There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

Abstract

From reenactments to pilgrimages, extraordinary experiences engage consumers with frames and roles that govern their actions for the duration of the experience. Exploring such extraordinary frames and roles, however, can make the act of returning to everyday life more difficult, a process prior research leaves implicit. The present ethnography of live action role-playing explains how consumers return from extraordinary experiences and how this process differs depending on consumers’ subjectivity. The emic term “bleed” captures the trace that extraordinary frames and roles leave in everyday life. The subjective tension between the extraordinary and the ordinary intensifies bleed. Consumers returning from the same experience can thus suffer different bleed intensities, charting four trajectories of return that differ in their potential for transformation: absent, compensatory, cathartic, and delayed. These findings lead to a transformative recursive process model of bleed that offers new insights into whether, how, and why consumers return transformed from extraordinary experiences with broader implications for experiential consumption and marketing.

I took the hat off, clinging to it all the way home, thinking about being back in this strange, therapeutic, enlightening experience, where the hosts seemed to understand me better than I did. I wanted to go back; despite the small panic attack and emotional exhaustion that washed over me, I wanted to do it all again (Alexander 2017).

Accessing an alternative realm beyond the everyday where they can be someone else has captured consumers’ imagination for centuries. Fascination with utopian worlds and possible selves continues to the present day (Kozinets 2002; Schouten 1991), and consumer experiences with fictional or virtual places offer a new frontier for innovative companies (Bertele et al. 2020). Contemporary consumer society is brimming with opportunities to join extraordinary experiences that allow for the exploration of different settings and roles—from reenacting the fur trade in modern mountain men’s rendezvous (Belk and Costa 1998), to immersion into vampire narratives during the Whitby Goth Weekend (Goulding and Saren 2016), to the decelerated experience that a Camino de Santiago pilgrimage promises (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019).

Returning from such experiences can be challenging. Modern mountain men’s “romantic nostalgia” (Belk and Costa 1998, 233), Whitby Goths’ “trace” (Goulding and Saren 2016, 221), and pilgrims’ “post-Camino syndrome” (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019, 1158) all suggest that coming back to reality is difficult. What this challenge exactly looks like, however, is still a question. How the kinds of lives consumers are leading influences the process of returning from extraordinary experiences also remains underexplored. Previous scholarship examines subjective understandings of consumers’ everyday life mainly as a motivation to engage in the experience (Kozinets 2002; Tumbat and Belk 2011), leaving uncharted how individual differences influence the process of returning. Yet the consequences of experiential consumption are likely as idiosyncratic as its antecedents (Tumbat and Belk 2011). Scholarship thus needs a better understanding of what happens when consumers leave extraordinary experiences and reintegrate into everyday life, and how subjective understandings of the tension between “extraordinary” and “everyday” influence this process.

This article examines the challenge of returning from extraordinary experiences in the context of live action role-play (LARP), an extraordinary experience during which consumers explore fantastic frames within which they assume the roles of invented characters (Orazi and Cruz 2019). Since frames and roles characterize what consumers detach from when returning to everyday life, these Goffmanian (1974) concepts enable us to unpack the emic term “bleed” as the process through which consumers’ experience in the extraordinary seeps into the ordinary, like dye colors bleed into one another. Unpacking bleed is theoretically relevant to advance understanding of the process by which consumers return from extraordinary experiences. As a result, we make three contributions to the literature: We (1) identify the critical dimensions of bleed to provide greater insight into what happens when consumers return from extraordinary experiences; (2) explain how consumers’ subjective understandings of the tension between the extraordinary experience and their everyday lives can influence bleed’s intensity; and (3) formalize a transformative recursive process that captures the diverse trajectories consumers can take when returning from extraordinary experiences.

In the following sections, we offer a conceptual framework that systematically reviews and reinterprets previous research into extraordinary experiences in terms of outcomes of returning, frames and roles with which consumers engage, and sources of tension. We then present our context and methods, after which we undertake an analytical investigation into the types of bleed and chart the trajectories consumers follow when they return from LARPing.

CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND

Features and Outcomes of Returning from Extraordinary Experiences

Extraordinary experiences are a “special class of hedonic consumption activities” (Arnould and Price 1993, 25) that share three identifiable features: intensity, engagement, and temporality (Abrahams 1986; Scott, Cayla, and Cova 2017). Intensity refers to the ability of extraordinary experiences to be sensorially and emotionally rich. Take clubbing, for example: “The combination of repetitive electronic music, extended periods spent dancing, and the use of ecstasy can act as a potent means to induce a loss of self, a transcendence of the body” (Goulding et al. 2009, 767). The elicited sensations bear an affinity with intense emotions, which help consumers lose themselves in the experience. Engagement reflects extraordinary experiences’ ability to drag consumers into the experience through a socially constructed frame, as we elaborate below. To walk into an extraordinary experience unexpectedly or be ignorant of the frame can be upsetting, as Goulding and Saren (2016, 219) explain in their study of Whitby Goth Weekend. Two campers who were unaware of the festival had been sleeping in their tent in the town’s graveyard, when around 2 a.m. festivalgoers dressed up as “vampires, sitting amidst the graves, holding candles, fangs glinting in the light, drinking red wine” woke them up with a shock. Fortunately for outsiders then, extraordinary experiences dissolve quite quickly after they form because, while they are generally nonstop, multiday-long events, they do end. Temporality refers to this time-limited nature of extraordinary experiences. Returning from intense and engaging experiences, however, can create disillusion when reentering everyday life.

Consumer research acknowledges instances of maladjustment upon returning. Weekend skydivers (Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993, 15) and bikers (Schouten and McAlexander 1995, 45) suffer cravings and “withdrawal” when Monday morning comes around. Modern mountain men feel “romantic nostalgia” for “the fantasy time and place that they visited and helped create” (Belk and Costa 1998, 233). Carnival goers need to face the consequences of their excesses and subversions when the party is over (Weinberger and Wallendorf 2012). Whitby Goth Weekend leaves a “trace” with Goths, and a trace of the Goths is left in Whitby’s culture and economy after the festival (Goulding and Saren 2016, 221). Husemann and Eckhardt (2019, 1158) describe symptoms of “post-Camino syndrome”: confusion, depression, disorientation, emptiness, fear, irritation, panic, purposelessness, and stress. Burners, climbers, Trekkers, surfers, and white-water rafters report similar challenges upon returning to everyday life (table 1).

While these contributions acknowledge challenges, they do not explain how these challenges filter back into everyday life and to what effect (Kozinets 2002). Understanding this process would require conceptualizing the critical dimensions of the experience that extend into everyday life. In the next section, we review literature on classes of hedonic consumption that are not necessarily extraordinary experiences to gain insight into these dimensions of consumers’ returns and readjustments.

Critical Dimensions of Returning from Hedonic Consumption

As previously mentioned, extraordinary experiences are a special class of hedonic consumption, so we scoured the literature for studies addressing returns and readjustments from adjoining hedonic consumption classes, including instore shopping (Borghini, Sherry, and Joy 2021), virtual reality (VR; Smahel, Blinka, and Ledabyl 2008), and narratives (van Laer et al. 2019). Though diverse, the problem of returning and adjusting transcends these classes. They converge on the sources of the challenge: leaving a physical, virtual, or imagined setting (Fine 2002) and the role consumers occupy within it (Seregina 2019).

Spectacular retail spaces, such as Nike Town, make visitors feel “transported to another place, an otherworldly site inhabited by super[humans]” (Peñaloza 1998, 380). As part of such experiences, consumers get emotionally attached to places and ascribe meaning to them (Debenedetti, Oppewal, and Arsel 2014). When forced to detach from meaningful retail environments, consumers can “lose … a link to a meaningful past,” as their so-called “displacement” takes away a possibility for future self-transformation (Borghini et al. 2021, 893).

Additionally, the video-gaming literature discusses detachment from characters. In massive multiplayer online role-playing games, players journey into virtual worlds using avatar-characters with whom they form intense emotional connections (Linderoth 2012). Avatar-characters serve as a means to explore fantastic and/or idealized selves in alternate realities (Miao et al. 2022), leading to a player-character identity overlap termed “character attachment” (Lewis, Weber, and Bowman 2008). This attachment can produce withdrawal symptoms and identity issues after the activity ends (Smahel et al. 2008).

In literary studies, transportation theory proposes that consumers travel some distance from their world of origin through stories (Gerrig 1993). Transportation requires mental imagery of the narrative world and empathy with its characters (for a meta-analysis, see van Laer et al. 2014). Returning from the narrative world can be transformative (Phillips and McQuarrie 2010) as long as the narrative world is not too distant from reality.

