Ink That Bleeds – How To Play Immersive Journaling  Games, and I’m going to show you some of what’s inside and what it made me think.

The Ink That Bleeds was actually one of the ZineQuest projects we highlighted at the tail’s end of this year’s event, and a success by all accounts – blew past its funding goal, lots of praise, quick delivery to all involved including myself.

First thing’s first, the zine acts like a buyer’s guide for journaling games. I was pleased to see some familiar games and names throughout my reading. Paul makes his own Visit to San Sibilia, multiple games from Armanda Haller show up, another game from Cat McDonald makes a prominent appearance, Last Tea Shop is central to the entire thing and we probably wouldn’t have gotten the zine without it. Even if you don’t count them, though, there are easily 20+ games being name dropped in here, and several of them are detailed in terms of their prompts or Paul’s own quoted playthrough of them. The “I’ve been playing so many journaling games the past two years” on the back cover is not an exaggeration.

It’s also incentive to keep an eye on Paul going forward, because aside from being a Diana Jones Award recipient with oodles of games available, some of the games he plays and mentions in The Ink That Bleeds are ones of his own design that aren’t the easiest to get. Be With Me (about being on a gaming show like The Bachelor or the Bachelorette and looking for love) seems to have been a physical version-only flash sale that wasn’t the easiest to find since The Ink That Bleeds took over its spot – there are only 44 copies remaining here. The Blanket (a game designed to help with bleed where you and the character from the game that’s bleeding out have a conversation about what just happened) doesn’t seem to be published yet – Paul mentions in the zine needing to get to that soon.

One of the neater things about the zine on the production side is that the table of contents is really a bit of an index based not on numerical or alphabetical order but concepts – if there’s a particular idea in the zine that you want to read up on, it’ll be easy to track down. So, as I’m writing about The Ink That Bleeds, I’m going to use this to jump to the ideas that caught my eye right away, and if you happen to read the zine yourself you’ll be able to jump right there as well. It won’t be exhaustive – there’s a lot to chew on packed into these thirty-eight pages – but it will be the Seamus-picked highlights!

Your Unconscious Mind, Playing Your Approximate Self, and Bleed (In and Out)

It’s hard for me to pull any one thing out of this first section to show to you, because it’s so central to the entire text – the page numbers for these three ideas are all over the place. In short, Paul proposes that the strength of journaling games, specifically immersive journaling games, is that they allow us to tell the stories we want to tell. The stories that we might not even consciously know we want to tell.

There’s the natural world that simply is, Paul writes (“viruses and natural geography and dolphins and…”), and the contrived world (“credit ratings and Twitter and prisons…”) that tells us what we should and shouldn’t do. Together they form the temporal world, the one we all live in. Relationships are each a world, he goes on, with each person gradually putting things into it to create said world that “exists within and against the contrived world… appreciates and recognizes you like the contrived world doesn’t, and has its own morality and awareness and rituals and language and narrative.”

Sounds a bit like a gaming group that’s playing together for a while, doesn’t it?

“An immersive journaling game is the same. Your unconscious puts its concerns, what it knows about you and wants for you, its insights about the natural world and life and humanity, and its understandings contrary to the contrived world, into the game as a world for you to inhabit. And you are as much made by it for your life in the temporal world as you are by the worlds of your relationships.”

This is further enhanced by Paul’s decision to play most of these games as himself, or rather his “approximate” self.

“So for one game maybe it’s a different name, to give me some distance from a character who is going to experience horrors. For another, maybe it’s slightly different life circumstances, like I’m not married if the game is about solving a murder on a singles cruise. But really I’m playing myself.”

It doesn’t get more immersive than actually imagining yourself as experiencing the situations that a game puts you in, even if there are a few filters and adjustments done in your own backstory.

Then, of course, there is bleed, where the emotions of the game bleed in – 

“So maybe it’s a character from a book, or from history, or someone or a location from a random photo. Maybe it’s a toy we loved that we lost at a park as a child. Maybe it’s a character from another RPG we played. When our unconscious brings it into an immersive game, that can give it a voice like it didn’t have before.”

– and out: 

“Emotions and concerns from within an immersive world transpire to consume you during your temporal life.”

Write To Find Out and Writing Dialogue

There are some writing techniques to help deepen these things, to help build these immersive worlds. If the first bit of the header there is reminding you of one of the chief principles of Apocalypse World – play to find out – and many games that followed it, it shouldn’t be a surprise; Vincent Baker and Paul were both on The Forge, back in the day. The writing style that Paul proposes to use to improve immersion, however, is based on stream of consciousness. You ‘write to find out’, putting the decisions making process and choices right there on the page. Paul provides a few examples from Be With Me, trying to figure out who the contestants are. Of one named Ask Key he writes:

“Why is she doing the show? I don’t see her doing it for trans awareness. Not for the money wither. She’s successful in her job somehow. Art restoration? Field biology? Medical research? Stunt woman? Property manager? Yes. Property manager. Would she fall for me? Would a trans woman fall for me? Why is she doing the show then? She wants to adopt a child from her birth country, but the government won’t let her because she’s trans and single. She thinks they might if she’s a celebrity, if there’s international pressure. So, she’s super determined to go far on the show.”

