Teaching Masculinities

Blood Feud is a transformative, GM-less, role-playing game that elucidates and reveals the toxic mechanics that motivate and provide incentives for harmful masculine behavior – or toxic masculinity. The game presents itself clearly as a “role-playing game about honor, power, and toxic masculinity,” and asks the players to assume the roles of men in an imagined Viking age and to take part in an honor economy requiring the domination of others. Through four observations of play, this chapter finds that the game allows for an outrageous and transgressive behavior to be played out, a free pass to behave as “toxic males,” and reflection and awareness of the social mechanics that motivate this behavior. This chapter recognizes some of the ways that bleed, out-of-play seriousness, and transgressive realism are factors in how the game is played and experienced, and the porous line between the extraludic, meaning out of play, and the intraludic, meaning inside of play, in a game so strongly grounded in contemporary gender discourse. This research suggests that Blood Feud is a role-playing game that is useful for exploring the toxic mechanics that govern aspects of masculinity and creates a stronger awareness of how social structure motivates this, rather than the individual itself.