In summary, different research streams on hedonic consumption suggest three key insights into challenging returns: (1) consumers detach from specific frames; (2) in which they explored certain roles; and (3) detachment becomes more challenging the more consumers feel a tension between the experience and everyday life. An interpretative framework that demystifies the process of return must thus deconstruct the frames that set the stage for extraordinary action and exploration of extraordinary roles, while explaining why detachment triggers distress. We find in Goffman’s (1974) concepts of frames, roles, and upkeying the building blocks to lay the foundation for such a framework.

Extraordinary Frames and Roles

The concept of frame determines a critical dimension of consumers’ engagement in extraordinary experiences, specifically their attachment to the setting (Fine 2002) or space (Borghini et al. 2021). Frames are situational definitions “constructed in accord with organizing principles that govern both the events themselves and participants’ experience of these events” (Goffman 1974, 10–11). A frame thus details shared beliefs, norms, and values that set down what to find, specify how to behave, and stipulate what things mean in a specific situation. Consumers navigate everyday life using ordinary frames that set the rules of acceptable conduct in the natural and social worlds. These ordinary frames, which are already meaningful by themselves, can change into something consumers will perceive as different by adding layers of “keyed” frames.

Engagement in extraordinary experiences thus requires participants to layer more “extraordinary frames” that add to or change the normative prescriptions of ordinary frames. Frames vary in their degree of “upkeying,” or the extent that layering them “increases [the] distance from what we would call literal reality” (Goffman 1974, 366). Some add elements of dramatic performance to the acts of rafting (Arnould and Price 1993), skydiving (Celsi et al. 1993), and obstacle-racing (Scott et al. 2017). Others prescribe entire, complex systems that transform everyday life into alternative realms (Goulding and Saren 2016). The latter frames lead to Burners’ liberation and creative self-expression (Kozinets 2002), dictate acceptable reenactment practices to modern mountain men (Belk and Costa 1998), and let geeks travel to a post-capitalist utopia set 300 years in the future (Kozinets 2001). The sources of such greatly upkeying frames are often narrative in nature (van Laer, Visconti, and Feiereisen 2018), such as Roddenberry’s science-fiction writing and productions for Star Trek conventions (Kozinets 2001) and Stoker’s (1897/1992) Dracula novel for the Whitby Goth Weekend (Goulding and Saren 2016). When layered onto ordinary frames, these extraordinary frames offer mutual understanding to direct participants’ actions during the experience.

Beyond setting the normative stage for a situation, frames prescribe roles—namely, what is expected of a person in a particular frame (Goffman 1974). Roles shape individuals’ identity, or the understanding of who they are as they define their subjective reality in respect of the relevant frame (Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler 2006). Consumer research acknowledges that individuals do not have strict identities (Appau, Ozanne, and Klein 2020; Schouten 1991; Seregina and Schouten 2017) but perform roles according to the referenced frames, continuously remixing the resulting self-understandings to construct an individual identity (Seregina 2019).

Since frames prescribe roles, they vary in their degree of upkeying too. Extraordinary experiences often offer the opportunity to take on a role that further contributes to the detachment from everyday life. Some roles can archetypically define what participants will do during the experience, such as walking the Camino as pilgrims (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019), posing as krewe royalty in a carnival (Weinberger and Wallendorf 2012), or conquering natural and artificial obstacles as modern heroes (Arnould and Price 1993; Scott et al. 2017; Tumbat and Belk 2011). Other extraordinary roles transcend the archetypical to present complete characters for consumers to adopt, such as Captain America at a comic book convention (Seregina and Weijo 2016), Goth Morris dancer during Whitby Goth Weekend (Goulding and Saren 2016), or Spock at a Star Trek convention (Kozinets 2001). Such roles experienced in the extraordinary contribute to the state of detachment from ordinary life and allow consumers to explore their fantastic selves (Schouten 1991).

In summary, frames and roles are two critical dimensions of engagement with the extraordinary that capture what consumers separate from when returning to the ordinary. While we do not employ Goffmanian (1974) frame analysis in our ethnography per se, we use his conceptualization of frames, roles, and upkeying to elucidate our data and characterize the critical dimensions of returning from the extraordinary. Table 1 summarizes the challenge of returning and provides a reinterpretation of engagement with extraordinary experiences documented by prior research.

Tensions between Extraordinary and Ordinary Frames and Roles

During extraordinary experiences, consumers “leave behind their normal values, beliefs, and customs” (Goulding and Saren 2016, 220). They become less reflexive of their ordinary frames and roles as extraordinary ones are layered upon them. The more an experience’s frames and roles are thus “upkeyed,” the more they allow a departure from subjectively understood reality (Seregina and Schouten 2017). Even only for a brief time, this distance liberates consumers from the societal constraints imposed on their world and roles (Kozinets 2002), enabling the exploration of alternative perspectives and selves (Belk and Costa 1998; Orazi and Cruz 2019). When the experience inevitably ends, however, the extraordinary layer dissolves and any built-up tension between ordinary and extraordinary frames and roles becomes hard to ignore.

Returning to everyday life may thus result in a rude awakening if the extraordinary frames and roles put consumers under tension as the extraordinary experience drops away. Prior research shows that individual conceptions of ordinary life are clear motivations to take part in an extraordinary experience (Cova, Carù, and Cayla 2018). Bikers long to leave unfulfilling work behind (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), modern mountain men unstable city life (Belk and Costa 1998), Trekkers the prejudice against daydreaming and fantasizing (Kozinets 2001), and Burners the unworthy market (Kozinets 2002). Whether individual differences in ordinary life conceptions influence how difficult consumers find dealing with the return, however, remains unclear. The subjective tension between extraordinary and ordinary frames and roles may be the crux to resolve the challenging return from extraordinary experiences.

In summary, extraordinary experiences are not only intense and temporal, but also engaging (Abrahams 1986; Scott et al. 2017) and they differ in terms of the extraordinary frames and roles they construct to engage consumers. Returning from extraordinary experiences whose frames govern remote worlds and removed selves may be more challenging than currently understood, particularly if consumers feel a tension with daily life. As most consumer research leaves implicit what happens when people leave extraordinary experiences and whether differences between individual consumers influence this process, we ask two fundamental questions: what is the process of returning from an extraordinary experience, and how does the return differ between consumers? To answer these questions, we analyze LARP.

CONTEXT OF STUDY: LARP

LARP refers to collective “performances that take place between imagination and embodied reality” (Seregina 2014, 19) during which consumers assume the role of a character while improvising a plot in a designated theatrical space and time (Orazi and Cruz 2019; Seregina 2019). We chose to investigate LARP as a representative context for three reasons: They are (1) extraordinary experiences, (2) governed by upkeyed frames and roles, and (3) challenging to leave.

First, while LARPs are considered games in popular press and sociology (Fine 2002; Williams et al. 2006), we view them as extraordinary experiences. In contrast with tabletop and video games, LARPs possess the defining features of extraordinary experiences: intensity, engagement, and temporality (Abrahams 1986; Scott et al. 2017). While consumers may get emotional when playing tabletop and video games, neither involves all the physical senses. At most, gamers put cards on a table or use controllers to decide the outcome of skirmishes with strange creatures. By contrast, LARPs involve telling a story both emotionally and multisensorially. They also allow more engagement than is possible with other types of games. The options open to tabletop and video gamers are limited, as it is the game designer, not the game player, who is “writing the book” (Fine 2002, 59). Conversely, LARPs give consumers more agency within their comparably loose confines. The temporality of LARPs also differs from these other games. While consumers can return to tabletop or video games anytime for as long as they want, LARPs are bound to a specific time and schedules. (See web appendix A for more details on the validation of this interpretation.)

Second, LARPs are enabled by accessing distinctive frames and roles. LARPs “entail character immersion and story engagement; hence, costumes are supportive performance elements and their quality is secondary to the story line and/or the interaction” (Seregina and Weijo 2016, 142). LARPers do not only embody characters like cosplayers do, but also embed them in their world constructed as part of the interaction between the characters.

Third, LARPers may find returning to reality difficult. Their constructive efforts are a unique part of a deep immersion into extraordinary frames and roles. Though extraordinary, this experience is lifelike, a characteristic that may present not only a challenge but also the potential for transformation; for example, in the form of skills that can be put to work in more mundane contexts (e.g., improvization skills, Mannucci, Orazi, and de Valck 2021).

