I don’t have much of a reason to write this article. It’s just something that struck my fancy to muse about for a little bit. The topic I want to tackle is diegesis in video games, and its less talked about sister concept, mimesis. You’ve likely heard of this before. At the very least, in the most common context, it appears in diegetic music in film and video games. But there’s a bit of a broader context that might be less familiar to most people.
So first off, where do these concepts originate? Well…
Plato.
It’s Plato.
It’s almost always Plato, for fucks sake.
But more specifically, these are concepts related to antique literary works. The way it’s defined at its earliest, and in the way Plato understood it, diegesis is the act of conveying the truth through storytelling or narration. Meanwhile, mimesis is the act of imitating the truth through performance.
In this narrow sense (and do keep in mind that the old Greeks were rather particular and rigid about their creative endeavours), it’s the difference between conveying information (or truth, as they’d call it) in a direct and indirect way. Fortunately, which will be important later, even in these early uses, it was recognised that some literary works could be both diegetic and mimetic at the same time, like in the sense of epics.
Prose -> primarily diegetic;
↓
Epics -> both diegetic and mimetic;
↑
Poetry -> primarily mimetic.
Historically, from then, we’ve had many takes on these concepts until we end up with modern interpretations. The big difference between those classic and our modern takes on those two terms is that we don’t really see them as dichotomic anymore. In fact, we can speak of them in basically complete separation.
Thus, for us, diegesis is any literary or storytelling technique that can be used without breaking the 4th wall. It’s anything that can be firmly planted in the world of the narrative, as diverse as that can be. On the other hand, mimesis represents aesthetic techniques relating to imitation. Realism is mimetic, but imagination is also mimetic.
This, however, puts us in the odd situation where we can talk about something being mimetic and diegetic at the same time, and to us, this would mean something different than what it did to Plato.
1) Practical Diegesis
So, let’s get back to how exactly this applies to video games. Of course, some of this is also related to media in the broader sense, like movies. But I’m interested in video games specifically, and that’s what I’m going to talk about here.
As I mentioned before, the most likely context someone hears about diegesis is diegetic music. This is a fairly universal application of the concept applicable to theatre, radio, film, video games, or even more specific examples of media, like rich books or visual novels. The idea is simple. You hear music that has a source in the world of the narrative. Be it music someone is playing, or maybe it comes from a recording, but it is part of that world of the narration, instead of an aesthetic addition to the presentation of that world (the “normal” way to add music to a film, for example).
Another typical example of this is diegetic UI. I want to get a bit deeper into the subject here. Whenever this UI style comes up, it’s almost universally using Dead Space as an example and points out two things: the health bar and the holograms.
(A render from the Dead Space press kit, showing us Dead Space Man and his trusty health bar.)
Let’s start with the health bar. The diegesis here is that your character’s health isn’t displayed on a HUD, as per video game conventions. Instead, the health bar is ostensibly something that exists within the world of the narrative. So what even exactly is it supposed to be? Does it actually make much sense to have this glowing tube on the back? How exactly does it translate someone’s physical condition onto a continuous 0 to 1 scale?
But this isn’t all. The whole game lacks a traditional overlay HUD display. Instead, while the health is a uhhh… arbitrarily glowing gubbin on your suit, everything else is a hologram your character sees and interacts with, or is it? Because those holograms seem to oddly very directly reference game mechanics and things that, in an in-universe sense, don’t exist.
So are they actually diegetic? I’d argue that they are not.
While the first example I used here, the one with the music, can be conclusively said to be a form of diegesis, this style of UI is… mimetic.
It’s a performative imitation of reality playing out within the in-game world. Fundamentally it breaks the 4th wall by displaying information and possessing functionality meaningful for us, not Dead Space Man. Grated, keep in mind this is just one way of thinking about mimesis; if we think of it from the perspective of realism, it’s not mimetic either.
And that’s not a problem!
I’m just here to point out that seeing this as diegesis is… not particularly correct.
But that might also lead to a different question. Is UI Diegesis actually possible? And the answer is that… yeah, it is, but generally, it’s mixed with mimetic and traditional interface elements. Common little elements of diegesis we find in our interfaces relate to manipulating devices within the game world, where we find ourselves clicking on buttons existing in the game world. Simple? Yes. Diegetic? Also.
In the end, it’s important to remember that interfaces exist so that we don’t need to lose ourselves in the minutia of our in-game actions.
3) Theoretical Diegesis
To fully grasp the breadth of applications diegesis has in game design, we need to consider its limits. Those limits are of a practical nature and relate to a few issues one might face.
To begin with, let’s start with narration. While we established it to be innately diegetic initially, we must consider if it is actually so. Essentially, can we always describe things as they are? Laconically, yes, but in-depth, not always so. So a case where a writer would like to use more poetic language to fill out something they cannot accurately narrate with more detail is definitely a case where we substitute our diegesis with some mimesis. That is to say, more in the performative sense, or by shifting things to the imagination more so than realism, an attempt to at the very least instil appropriate feelings. And that’s fine.
Similarly to narration, any other aspect of game design can be taken in the same way – we can make it as diegetic as we want, but at some point, we might not be able to. Games that try to take a strongly diegetic approach generally tend to become a simulation. They dedicate their design to replicating the in-universe “truth” (as Plato would say, I guess) in their presentation and mechanics. And mind you, this doesn’t need to be something directly taken from our world. For example, a fantastical game can portray its supernatural, magical or whatnot aspects in the form of a simulation, trying to accurately capture the happenings of the game’s universe.
But, again, this pushes the game towards a form of simulation, and there are two issues. First, not every game should be a simulation, but also, every simulation has its boundaries. The places where we cannot or no longer want to continue simulating the in-universe processes.
That’s why we get strongly mimetic games. That is, games strongly relying on indirect measures and imagination. In this way, some games function as poetry (not necessarily good poetry), using symbolic and abstract substitutes to convey what they want to convey. For example, this is what happens whenever you try to use a stock video game mechanic (like match 3, jumping or an abstract card battle system) to represent some core concept within the game (which most definitely has nothing to do with the representation). In such cases, it can be an intentional forgoing of diegesis in favour of a mimetic approach. Or it might just be incompetence and lack of ideas. One of those approaches is fine, the other not so much. But that’s really not the topic of this article.
The cases where we rub up against the boundaries of the simulation are easier to discuss. Ultimately, the scope of a game is limited. These limitations can come from different places, like focus, resources, and player experience. But whatever their source might be, at some point, any simulation hits the point where it doesn’t want to continue detailing things and either chooses to ignore them or implement some kind of memetic substitute to round off the edges, so to say.
Thus, when taking the diegetic approach, it’s essential to identify what we want to elaborate on and why, as well as question if this is really a good experience for the player. But if that is kept in mind, there are a lot of processes that can be adapted for a video game. The usage of computers within computer games strikes me as an evergreen field, as well as the replication of various technical processes, not necessarily actually existing ones; it might also be alchemy or magic. Those are places where realism (or at least fantastical realism) meshes well with an in-depth exploration of a subject from an in-universe perspective.
But really, sometimes it’s also ok to just make a game about some nonsense because you have a good idea for a new card game mechanic.
Esoteric Musings... 