It’s turning off the edit-as-you-go machine that often slows down, well, me, and letting your unconscious mind simply work through the questions placed in front of it until it gets to a satisfying answer. It’s not always easy, sometimes it can take a long time,  but if working as intended you’ll always get to the story beats you really want to get to.

The second technique is, for me anyways, a little bit easier to get a handle on. If immersing oneself in a game is like immersing oneself in a relationship, then the same tool can be used, and the primary tool for building a relationship is conversation. Playing a game of It Is Written, Paul finds himself as a cartomancer who can’t fall in love with his client.

“”What do you hope to find out today?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes at herself. “Oh, well, maybe if I’m going to meet someone?”

“If you’re going to find love?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the best question. If someone doesn’t have love, I never understand why they ask me about money or career or something.”

“My daughter watched earlier, and thought I should come. But yes, I’m divorced. I’ve dated a bit, but haven’t found anyone.”

“Okay, well, let’s see what’s going to happen,” I said.

So if my first recommendation is write to find out, my second is to look for games that put you in conversational situations, and when you’re playing in those situations, write dialogue. Everything comes so alive from dialogue.  You’ll feel it when you do it.”

A Braided Lifescape

So, here’s something interesting. Because he’s playing his approximate self in all of these games, Paul hits upon a new idea.

“I could play more than one game at the same time, alternating between them for the journal entries I wrote.

And… wow!”

Specifically he tells the tale of a game of Hopelessly Devoted entwined with Haller’s Once and Again, games of being part of a service order and six prompts that occur as you travel around with repeated prompts telling the story of it that’s changed since it happened respectively. Since his self had already been in other games, even more got pulled in.

“I rolled a prompt for Once and Again first, which was about two people finding each other after years apart, and because the first time you roll a prompt it’s something that happens to you, I wrote about running into Morgan – from It Is Written, who I’d felt so drawn to – at a founders festival at one of the small towns and she was with her old high school sweetheart she’d recently reconnected with. I wrote to find out, and that’s what I found out. Ugh.

She introduced me to him – ‘Paul, this is Tim’ – and told him she knew me from when I’d done a card reading for her. But I didn’t stay for much conversation.

Then I rolled a prompt from Hopelessly Devoted. It told me there was a routine in my life that someone knew and used for their advantage.

I wrote how I would routinely swim in a certain secluded lake and how Tim found me there, how he was a taxidermist in one of the towns, and good at tracking, and found me at the lake. He told me how his elderly mom lived alone in a cabin on a high forest lake and had some mental challenges and how he’d been trying to convince her to go to assisted living but she had refused.”

And on Paul goes, his self having to try and help Tim because he’s part of this modern service order, a prompt from Once and Again leading to Tim’s mom singing as Paul comes up the trail, giving her a card reading from It Is Written, learning to shapeshift with her from Hopelessly Devoted, and on and on it goes. Once the seal was broken with two games, it started to make sense to add more – after all, It Is Written got tossed into the mix right off the bat. Each fed into the other, creating a sort of bleed-in feedback loop. Even getting killed off in one game didn’t bring an end to the story, because another one provided a way back to living.

Instead of a solo game, alone, you get a series of games, all connected by your self/character.

Why play one game out of your collection, when you could play them all?

The Ink That Bleeds and Me

There’s a lot that struck me while reading The Ink That Bleeds, but among them was just how different Paul’s journaling game playstyle and my own is, and a little bit how similar they are. 

I originally backed the zine simply because I thought the topic was an interesting one. I don’t consider myself… I don’t know, academically minded? I’m not sure if that’s the right phrase for it, but I consider myself just a guy who has been around for a while and has a lot of enthusiasm. The idea of someone taking this deep dive into the subgenre of immersive journaling games had an appeal because I didn’t feel like it was something I can do myself. I expected a fun read, an interesting one, something I could show to people who don’t get the journaling game thing yet and say ‘here, he’ll explain it better than I can.’ I did in fact get those things.

Foolishly, though, I didn’t expect to learn very many new things.

—

While I think Paul and I are both playing to find out, the idea of writing to find out the way he does, writing out the decision making process instead of it banging around in one’s skull, had literally never occurred to me. I think I run into a couple of issues with the idea. My own manifestation of ADHD hates putting things down on the page the ‘wrong’ way – outlines and drafts have always been hard. As a result, there are times when I’m playing a journaling game where I’ll just have to sit with a prompt for a while, or take a break from the game (Paul actually has some interesting methods of taking a break from a game in the zine, too). I can absolutely see the use of this method, though. It does get that process out onto the page, turns it into a conversation between yourself and what you’ve written, which many may find easier than just burning brain cells.

It’s also given me food for thought on the lens through which I look at the games I play, however. “You’re not writing a story for someone to read,” writes Paul, but… that’s not really been true in my case, has it?