METHOD

We approached the field with the aim of understanding the requirements for and consumers’ return from extraordinary experiences. To bolster the integrity of our interpretations, we triangulated our data across multiple ethnographic techniques and constantly checked our developing theory against new data, consistent with a theoretical sampling strategy (Goulding 2002). We began with an archival data collection of Monitor Celestra, a science-fiction LARP enabled by the TV series Battlestar Galactica and constructed by 389 participants in Gothenburg, Sweden, over three runs of three days each in 2013. The LARP revolved around a spaceship that the TV series had not covered. In the words of the designers, the LARP studio company Alternaliv AB, “This is the true story of the 13th Cylon model and the real reason the universe finally found peace, a story you can never watch or read. It’s a story you must live” (alternaliv.se). We expanded this probe with newspaper and web archives analyses of two more LARPs: Fairweather Manor (2015), based on the show Downtown Abbey, and College of Wizardry (2016), based on Harry Potter. This exploratory data set confirmed our intuition that a LARP is indeed an intense, engaging, temporally limited (and therefore extraordinary) experience that lets consumers explore extraordinary frames and roles. Our initial insight having passed muster, we followed up with a search for field sites.

Field Sites

As a first field site, we selected Dracarys 2016, a LARP of the fantasy genre based on the Game of Thrones novels and TV series. Terre Spezzate, a community born “from a small group of enthusiasts,” designs the LARP (events.grv.it/en). Set after season five, the designers invited “nobles and travelers” to celebrate the reconstruction of Summerhall fortress. We chose Dracarys 2016 because the fantasy genre is the most popular frame source for LARPs (Bowman 2010) and the 11-month period between character role assignment in September 2015 and mise-en-scène in August 2016 allowed for a pilot survey and netnography of the preparatory phases. As our first interviews indicated that participants find withdrawing from the experience particularly challenging, we refocused our research program to zoom in on the difficult departures from extraordinary experiences.

The second field site selected was Conscience, a science-fiction LARP based on the Westworld TV series. The event was designed by Not Only Larp, an organization that believes in LARP’s “potential to raise awareness and inspire social change” (notonlylarp.com). Conscience was set in a futuristic amusement park that robot hosts look after. Park guests could indulge their every wish without consequences. We chose Conscience because science fiction is the second most popular LARP genre (Bowman 2010), and Conscience’s theme allowed us to question how adopting countercultural norms and deviant behavior affects the transition from extraordinary experience to ordinary life.

As a third field site, we selected Demetra, again designed by Terre Spezzate. The LARP was not based on a specific TV series and portrayed an alternative reality in which traditional gender roles were reversed and a private company controlled the global food market. This third field site was thus ideal to unpack the tensions between (extra)ordinary frames and roles further.

As a fourth and final field site, we selected Dracarys 2019, a rerun of Dracarys 2016, to ask returning participants to comment on their repeat experience and perform member checks. In summary, we selected our field sites to capture variance. Table 2 breaks down the four field sites in more detail.

Ethnographic Techniques

The final research program included newspaper and web archives, a pilot survey, participant observation, collection of audiovisual materials, post-LARP interviews, consumer diaries, and netnography. We detail these techniques and the data next and in table 3.

Newspaper and Web Archives

We searched the archives for the keywords “LARP,” “live action,” “role-playing,” “television series,” and “TV series” in the global news aggregators and databases Factiva, Google News, and ProQuest and collected the nine newspaper and 11 web articles covering the Monitor Celestra (2013), Fairweather Manor (2015), and College of Wizardry (2016) LARPs. Adopting a bottom-up, inductive approach, we conducted a common discourse analysis of repeated readings and annotations of our data (van Laer and Izberk-Bilgin 2019) to identify the common features and foundations of LARPs.

Pilot Survey

We conducted an online, pre-LARP survey with 32 prospective participants in Dracarys 2016. On the Facebook page dedicated to the LARP, we posted a link to six open-ended questions (see web appendix B). This pilot survey helped us understand participants’ profile, their relationship with the lore informing the extraordinary frame (Game of Thrones), and their expectations of the LARP.

Participant Observation

In contrast with other dramatic contexts, such as theater (Goulding and Saren 2016) or reenactment (Belk and Costa 1998), LARP does not typically allow an audience, so the role of external observer is not permitted. The first author conducted the ethnographic fieldwork instead as a participant in all four field sites. Like extant ethnographies of extraordinary experiences (Arnould and Price 1993; Husemann and Eckhardt 2019), he used his body as a tool for inquiry and knowledge, engaging in a self-witnessing exercise as he constructed and acted alongside other participants.

Audiovisual Materials

These materials included photos consumers posted online, photos we took, and GoPro videos taped from the first author’s point of view. With permission from the designers, we filmed during Conscience, as the GoPro camera hidden in the first author’s hat was consistent with the science-fiction genre. Photos by consumers enabled a more complete representation and understanding of how the stories of the LARPs were told (Farace et al. 2017). These materials visualized how the setting and scenography, costumes and props help layering extraordinary frames and roles, respectively (see figure 1 and web appendices C and D).

Interviews

In the post-LARP phase we interviewed participants who we recruited via purposive sampling. None of them had completed the pilot survey. We conducted interviews with 11 Dracarys 2016, six Conscience, five Demetra, and seven Dracarys 2019 participants before theoretical saturation. Twenty-one interviewees identify as female. As LARP, similar to cosplay, can be a form of legitimization (Seregina and Weijo 2016), and two of the field sites dealt with either the dynamics of humanity and abuse (Conscience) or the reversal of patriarchy (Demetra), we suspect female participants may have been more prone to accept interview requests to voice their views on a traditionally male-dominated field. All interviewees are between 20 and 59 years of age. Half our sample is Italian, with the rest being mostly from other European countries. Most interviewees are middle-class. The interviews lasted between 30 and 96 minutes, and we conducted them either face-to-face or via videoconferencing. We used a semistructured interview approach guided by the field notes and conducted the interviews in English or Italian. All interviews were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded for analytical themes. We twice interviewed four participants from Dracarys 2016 and four from Conscience, four and two years after the respective LARPs, to conduct member checks of the emerging framework and glean deeper insights into their post-experience lives.

Consumer Diaries

Seven participants in Conscience chronicled for us their feelings during the week after their LARP. We had previously interviewed three of them. The interviewees used a simple free-form logbook made in Microsoft Word to note specific LARP-related feelings, thoughts, comments, or observations on “Day 1,” “Day 2,” etcetera, which were the sole time cues. They wrote freely and needed neither probing nor prompting. Diaries helped us grasp the challenges that returning from the extraordinary experience presented to participants, a “present” which intruded into mundane consciousness and even dreams. Table 4 offers a summary of our interviewees and diary keepers.

Netnography

The first author joined the Dracarys 2016, Conscience, and Demetra Facebook groups as a participant-researcher 11, six, and two months before their respective staging. These socially mediated communities eased coordination among participants, character relationships, and a shared interpretation of the governing frames. We manually scraped all records. Netnography was particularly useful in illuminating the post-LARP phase. Participants often continue to interact on social media after a LARP ends, reliving and sharing stories (van Laer et al. 2019); reevaluating the governing frames; and organizing out-of-character social gatherings. Given this continued existence and the mediated nature of the interaction, netnography was central to refining and finalizing our research program (Kozinets 2019), particularly the focus on the challenging return to ordinary life, and the tension between realms.

Data Analysis

Our analytical strategy involved four stages of (re)interpretation across units of analysis, with the goal of distilling an overarching theory. First, we used open coding to isolate the composite concepts, grounding the observed phenomenon—using in-vivo labels whenever possible (e.g., “cannot stop thinking about what happened,” “watching the story again”)—and calibrating our research program toward the emergent codes. For example, we noted the impressive accounts of difficult returns to ordinary life and thus focused the research program to home in on this challenge. Second, we used axial coding to find the relationships between first-order concepts and aggregate them to second-order themes, including “disembedding,” “dissociation,” “frames under tension,” “roles under tension,” “extraordinary transformation,” and “ordinary transformation.” Third, we heavily iterated between the second-order themes and existing literature on extraordinary experience and frame analysis. Using selective coding, we derived three aggregate categories: (1) bleed types, (2) bleed intensifiers, and (3) transformation. Fourth, we returned to our data and using our coding from stage 3, developed detailed summaries of each informant’s bleed trajectory (for a similar procedure, see Mannucci et al. 2021). We charted these trajectories to better understand how individual consumers differ in their return and to formalize a recursive transformative process (Giesler and Thompson 2016).

FINDINGS

Bleed Types: The Traces Left by the Extraordinary

Uprooted from the extraordinary frames and disrobed of their roles, LARPers leave the experience but do not always make a clean break. The emic term “bleed” captures the challenging transition from extraordinary to ordinary life. Bleed stands for the “trace” left by the experience, “if only by its absence” (Goulding and Saren 2016, 221). Our informants figuratively use the definition of bleed as a liquid substance, such as dye seeping into an adjacent area: “If you have different colors and they bleed into each other, so this is your LARP character or LARP experience bleeding into your life and back” (Arion 2019, interview). We find two distinct forms of bleed: disembedding, characterized by removed access to extraordinary frames, and dissociation, characterized by consumers’ separation from extraordinary roles.

