Blending Boundaries

Have you ever been walking around in a game, listening to the music and then your character suddenly asks, “Where’s that music coming from?” Oh shit, my character is self-aware and he’s breaking the rules of the game! Wait, never mind, there’s a radio playing music over there. That’s right we’re talking about diegesis in games.

Diegesis, to put it simply (and probably wrongly) is when a story is told as a narrative, by a narrator. The narrator exists within the world of the story and is relaying their experiences. It can also refer to the world of the story. Characters talking, cars moving and fights happening are within the world of the story. That rockin’ soundtrack on top of that action is not part of the world. Unless there’s a band in the background explicitly playing that song. Then it is.

Yeah. Diegesis and non-diegesis are weird. They blur the boundaries of the fictional world and our reality, what we experience and what the characters experience. We have a window into a characters world, usually with stuff like health bars, maps and radars in between all that. They’re for us. They’re aids that let us interact with the characters world. But then you have games like Dead Space, where your health bar is attached to Isaac’s back and where when you press pause Isaac holds up a small device that displays all your options on a hologram. So Isaac now has awareness of his own health and his own inventory and “stats.” This helps add to the atmosphere of the game as it allows less of the screen to be taken up by what is essentially unnecessary images and numbers and gives you more room to look out for monsters without disractions.

Dead Space is probably the easiest form of blurring boundaries to understand, but how do other games do it? In Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, you play as a young girl called Senua, who may or may not be suffering from a mental illness similar to schizophrenia. It has audio and visual hallucinations, whose interactions with Senua also serve to interact with the player. When in combat, voices will whisper things such as: “Behind you!” letting you know that an enemy is attacking from behind.

The visual hallucinations are used as puzzle solvers and horror moments. In order to progress in some areas you have to find rune shapes in the world. The runes are usually formed naturally, such as in shadows and tree branches and when you get closer to them the symbol you hallucinate on the screen becomes more vivid and multiplies. It’s a rather jarring experience.

So far we have a world where your health and pause menu are part of the characters kit and another where hallucinations are your hints and objectives. Each of these games share something of a horror element so the less cluttered screen space gives you easier access to the world and the nature of their non-diegetic elements.

Another game that I love talking about is NieR: Automata. You play as androids in a post-apocalyptic future. This game does so much in regards to diegetic and non-diegetic moments. For one thing, death happens in story. Every time your character dies you don’t turn back time to the last checkpoint. Sure you do respawn from there, but time has moved forward and your death stuck. You have to go back and retrieve your corpse so that you can retrieve your items and plug-in chips. Your plugin chips are also a form of non-diegetic interaction. Depending on which plug-in chips you add or remove, you can completely change your characters HUD. You can display your health, a map, enemy health and fishing spots, as well as so much more, or completely take it away. Removing your OS-chip just immediately kills you, as it’s a core component, and being able to do so highlights just how much of your android you can interact with. There are also various screen and sound effects that occur as a result of hacking, such as making the audio an 8-bit chip tune, adding various filters to the screen and distorting your HUD as your character gets more damaged.

As a quick response to the above article, I do believe that games currently have the best potential in altering how we tell stories due to how we experience them. Games such as SOMA, where we experience almost first hand what can happen if the ability to transfer consciousnesses between bodies and technology is made real. While not a case of diegetic or non-diegetic interactions, it is powerful and something almost unique to games. The idea that we can directly interact with something that in other media can only be told or shown to us is incredibly interesting and if they can be handled like Hellblade or NieR:Automata then I am incredibly excited.

Related posts:

Universal Pictures has revealed the Night Swim release date for the upcoming horror thriller movie from director Bryce McGuire. Night Swim‘s release date has been moved up to Friday, January 5, 2024…

Snow Mountain Garlic, Allium Sativum, (Kashmiri Garlic) is one of the intense herbs that is satisfactory and has inexhaustible restorative properties. Numerous societies Chinese, Indian, Greek, and…

Park Guell is one of the most famous and most visited places in Barcelona city, after La Sagrada Familia. Barcelona city of Spain has become one of the first and most visited tourist destinations in…