The Ink That Bleeds

A zine about bleed, immersion, writing to find out, self care, and the landscape of your unconscious, with insights from my own play.

I've been playing so many journaling games the past two years. Some you may have heard of, like Thousand Year Old Vampire, and other great ones you may not have, like The Wandering Lake and The Magus and Last Tea Shop. Some I played for months, like Hopelessly Devoted, some for a few hours, like a lonely road, and some for just twenty minutes, like Foam & Fiction.

Sometimes they’re super immersive. I get lost in them and have a hard time taking a break. Sometimes they’re so bleedy I can’t stop thinking about them, about their characters, outside the game, surfacing my emotions from them when I’m at the supermarket, or driving, or trying to read something, totally fucked up by them. And sometimes they’re utterly forgettable.

The Ink That Bleeds is me writing all about it — how immersion works, about bleed in of stuff from our lives into our journal game experiences and bleed out of emotions and concerns from games into our outer lives, about why journaling games are having their cultural moment, about self care, playing your approximate self, worlds as relationships, why writing dialogue is so affecting, and more — so you can do it too.

And I show it all with excerpts from my own actual play of more than a dozen different games.

I've had such a good time, and such affecting experiences; andThe Ink That Bleeds is some of the most engaging, thought-provoking, and inspiring writing I've done about play and the potential of games. I can't wait for you to see it.