Disembedding Bleed

Disembedding describes consumers’ separation from the frames that prescribe how to navigate the extraordinary space and time. As Goffman (1974) mentions, extraordinary frames offer beliefs, norms, and values that engage consumers in the experience. Just as the vampire myth when layered onto ordinary pubs, changes them into dark, cavernous spaces (Goulding and Saren 2016), so too the lore of Game of Thrones when layered onto a geographic location, turns Rezzanello Castle, Italy, into the make-believe ruins of Summerhall, Westeros. These frames provide Dracarys LARPers with a “shared cultural code” (Daenerys 2016, interview) they can use to orientate themselves. As Cersei (2016, interview) puts it: “You are in a castle, the scenography is awesome, you eat, drink, and sleep in-game, so you find yourself completely detached from the real world for three days.” Such “upkeying” (Goffman 1974) of the real world has a dreamlike quality according to Sansa (2019, interview):

There is a part of you that remembers this is not real, but you are deliberately suppressing that and because everybody is doing the same if they are doing it properly it is very, very immersive, and very, very convincing, it is a bit like a collective dream.

Not surprisingly, letting go is challenging. Disembedding bleed leads consumers to share their longing for the upkeyed space and time on social media: “I just arrived home and I feel something is missing. The starred sky, the rags worn, the voice of the dragon, the ancient ruins. I just arrived home knowing I left another” (Tyrion 2016, Facebook post). However, disembedding is much more than sentimental longing for a lost world. The extraordinary frames layer normative prescriptions onto the experience which then ooze into ordinary life. As previously mentioned, Demetra reversed traditional gender roles. Afterwards, Arion (male, 2019, interview) had an instance in which frames collided:

When I went to a door and a woman was approaching the door too, and because I always did that in Demetra, I waited for the woman to open … the door, yeah? Because in Demetra it was something for the women to do, to help the weak men, yeah? And she stands there, and she was waiting for me to open the door, and I am waiting for her to open the door.

In this encounter, Arion views an ordinary situation through the lens of the bleeding extraordinary frame of Demetra. Dolores (2018, Facebook post) mentions a similar incident after having been a park guest in Conscience:

I had the weirdest (positive?) bleed experience yesterday. Ran into a distant work acquaintance coming into a hotel lobby at this festival where I am for work. When I was forced to do small talk … I just did it without a hitch, then even actively introduced myself to his handsome friend, engaged in some pretty funny – and in retrospect calmly flirty – banter with this random handsome stranger, said goodnight and “I'll catch you guys tomorrow” (even though the likelihood I'll ever see the stranger again is close to zero). Walking to the elevators I caught myself reflecting something like “I set that up pretty well for play tomorrow”. And finally understood what had happened. I still had this behaviour pattern from the larp that if you walk around as a guest in a strange town and are approached, someone is offering you play or plot, and you should engage with them from a position of curiosity and confidence.

In summary, disembedding bleed appears when the extraordinary frames escape the experience. Such instances happen to participants in extraordinary experiences other than LARP, too. The spirit of rebelliousness and frontier liberty experienced during motorcycle rallies flow into (week)daily life of weekend bikers (Schouten and McAlexander 1995). Goths return from the Whitby Goth Weekend carrying with them a trace of a welcoming world of darkness into one that is less accepting (Goulding and Saren 2016). Modern mountain men (Belk and Costa 1998) and scallop-shell adorned pilgrims (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019) experience clashing temporal logics upon returning from decelerated rendezvous and Camino.

Dissociation Bleed

Reflecting consumers’ separation from their extraordinary roles, dissociation describes the difficulty of letting go of a character. Arya (2016, interview) expresses why when Dracarys ended, she felt terrible: “When you play a character, you feel free to play it fully, when I cried, I was crying for real. When I laughed, I laughed for real. It’s a complete immersion.” Taking on extraordinary roles, LARPers become attached to the characters they “lived with another mind and another heart,” as Brienne (2016, Facebook post) refers to her character Rhialta:

In three exhausting but too short days I have told a massive, choral story and I’ve lived with another mind and another heart, as I felt this “mask” terribly mine.… Rhialta Vance, the dancer, the faceless woman burnt by unknown passions, will remain a part of me. I cannot stop thinking about what happened to Rhialta, what she did, what she could do, the stories and the magic. COULD SOMEONE BRING ME BACK TO REALITY HELP!

Dissociation thus requires consumers to empathize with the character deeply, echoing video-gaming literature finding greater readjustment difficulties when consumer and character overlap (Smahel et al. 2008). Ygritte (2016, interview), who did not suffer any dissociation, explains:

Coming back is more or less complicated depending on the complexity of the character and how much it overlaps with our everyday life, our point of fracture, let’s say, the things that struck or hurt us in the past. [My character] was monolithic, I could get nothing out of it, not as learning, not as a moment of introspection on who I am, why I act, where am I going, why I react in a specific way to situations … which is what a more nuanced character allows you to do, it allows you to think about your being human in the face of events. Here, I was a sort of tank and when I died, I just said, “Goodbye darling!” and it ended there.

As consumer identities are far from strictly delineated (Appau et al. 2020; Schouten 1991; Seregina and Schouten 2017), consumers can improve their understanding of themselves and the world in which they live through the performance of extraordinary character roles (Hamby and van Laer 2022). When dissociation occurs, it is challenging because being someone else allows for the exploration of qualities, personal traits, and self-concepts, which can then percolate into everyday life and enrich everyday identities. As Missandei (2019, interview) says, this “drag” happens more easily when upkeying (Goffman 1974) allows consumers to explore traits that may have already been there but lie dormant:

To me [dissociation] bleed is dragging what I have done in the game to the external world, not being able to detach completely… I’ll give you an example, the first character I played was very stubborn, very impulsive, she would jump at every opportunity, and I am not like that, but it helped me because then I started doing that in real life too.

Bleed and Corporeality

Our conceptualization of bleed cannot ignore the body, here considered “flesh” rejective of a mind/body dualism (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Scott et al. 2017). The body acts as the mediating boundary to understand the self in the world (Seregina 2019). It is therefore the technology, thing, or tool that consumers use to take on an extraordinary role (Seregina and Weijo 2016) and the canvas on which extraordinary frames are painted during the experience. Designers play a vital role in upkeying frames and roles by producing event spaces that ease sensory experiences for the body (Hill, Canniford, and Eckhardt 2022), facilitating the embodiment of extraordinary frames and roles in turn. For instance, participants can feel the steep staircase leading down into the sunken tower, smell the flourishing mold growth, and touch the skull of Balerion the Black Dread (see figure 1). Once embodied, extraordinary frames and roles can surface viscerally as exaggerated startle responses hours or even days after the experience, as the first author recorded in his field notes after Conscience:

We are sitting outside a bar in Malaga on a quite windy afternoon. The event ended yesterday, and we have three hours to kill before our flight. Suddenly, while we are sharing memories from the event, we hear a *bang* sound. Our right hands lash toward the side of our leg, trying to grasp a gun that, until yesterday, was faithfully resting in our holsters and now is no longer there. After three seconds, we realize that a gust of wind has knocked down a pavement sign, and we all burst out laughing. Maeve says, “I think we have a problem” (2018, field note).

Costumes, tattoos, food, and drink also support upkeying frames and roles (Goffman 1974; Head, Schau, and Thompson 2011). Thoros (2016, interview) explains: “Costumes and props are fundamental to reinforce the illusion” which is why he spent considerable time crafting and training with the flaming sword wielded by his character (see vimeo.com/309042250). Flaming swords and other fantastic objects symbolize upkeyed frames, and for Cersei (2016, interview) these symbols make for “a more immersive experience, because knowing these details helps you [recall] information like you had that information in your real life.” The costumes and props that support role enactment are not extinguished in the extraordinary however, since they are made of everyday materials. Bernard (2019, Facebook), whose character wore four golden rings, recounts how his body still craves them:

Getting rid of Isaac Rothschild is harder than I thought. I have tried to remove the rings (with success). But some hours without the rings is hard, the abstinence starts kicking in. I’m starting to touch and “jerk” where the rings were.. I need my rings..!* At least there is progress. I started off with three rings, now I’m down to two rings. Reducing more is the toughest part. Is there any rehab facility for ring addiction? Advices appreciated.

Edit: I need HIS rings..!

Charlotte comments: “Take all the time you need to remove the rings, no hurry. And take good care of yourself.” Clementine follows: “Some characters never truly leave you.” Notes from the first author’s participant observation corroborate these accounts: limited movement as a disabled person in Dracarys 2016; cold, fatigue, and hunger during the desert nights in Conscience; physical pain while fighting as a gladiator in Demetra; and diegetic dreams while sleeping during and after the LARPs are all layered onto his body.