I don’t play many journaling games aside from what’s been featured in Solitaire Storytelling. This has the vibes of a self-fulfilling prophecy; if I like a game enough to play it, I’m probably going to want to share it with other people. And I’ve known that doing so has shaped my play, obviously. I format things after the fact for readability, I scan for typos (this would probably happen even on my own, but still), what comes before the ‘read more’ button may be an intro written outside of the game, there’s a review portion to write after the fact, and always I’m considering the fact that someone else is (hopefully) going to read this. The idea of writing to find out doesn’t seem to plug in well with the way I’ve played this kind of game, which has me mulling over other ways being a solo journaling actual player might have shaped how I’m interacting with these games.

Maybe I’ll try to play games more just for me. Maybe I’ll give writing to find out a try but keep it behind the scenes. Maybe it’s just not for me. But it has my brain humming either way.

—

While I’ve written in the voice of a character, having them ‘talk’ to the reader, back-and-forth dialogue between the protagonist and another character wasn’t something I’d ever done either. I was reading the zine at about the same time I was reading I Have No Railgun and I Must Scream, so when I played it I used some dialogue between Hope and their sister Hazel to what I think was great effect. Dialogue is definitely something I’m going to be trying out more in the future, full stop. 

Hey, not all of these have to be complicated. It works.

—

Speaking of screaming about a lack of railguns, the idea of putting multiple games together immediately had me wondering if I could combine Railgun and my own Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage. Could I trade them back and forth, using one to inspire the other? In my head LATSW has presented as decently hard on the sci-fi scale, so could the prompts Railgun prompts lend it a more superpowered vibe and take it to new and exciting places? How would the ending points for both games, each of which could determine if the Pilot lives or dies, interact if the results are different? Hey, what if I put Laser Beams Like So Many Stars into the mix? 

Overall it seems a fascinating, long-term project that I’d love to give a try.

—

I don’t really play as myself, approximate or otherwise.

This doesn’t mean I haven’t felt immersed in a game, or never experienced bleed, while journaling. Laser Beams Like So Many Stars was my own fandom of mecha anime being dropped into a situation where the robots and casualties were all too real. I Will Fill This Library Myself If I Have To was a kind of power fantasy for me; getting to share books, including ones I’ve written, with others is about as close to an approximate myself as I think I’ve gotten, although I’d be lying if I said I was thinking of it that way at the time. It’s been more than a year and I still can’t get the nostalgia-for-a-game-I-never-played of A Requiem for Horizon Prophecy Online: The Final Four out of my head.

I think that while immersion and bleed are something that happens when I play these games, it turns out that I’m approaching them first and foremost as character studies rather than aiming for an immersive experience. The character is decidedly not me, they’re conjured up by me and/or the game, and then I play to find out who they are and what they experience. In a way, it’s a relationship, and a world, and I thoroughly enjoy it, and some parts of me bleed in and some parts of them bleed out… but I can see where my immersion is reaching a high-water-mark that I won’t really get past without putting more of myself into the game.

I’m not certain if I’ll ever really play myself. I do love to study another character, and myself and I… we’ve had our problems. But I find myself in agreement with Paul, that immersion and bleed aren’t just “cheap, short-term pleasures” if they’re done right. While it’s not from a solo game, and I haven’t talked about it around here before, I put a lot of myself into Max – we share a fact that our lives went nowhere according to ‘plan’, but have still turned out to be where we’re happy with them. Probably against the odds. If playing as yourself is a way to achieve that level of immersion, if it lets your unconscious out to give you what you need, to reaffirm what you want for yourself… well, I’m not arguing with it.

So. Maybe. Someday. And maybe my approximate self will even show up around here.

I wonder what he’ll have to say.

— 

The entire point of this very long section, going through my own considerations of what The Ink That Bleeds had to teach me and what it made me think about, is that if you’re new to the notion of a solo journaling game? This is going to be a great resource, absolutely. If you’ve got a dozen or more games under your belt, however, and think you know what you’re about? Well, you probably do know what you’re about… but The Ink That Bleeds stands a good chance at showing you something new and opening up even more ways to think about and enjoy the games that you love.

—

You can read the first couple thousand words of the zine in an excerpt at The Indie Game Reading Club. True to the spirit of zines, though, there are no plans for a complete digital version – you’ll need to get your hands on a physical copy of The Ink That Bleeds yourself. If you missed the Kickstarter, you can get one here for $22 plus shipping ($28 total at maximum, looks like). There were originally 150 copies available, and there are 109 left as of this writing, so get one while you can. After all like I said, these are just the Seamus-picked highlights;  Paul really will explain it better than I can.

“Pick a game. Start playing.”

Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together?  Well, you could vote for us in the 2023 ENNIE Awards! Tell you friends about us! Follow one of our fine and elegantly crafted links to DriveThruRPG, where we get Affiliate credit to get more games to review! Finally, you could support us on Patreon, which lets us pay our writers, cover expenses, and save up for future project!