Ensaigner le réel is an art-based research thesis project that employs tabletop role-playing games as a practice of embodiment, confrontation, and negotiation with otherness. Our hypothesis posits that role-playing facilitates the transition from a “shared world to the creation of shared worlds” (Reed, 2023), transforming fiction and narrative into tools for exploring models of alien worlds, unfamiliar to us. Role-playing goes beyond mere representation of otherness, allowing participants to engage with it closely, at times intimately. This leads to the phenomenon known as bleed, a term used in the role-playing community to describe the blurred boundary between fiction and reality. Bleed occurs when the emotional boundary between the player and the character they embody dissolves, resulting in mutual alienation between the player’s real identity and the foreign, alien identity they portray. This research aims to investigate the mechanics of bleed, examining it as a phenomenon of alienation and estrangement. The project aims to design a role-playing game framework that creates a “potential space” (Winnicott, 1975) to engage with the complexity of reality and experiment with alternative forms of life through the bleeding of the fictional and the real. This artwork-game, titled Alieneering, will unfold in the form of writing and gaming workshops where the axiological and material infrastructures of our reality serve as a foundation for the collective design of alien infrastructures, akin to dungeons to be explored. The narratives generated from these public experimental cycles will contribute to the writing of the thesis and culminate in the production of an edition inspired by a role-playing game manual, intended to disseminate the research findings, and facilitate their adoption. This project draws on theories of fiction, play, and narrative to develop a role-playing model of the literary, which could be of interest to other disciplines.