Esthetically, appearance and manner also construct the extraordinary frames and roles consumers explore. They further lead to bleed. For Jon (2019, interview), his long hair and bushy beard have become a constant reminder of his commitment to his Dracarys warrior identity, and he continues to express a nonconforming fierce attitude even though he is no longer in costume. The body is thus also a necessary condition for “the carryover of appearance, manner, and grooming from rendezvous to everyday contexts” for modern mountain men (Belk and Costa 1998, 235); the reasons for wearing a Starfleet uniform to jury duty (Kozinets 2001); and the way the qualities, traits, and self-concepts that are enacted during the Whitby Goth Weekend permeate Goths’ everyday identities (Goulding and Saren 2016). The embodied phenomenology, whereby consumers viscerally experience extraordinary frames and roles, causes the extraordinary to filter through their bodies into the ordinary.

In summary, consumers’ bodies are the canvas onto which the extraordinary is painted, and when they return, they bleed literally (Scott et al. 2017) or figuratively. As Warde (2014, 294) warns, “Bodily processes, the senses (not just sight) and emotions, all of which are connected to habit and impulses to act intuitively, are integral to an account of distributed mind.” Like a canvas, the body is “endowing extraordinary experiences with meaning” (Scott et al. 2017, 37), visualizes different temporal logics (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019) and lifestyles (Belk and Costa 1998; Kozinets 2002), surfaces the tension between dissonant levels of physical activity (Celsi et al. 1993), and incarnates extraordinary frames and roles. As such, bleed is necessarily a bodily experience.

Bleed Intensifiers: The Tension between Extraordinary and Ordinary

Consumers interpret bleed heterogeneously, and their subjective interpretations influence bleed’s intensity. They can acknowledge bleed as a nostalgic trace left by the experience or feel an acute tension between the trace left by extraordinary frames and roles and those that everyday life governs. When the ordinary world cannot meet consumers’ normative prescriptions of the extraordinary, the subjective tension between extraordinary and ordinary frames and roles intensifies bleed.

Frames under Tension

Disembedding bleed intensifies the more the extraordinary frames offer beliefs, norms, and values that are radically novel or in opposition to those of individual consumers’ everyday existence. Directly experiencing alternative frames allows consumers to imagine a different existence. As Thoros (2020, member check) clarifies: “Some aspects of the world that are different from daily life … make you think ‘what would I do if…?’” On the surface, disembedding intensifies when extraordinary frames generate such suppositions. Teddy (2018, Facebook post) suffered intense disembedding from Conscience because he explored frames for issues he never had confronted before, such as human–robot interactions:

I had the opportunity to live a world yet to come and see how I would behave. The day we reach the singularity may not be nigh, but Conscience has already taught me that if we reach this level of technological sophistication, with conscious machines…. These will be people, not appliances. I think that is the message the LARP wanted to convey, that humanity resides in consciousness, and that making distinctions between flesh or metal will be similar to discriminating based on skin color.

On a deeper level, disembedding intensifies when consumers perceive a clear distinction between their everyday frames and the extraordinary frames which they had constructed and into which they had embedded themselves during the experience. Arya (2016, interview), for example, recounts her aversion to contemporary cutlery, and “real life” in general, after spending three days in Dracarys’s “Middle Ages”:

I almost had problems eating with forks afterwards, because I was so accustomed to eating with my hands from a bowl, in the other way. I realized I rediscovered beautiful things, such as trying to understand what time it is without a clock, using the sun, or…. Now we are accustomed to say “let’s meet in front of that pub this time” or “I am late,” and there you just couldn’t…. The feelings are really different; when you come back to real life there is a nasty, really nasty clash.

Arya’s feelings seem to originate from the logics of a slow, low-tech, medieval world in which she found herself managing the flow of time without the use of technology not mixing well with her everyday punctuality. Just as Belk and Costa (1998, 233) found themselves driving away from a rendezvous they had attended “at an overly slow 10 or 20 miles an hour” and pilgrims of the Camino “have difficulty adjusting to the speed of everyday life, and may report confusion, disorientation, or even panic” (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019, 1157–58), so too Arya experiences a “nasty clash” of time frames.

When extraordinary frames are upkeyed to prescribe realms alternative to everyday life (Goffman 1974), consumers feel tension. LARPers are aware that they are constructing alternative societies or ways of living, an awareness they share with bikers (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), modern mountain men (Belk and Costa 1998), Trekkers (Kozinets 2001), and Burners (Kozinets 2002). As our web archives reveal, while it is one thing to “postulate an alternative society on paper; constructing and living in one is another thing entirely. The compelling experiences of both utopian and dystopian ideas that such simulations offer is [sic] why LARP lends itself so easily to critical play” (nordiclarp.org/wiki). As such, a reversal of traditional gender roles can intensify disembedding when experienced by someone like Plutus who is institutionalized into patriarchal society, because:

Planet ‘Reality’ is so far from this shared moment that was Demetra […] this LARP is a place of learning, one that is not given to attend at school or in life. The one that the women of “the real world” describe to us but which is so difficult to imagine, because we never, as men, are in their situation…. I had only one desire at the end of this LARP, to ask forgiveness (Plutus 2019, Facebook post).

Similarly, Burners return from their experience with “a fresher perspective or some heightened artistic or communal sensibility” (Kozinets 2002, 31), as a result of the opposition between Burning Man’s values and everyday market logics.

In summary, extraordinary frames resurface in everyday life through disembedding. When they offer alternative understandings or clash with consumers’ ordinary frames, disembedding bleed intensifies.

Roles under Tension

Dissociation bleed intensifies the more the extraordinary roles allow consumers to explore unknown sides to their everyday identities or escape unsatisfactory, ordinary roles. Exploring a different role while escaping an unsatisfactory one becomes particularly challenging post-LARP. Informants often reported dallying in dissociation because their everyday work feels pointless. Thoros (2020, member check), whose daily routine as a financial consultant is bleak and draining, explains:

If you throw me in a context where there is high risk and high reward, and I can be a leader, with extraordinary powers that I can exploit, like … revive dead and other creepier things, bleed just overflows.

Similarly, Elsie (2020, member check) describes:

My bleed in Conscience came from the joy of working as a writer in a team of writers where my stories matter. That was different from what all my real-life writing work has been…, and I still miss that feeling.

Portraying a plot writer, Elsie oversaw plots and the fun of the park guests. She wrote up the latest ideas and events and rehearsed them with the Conscience participants portraying the robot hosts in the Westworld-like theme park. She could then see those stories unfolding through the dozens of cameras that the designers had scattered around. The work role Elsie held in the extraordinary clashed with her everyday work role as a writer. Escaping everyday life, and specifically ordinary roles, thus intensifies dissociation bleed. Similarly, many doctors and nurses find the roleplay during the Whitby Goth Weekend a fun way to face daily dealings with death and mortality as part of their everyday identities (Goulding and Saren 2016), and immortalizing the rebellious biker (Schouten and McAlexander 1995) helps escaping the boredom of nine-to-five routines.

Dissociation bleed becomes particularly intense when consumers take on roles that create tension with the self-understandings at the core of their identity. The first author (2019, field note) saw a woman who portrayed an assertive security expert burst into tears as soon as Demetra ended. When he approached her to check if she was okay, she told him how sorry she was that in ordinary life she was not a more confident role model for her daughter. Jaime’s (2020, member check) account is helpful in unpacking this potential for consumers’ ordinary roles to intensify dissociation:

What makes bleed worse is when something plays close to home or deals with sensitive issues. Imagine you play a WWII LARP and your grandfather told you a thousand stories, or you lost a relative there. Or you play a LARP on pregnancy like the Handmaid’s Tale and you had an abortion or cannot have kids … you are not necessarily aware of these issues when you sign in, but they surface while you are in.

The issues on which Jaime focuses, he and others call “triggers,” enduring vulnerabilities rooted in ordinary life that extraordinary roles can resurface. Though triggered during the extraordinary experience, the implication of these enduring vulnerabilities is intensified dissociation after consumers return to everyday life. Ashley (2018, diary), who had to watch the gang rape of his character’s sister, chronicles this implication best:

This has stirred up a bunch of memories and feelings about the real life rape of a close friend in my university days in the early 1990s. I thought that I was over this, but it seems that there are lingering issues with the events of those times that have triggered feelings of helplessness and self-resentment. This is absolutely not the fault of the organisers, nor is it anyone else’s fault, but it is a situation with which I must cope.

Ashley’s diary entry also explains why the portrayal of extraordinary roles is not triggering for all consumers. Blogger Ericka Skirpan (2019) uses a similar rationale to summarize why consumers react differently to potential triggers: “It’s a lesson I’ve learned repeatedly over the last few months. One person’s safety is another person’s trigger.” Scholars similarly find these triggers across more mundane hedonic experiences, from paintings (Joy and Sherry 2003) to TV series (Russell and Schau 2014). In summary, dissociation captures the spillover of extraordinary roles into everyday life. Dissociation intensifies the more character roles awake dormant aspects of or are in opposition to consumers’ everyday identities.

Trajectories to Transformation

Bleed appears in our informants’ accounts as a potential force for transformation. As Arion (2019, interview) mentions, “many people seek bleed out. They want to be triggered; they want to be changed; they want to be transformed.” Whether and to what extent people realize this transformative potential, however, depends on the subjective bleed intensity the experience produces. We chart four trajectories to transformation following the journeys of our informants as they cautiously mix the extraordinary experience and ordinary life.

Absent Trajectory

Returning can cause little to no bleed when consumers do not sufficiently engage with the extraordinary frames and roles. Despoina (2019, interview) does not warm to the “dystopian world” of Demetra so she “had no bleed after … because there is nothing from Demetra I want to bring back with me, I will miss nothing of the world of Demetra.” The experience does not bleed for Despoina like it does for Arion and other Demetra participants, therefore. Similarly, the experience does not bleed enough for Jaime (2016, interview) after Dracarys:

I played a laid-back, light-hearted swashbuckler, a soldier of fortune, a strictly less cynical Bronn [Game of Thrones character]…. Surely a bit, as for any character you play, a bit of sympathy remains, a sense of affection for the image to whom you gave a body. But this time I did not have a strong attachment, probably because the tone of the event was not as intense as others. I played very psychologically heavy events like Inside Hamlet that truly shocked me and made me question my identity and the world I live in, and Dracarys did not do that.

Neither Despoina nor Jaime are transformed because their experiences do not bleed (enough).

Compensatory Trajectory

Consumers for whom the experience leaves a trace without necessarily creating tension follow a trajectory we label compensatory. As these consumers become romantically nostalgic for the extraordinary frames and roles, they look to evoke the experience once more through compensatory reconsumption—a marketplace-facilitated coping practice whereby consumers re-access the extraordinary frames and roles through mundane forms of hedonic consumption. Novels, TV series, and video games help consumers deal with disembedding and dissociation by returning to the experience in their mind’s eye and re-empathizing with their characters. As Emily (2018, diary) announces, “the second season of Westworld will be out in April…. I’m sure that’s going to bring back tons of memories.” For Emily, the experience has produced a personal narrative of frames exploration she can access once more through marketplace means. Robert (2019, interview) too notes after Conscience, “I really rushed to see the new episodes when they came out. I also installed this mobile game based on Westworld and I started playing.” Robert finds a way to quell nostalgia by accessing the extraordinary frame through a more mundane form of consumption: a video game.

The transformation that consumers achieve following a compensatory trajectory is that of the extraordinary itself. Accessing and consuming again the extraordinary frames and roles transform consumers’ relationship with them. As Cersei (2016, interview) elegantly elaborates:

The way in which I will look at the original canon is not immune to what I have lived. It is no longer possible to distinguish between what you live in the LARP from what you read in the original, because the latter is magnified with meanings expressed and experienced during the LARP.

This reinterpretation helps negotiate the experience to the point that it can lead consumers to appropriate the extraordinary frame and see themselves as experts with a superior authentic understanding. Jorah (2016, Facebook post), for example, claims expert knowledge of Game of Thrones when he argues that other consumers “do not know the true story”:

When I returned home, the first thing I did was to look for all the names and stories of the Great Houses of the North. I laughed. They do not know the true story. They do not know what really happened in Summerhall during the wedding between Luthor Tyrell and Aliandra Martell. But we know, we were there, we fought, we cried, we laughed. We were there, and those moments will be hard to forget. For the North!

Similarly, modern mountain men who (re)enacted nineteenth-century fur-trade rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains, “were critical of the Indian arrows in Dances with Wolves, saying they were not the proper length” (Belk and Costa 1998, 222).

In summary, consumers who sense that the extraordinary experience has left a trace in their everyday lives look to return to the extraordinary frames and roles through compensatory reconsumption. Feiereisen et al. (2021) specify a similar practice called “feasting,” which involves augmented access to narrative content that deepens consumers’ understanding of that content. Evident in our data is that such an ordinary hedonic consumption practice can also compensate for the loss of direct access to extraordinary frames and roles.

Cathartic Trajectory

When the experience not only leaves a trace, but the trace creates tension with daily life, consumers follow a cathartic trajectory. When such a tension becomes clear, it calls into question one or more aspects of consumers’ everyday existence and compensatory consumption alone is not enough to stop the intense bleed. It may at times even be counterproductive: several Conscience participants (2018, Facebook posts) comment that they feared watching science fiction on TV would increase bleed. These comments suggest that reconsumption can lead to a metaphorical deluge, further intensifying bleed by highlighting the unsatisfactory frames and roles of everyday life that the experience made salient. Consumers under tension instead negotiate the manifested tension by engaging in retrospective integration.

Retrospective integration captures the strategy to reflect on, report, and share the extraordinary experience to cope with bleed. Attempting to deal with disembedding, Ashley (2018, diary) writes how his first days after the LARP are about an “overwhelming desire for human contact … and [the need] to tell my stories” and “missing the people that I have played with, that I am still craving human closeness that is not available to me at home.” Further to disembedding, his diary helps him cope with dissociation. We learn that Ashley is juggling multiple roles due to a divorce, the relationship with his daughter, and work. The previously mentioned emotional scar makes him “unable to settle [at] work and so [I] inform my boss that productivity will be limited” on the second day and “[it] does not seem to be getting less intense” on the third day such that “[my] mood deteriorates as I fail to get the contact that I am craving, and I have to work pretty hard to not lose my temper with my daughter in the evening.” On the fourth and fifth days, torn between “the need for contact and the desire to hide,” Ashley finds himself “musing on the nature of responsibility and culpability and self-worth” and finally begins retrospectively integrating his self-diagnosed “problem moment: I start to be able to process the events of Conscience…. I am able to reflect upon the problem moment, although I am sure that it is merely an identified symptom of the effect that the game had upon me.”

Like Ashley’s experience, Kora’s (2019, interview) role in Demetra bled intensely into her everyday:

Some dynamics and what happened to the character stayed with me for a long time. For example, she was betrayed and killed by the closest people to her, and this betrayal aspect is something that played close to home and reminded me of very, very unpleasant moments in my life, or of fears of living the same.

Kora uses the bleed to mix into her identity an enhanced self-concept that transforms her everyday life, “because one of the things you get from the LARP is a learning experience.” We learn she does so through retrospective integration during which she dips into, digs up, and dissolves her extraordinary role and her everyday identity into one homogeneous solution.

Intense bleed can lead consumers on a trajectory of cathartic transformation. We note how bleed intensity is a subjective continuum rather than a definite category: consumers change their trajectory to transformation according to subjective tension. For cathartic trajectories, both compensatory reconsumption and retrospective integration can coexist, but the former is more frequent when consumers feel the trace outweighs the tension, and vice versa for the latter.

The greater the bleed, the more consumers pace their retrospection because slowing down aids transformation (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019). Armistice (2018, Facebook post), who sought out retrospection after taking part in Conscience, shared a summary of her long road to transformation:

It took me 4 days to even be able to pick up my laptop and start writing about it. 20 pages later and I feel like I’ve barely started telling this character’s story, barely commenced the process of pouring my bleed/love/pain/grief out of my heart and onto the page. What is clear is that this larp has changed me. It has forced me to face personal demons; to ask myself essential questions about the nature of humanity, of love, of choice. It has taught me new things about hope, and about loss. I’m still reeling. I feel like I left a part of myself stumbling around that desert, gun in hand. Forever changed by grief. In return, I think I bring back home a new piece of my humanity, of my innocence.

As the “narratives consumers craft after finishing” are about exploring “a new dimension of their humanity through their body” (Scott et al. 2017, 37), so too Armistice’s bleed transforms her thinking about human–robot interaction and enriches her humanity and innocence. Like the liminal state between undesirable and desirable selves that Appau et al. (2020) discuss in their treatise on the unfinished individual, bleed opens an indeterminate dimension that channels identity reconstruction.

Delayed Trajectory

The interplay between slowing down and transformation becomes even clearer in the few cases where bleed is so intense that it requires prolonged distancing from anything related to the extraordinary experience. Paced reconsumption and retrospection can come to a full stop on these rare occasions when consumers experience bleed of overwhelming intensity. Theresa (2020, member check) details the struggle: “My character suffered from some similar problems as I did in real life, so there was some bidirectional bleed going on.” Involved in an abusive relationship and wanting a better life, Theresa could not quell her extreme bleed until a year later:

I think that for me personally, the LARP and my bleeds set in motion some processes that led to me stepping out of harmful and abusive structures a year later, in my real life. Because the topics of Conscience spoke to me on a very personal level and made me think. About repeating stories versus breaking free, about the nature of freedom, about who I want to be.

Theresa’s trajectory through her year of overwhelming bleed is particularly telling. She uses a metaphor to explain:

In the LARP I placed this lantern on the table and turned it all up to shine very brightly. I said that this mirrors my experience. That I realize I live every day with my light turned dim. And that in the LARP, I experienced how I feel when that inner light is turned up and I am burning brightly. And how painful I thought it was to leave this state and return to dimness.

Theresa presents the extraordinary experience as an alternative reality whose different frames and roles made her realize she can dramatically change her life. To shield herself from this emotional onslaught, Theresa distances herself from the experience for a long time. The slow cadence helped her stem the bleed, end her relationship, and improve her everyday circumstances. Months later, retrospective integration helps her make sense of the experience and start a process of transformation of her ordinary frames and roles, which includes denouncing and breaking free from the abusive relationship. Theresa’s is a case in which an unmanageable tension intensifies bleed so that it provokes a traumatic detachment from the extraordinary experience. As a result, tension further accumulates which later causes an equally traumatic reconstruction of everyday life. We note the low incidence of this trajectory in our data. However, we also acknowledge the enormous transformative potential of bleed in instances in which it can even help escaping the horrors of an abusive relationship. Figure 2 outlines the four transformative trajectories.

DISCUSSION

Most prior consumer research leaves implicit what the process of leaving an extraordinary experience looks like and how consumers’ individual differences influence this process. Our ethnography of LARP unpacks the widely used, emic term “bleed” as an emergent construct that offers greater insight into the challenging outcomes of returning to everyday life after an extraordinary experience. Our findings shine a spotlight on the role of consumers’ subjectivity in informing the return and the negotiation of the extraordinary–ordinary continuum. The interaction between bleed types and consumers’ perceived tensions converges into a transformative recursive process that explains how and why consumers can return from the same extraordinary experience following distinct paths.

Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

Our first contribution is distilling distinct types of bleed as the challenging outcomes of leaving extraordinary experiences. The distillation explains the process whereby extraordinary experiences can seep into everyday life. Bleed is the trace left by an extraordinary experience in everyday life, when the frames and roles that made extraordinary engagement possible are now inaccessible but call consumers back in the form of disembedding from extraordinary frames and dissociation from extraordinary roles. Far from being nothing but an experiential hangover, bleed carries existential implications for what it means to move between routinized and distant or, in the words of Goffman (1974, 366), “upkeyed” frames and roles. Complementing understandings of what define and happens during extraordinary experiences, bleed offers a unifying lens to link seemingly disconnected instances of challenging returns from extraordinary experiences.

Our bleed typology helps surface bleed from previously researched extraordinary experiences after consumers have explored alternative frames and roles. We observe instances of disembedding in the withdrawal symptoms of Harley-Davidson riders (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), modern mountain men (Belk and Costa 1998), Goths (Goulding and Saren 2016), and peregrinos (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019). Husemann and Eckhardt (2019, 1161) explicitly ask to what extent consumers who experience extraordinary frames suffer afterwards. Our findings extend their ethnography by showing that consumers suffer the more extraordinary frames are upkeyed from everyday ones and the more the trace left by extraordinary frames creates a tension with daily life.

We can similarly find instances of dissociation from roles in extraordinary experiences that allow for identity exploration. Carnivals (Weinberger and Wallendorf 2012), geek conventions (Kozinets 2001), festivals (Goulding and Saren 2016; Kozinets 2002), and even climbing Chomolungma/Mount Everest (Tumbat and Belk 2011) are prime experiences after which dissociation can occur, allowing consumers to explore, and then question their self-concepts beyond what they knew about who they are and could be.

In summary, disembedding and dissociation explain whether and how extraordinary experiences may bleed. We can generalize our findings to the “Turnerian” (Cova et al. 2018) extraordinary experiences that construct alternative frames and permit identity exploration (Belk and Costa 1998; Kozinets 2002), as these foundational dimensions have the potential to leave a trace and generate a tension with everyday life afterwards, a tension exacerbated by the degree of upkeying (i.e., the subjectively perceived distance between extraordinary and ordinary frames and roles). Web appendix E describes in more detail the transferability of our findings onto Turnerian escapes into nature, festivals, and subcultural gatherings.

That said, bleed requires deep engagement within a shared frame. Our findings seem less applicable to contexts in which interruptions are frequent and conflicting frames coexist, such as comic book conventions (Seregina and Weijo 2016). While the body is vital for bleed, it springs from extraordinary frames and roles. Our findings may therefore also be less transferrable to what Cova et al. (2018) classify as war-like extraordinary experiences which center on physical challenge rather than identity exploration. For example, Tough Mudder focuses on overcoming physical challenges and shattering “reflexive projects of the self” (Scott et al. 2017, 29), which is a significantly different process from investing in a role and then dealing with dissociation. Disembedding bleed may still occur and clashing frames may cause tension, but the absence of dissociation bleed suggests an overall lower level of bleed than contexts in which both types of bleed can cooccur.

Consumers’ Trajectories of Return along the Extraordinary–Ordinary Continuum

As a second contribution, we extend literature on extraordinary experiential consumption by showing how consumers’ subjective understanding of the experience in relation to their ordinary life dictates the trajectory of their return. Prior research acknowledges that some consumers are motivated to engage in extraordinary experiences to escape from prejudice and stigma (Goulding and Saren 2016; Kozinets 2001), the stresses and accelerated logics of modern city life (Belk and Costa 1998; Canniford and Shankar 2013; Husemann and Eckhardt 2019), the unworthy market (Kozinets 2002), and workplace frustrations (Schouten and McAlexander 1995; Scott et al. 2017). The theoretical focus of that work is on consumers’ characteristics as motivations to escape, but whether and how these characteristics influence the outcomes of returning so far remained underexplored. We shift the focus to how the aftermath of extraordinary experiences depends on both the trace left by extraordinary frames and roles bleeding into ordinary ones and the subjective tension they produce in consumers’ heterogeneous everyday lives.

Consumers’ subjective understandings are particularly important for the different bleed intensities that lead to distinct trajectories of return. Extraordinary frames and roles only leave a trace if consumers find they resonate; they only create tension if consumers find they clash with their ordinary shadows. The more the trace left by the experience creates tension with ordinary frames and roles, the more intense is the bleed and its potential for transformation. Disembedding bleed intensifies after experiences that find extraordinary frames in opposition to ordinary frames, such as clashing temporal logics (Belk and Costa 1998; Husemann and Eckhardt 2019), spatial perceptions (Canniford and Shankar 2013), and marketplace understandings (Kozinets 2002). Dissociation bleed intensifies when the opposition is about roles, such as stigmatized consumers becoming science-fiction heroes (Kozinets 2001) or mythical creatures (Goulding and Saren 2016) and disempowered consumers adopting rebel biker personalities (Martin, Schouten, and McAlexander 2006; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). By shifting the focus of transformative potential from the experience onto its aftermath, we have been able to answer the question of how extraordinary experiences filter back (Kozinets 2002). The interaction between experiential trace and subjective tension causes different bleed intensities that explain why consumers taking part in the same extraordinary experience return following different trajectories.

Our findings also suggest that consumers move along an extraordinary–ordinary continuum when mixing subjective understandings of extraordinary frames and roles with ordinary ones. Prior research claims that consumers distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary due to clear temporal markers that indicate when the temporary destruction and subversion of social structures begins and ends (Weinberger and Wallendorf 2012). Conversely, our research shows that temporality cannot neatly compartmentalize the extraordinary: traces of antistructural shattering can seep into the ordinary. Our conceptualization of bleed refutes the dualist view that treats the extraordinary and the ordinary as separate domains. Corroborating Seregina (2019), it also goes beyond the postdualistic notion of blurred boundaries, which rests on the paradoxical existence of two separate entities whose borders are not clearly delineated (Canniford and Shankar 2016). Instead, and in line with Husemann and Eckhardt’s (2019, 1158) argument that “liminality does not begin or end with the anti-structural space of [an extraordinary experience]; it can be extended beyond its physical boundaries,” we call into existence an extraordinary–ordinary continuum. The ordinary becomes a subjectively understood flow of time and routine that episodically turns extraordinary, either because of the extraordinary experience itself, or because upkeyed extraordinary frames and roles bleed into the ordinary and leave a recognizable, extraordinary trace.

Bleed as a Transformative Recursive Process

Our third contribution lies in theorizing bleed as a transformative recursive process (Giesler and Thompson 2016). Prior research implies the extraordinary transforms consumers during the experience (Belk and Costa 1998; Kozinets 2002). At least in the case of carnival (Lachmann, Eshelman, and Davis 1988), however, it is not the extraordinary experience or its associated practices that fuel transformation, but rather—adopting Theresa’s metaphor—the bright light of alternative ways of living that streams out of the manifestations. Our findings corroborate those on carnivals (Weinberger and Wallendorf 2012) and Star Trek conventions (Kozinets 2001) by showing how consumer awareness of distance from literal reality eases transformation in the aftermath by making manifest the utopian potential of which everyday life is devoid.

Following this logic, we conceptualize the transformative effect of bleed as manifesting in a recursive process from there, away, and extraordinary to here, home, and ordinary and back again. Corresponding coping practices that define the confines of transformation go with the trajectories of return we chart. Compensatory trajectories caused by a trace without tension (see figure 2B) seek to reaccess and transform the extraordinary. Cathartic trajectories where extraordinary and ordinary frames and roles clash (see figure 2C) also activate retrospective integration. This practice channels the extraordinary experience to transform specific aspects of daily existence into an alternative way of living, a different understanding of time and its passage, a different role, or a new way for consumers to see themselves. This finding extends consumer research that recognizes the “burden of liminality” (Husemann and Eckhardt 2019, 1160) by showing that everyday structure not only impedes achieving liminality and creates a burden when consumers return to structure; it also interacts with the outcomes of the liminal experience, leading to a much heavier burden upon return, which, paradoxically, possesses greater transformative potential: intense bleed.

Bleed as a transformative recursive process adds to scholarly understanding of the distinct ways extraordinary experiences transform. Previous consumer research has investigated how services become legitimized, within everyday life and ordinary frames, at the sociocultural (Deighton and Grayson 1995) and individual levels (Humphreys and LaTour 2013). In showing how consumers like Teddy, who once thought about robots as objects, come to see them as persons, we join this scholarship by evidencing how extraordinary experiences can legitimize frames and roles.

By no means do we argue that bleed is the sole transformative force of extraordinary experiences. Both van Laer et al. (2014) and Scott et al. (2017) suggest that for transformation to be possible, a sense of suspended reality must accompany the transition to the other realm. Losing the self to adopt another in LARP or reenactment as well as shattering it to tell an embodied story “painted in blood and carved in scars” inflicted by Tough Mudder (Scott et al. 2017, 39) can move consumers away from reality. While we envisaged bleed aesthetically as dye seeping into an adjacent area, the word also applies to other liquid substances like blood lost from the body because of injury. The hemorrhagic definition suggests a focused frame analysis of the role of the body would be a valuable pursuit. An implication of such research would be a formal relationship between bleed and embodied storytelling, or how the body informs narrative recordkeeping of an experience. Mudders shatter the self because of blood and pain, a process Scott et al. (2017) term disidentification. Embodied storytelling ensues. Dissociation bleed instead occurs because LARPers lose their selves in extraordinary roles. We wonder as to the degree of similarity between disidentification and dissociation bleed within the same extraordinary experience. We pose broader questions and implications of our model of bleed next.

Questions and Implications for Metaverses

Consumer researchers can use our model of bleed to interrogate the potential dark and dystopian side of emerging forms of hedonic consumption, such as the metaverse: “three-dimensional virtual, augmented, or mixed reality in which consumers can explore the digitized environment and interact with others” (Chattopadhyay and Yang 2022). A growing marketing and technological trend, metaverses like Decentraland, Fortnite Concerts, and Second Life celebrate playing with multiple, shifting, constructed frames, and roles.

However, the liberation from ordinary frames and roles that catch and constrain consumers’ existence may be false. Metaverses may cause bleed and urge consumers to return, with a potentially dramatic twist. Since accessing most extraordinary experiences requires significant investment in time, money, and physical activity (e.g., Burning Man, Kozinets 2002), experiences are episodic which allows paced coping. Metaverses however allow access “at any time one desires, for as long or as short a time as desired” (Williams et al. 2006, 6). On the downside, the ability to go back there at will to cope with virtual world disembedding and avatar-character dissociation may risk disengaging consumers from everyday life more so than what our article charts. On the upside, metaverses do not engage the body to the same extent: consumers must use headsets or other equipment to access these worlds. The research questions are numerous: “How and why might the metaverse interaction experience impact behavior in the physical world?” (Chattopadhyay and Yang 2022). More specifically, under what conditions does the metaverse cause bleed? How does bleed change when consumers can access the extraordinary 24/7? What about transformation? Does metaverse immersion enhance psychological wellbeing if consumers follow compensatory or cathartic trajectories? Future research is necessary to answer these important questions.

Questions and Implications for Narrative Worlds

A question our model of bleed does not address is the role of narratives at the basis of many an alternative realm. While extraordinary experiences are not exclusively narrative activities, the sources for extraordinary frames are often narrative in nature (van Laer et al. 2018). These observations leave the valuable pursuit of the narrative angle on the table. Could bleed be an outcome of transportation into a narrative world? Doing so would require revisiting the theoretical and methodological foundations of transportation theory in an interdisciplinary manner and psychologically reworking the relevant detailed effects of the bleed intensifiers. Rewriting transportation theory from an experiential perspective should also address how participants in an extraordinary narrative like river rafting become transported in “the quintessentially romantic story of the self-perfecting self, as in the novels of Herman Hesse or Carlos Castenada” (Arnould and Price 1993, 42), and why only seeing or hearing a narrative does not mean extraordinary transportation, all directions worthy of future research.

Implications for Experiential Design

More broadly our study speaks to impactful use cases in experiential industries. Shows, in which consumers are at liberty to follow their own instincts through a performance space, are becoming sensations. As consumers pass through these spaces, frames and roles whirl them into a different world. All along, the experience hoicks theater out of old age. The approach is intense. Consumers are engaged, multisensorially aware, and must decide what to do, where to go, or what to avoid. Starved of largescale works by the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers are eager to give these experiences a go again. Intriguingly, the more consumers own and live these shows, the more the experiences will produce not only excitement but also the necessary friction for bleed (van Laer, Feiereisen, and Visconti 2019). Extraordinarily popular Sleep No More, designed by Punchdrunk, is an example of such an experience: unfolding over multiple hours across an immense space, it allows consumers to move around and explore different angles of a massive narrative. Several consumers return over and over to relive the experience and discover new nuances (Shendruk 2020). Our model of bleed labels the returning fans of Sleep No More, some of whom have returned up to 140 times, as consumers who suffer bleed and cope by reaccessing the extraordinary frames and roles they miss.

However, our model of bleed suggests some consumers may be disturbingly “triggered” during and after the experience. Designers can institute several safety measures to reduce this risk. First, they can act pre-experience to minimize the risk of triggers. Signup forms are common before many LARPs. Participants can note situations they would rather avoid since they may be triggered. Second, designers can act post-experience to help make sense of bleed in the immediate aftermath. After Conscience, the designers offered participants different debrief exercises to reflect on the experience and quell rising bleed. When such exercises train them in compensatory reconsumption and retrospective integration, debriefing can go a long way in supporting consumers to avoid overwhelming bleed.

CONCLUSION

Even extraordinary journeys end. Returning is a necessary transition, but travelers, providers, and their scholarly companions often overlook what this process looks like and how it can be challenging for some but not others. Our model of bleed offers a more nuanced understanding of the traces and tensions generated by extraordinary experiences, and how individual consumers take different routes along the extraordinary–ordinary continuum to return, cope, and transform their everyday lives. To demystify the strange, enlightening, therapeutic powers of bleed, we went there and back again.

DATA COLLECTION INFORMATION

The first author conducted all the fieldwork himself from mid-2015 until mid-2019 across the four field sites. Using the first author’s artifacts, field notes, photographs, screen captures, text files, and video clips, both authors discussed and analyzed the data on multiple occasions. Both authors functioned as each other’s confidant throughout the process. The final ethnography was jointly authored. All data are currently stored in a project directory on the Open Science Framework under the management of the first author.

Author notes

Davide C. Orazi ([email protected]) is senior lecturer (assistant professor) of marketing, Monash University, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East VIC 3145, Australia.

Tom van Laer ([email protected]) is an associate professor of narratology, University of Sydney Business School, Abercrombie Building (H70), the University of Sydney NSW 2006, Australia.

The authors thank Robin Canniford, Angela Gracia B. Cruz, Eileen Fischer, Pier Vittorio Mannucci, Usva Seregina, Luca M. Visconti, Markus Giesler, Linda Price, Christina Goulding, and the four anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions throughout the revision process. The first author dedicates the article to the inspiring memory of Gary Gygax. The second author dedicates the article to the loving memory of Marylouise Caldwell. Supplementary materials are included in the web appendix accompanying the online version of this article.

References

Author notes