Diegetic (AKA Inside the story)

 

Diegetic is a term that I first found out about when I did cinema studies at university. It generally means something that the characters within a story are capable of interacting with. When you watch a character turn on a radio and listen to a song, and then maybe make a comment about how the song means something to them, it is clear in a few ways that they are able to hear the song and interact with it. On the other hand, if you watch a character walks into a room and a song starts playing that fits the intended mood of the scene...but there's no obvious indicator that there are speakers playing music within the scene, and it feel like the music is purely there to help the viewers establish a vibe... that's non-diegetic. 

Characters talking to one another... diegetic.

A narrator adding details to the imagery depicted on the screen, or a character's internal monologue that no one else in the scene can hear... non-diegetic.

If we pull the ideas but to a TTRPG perspective, we might be looking at...

Characters talking to people within the story...diegetic.

Players rolling dice for their characters to see what information they get... non-diegetic.

Characters shooting at monsters...diegetic.

Players looking up tables for hit locations, or arguing over the stats of the gun their character is using... non-diegetic.

A player in a Boffer LARP, physically whacking someone with a padded foam baton to score a hit... probably more on the diegetic side (but it's a bit of a simulated combat technique for safety purposes).

A player in a Parlour LARP playing scissors-rock-paper to and an established set of character abilities and statistics to determine a "physical hit"... that's more on the non-diegetic side.

When we're LARPing, the diegetic/non-diegetic distinction becomes more blurred. It links back to ideas of bleed (which I mentioned here and a few other times in previous posts on the blog), but I'll get back to that shortly if I don't get too distracted while writing this. 

For the moment, if we got back to an approximation of the idea of Gaming-Narrativism-Simulationism concept (yeah, I know there's a lot of folks who have a rabid dislike of that descriptive paradigm of gaming), I like to think that the "simulation" side tends more toward the diegetic, as it's more about the immersion of the players in the settings and genre of the story through their characters. The "gamism" side tends more to the non-diegetic, as it's more about competing to win the scenario with elements of game balance, fairness, and rules having a larger part of shaping the play. The "narrativism" side draws on both sets of concepts, picking and choosing from the assorted menu selection to find what might be most supportive to the story at any given time. The diegetic drives from within the story, the non-diegetic drives from outside the story.

One of the things I struggled with in FUBAR, and early drafts of SNAFU, was actually a dilemma of reconciling diegetic and non-diegetic character improvement, I just didn't realise it at the time. Heaps of other games have this dilemma too, but they hide behind facades of "game balance" as a barrier to avoid properly addressing what happens, or bringing out concepts like "metagaming" as a way to reinforce a divide between what happens in game compared to what happens out of game. 

I liked the ideas from Benjamin Lloyd in the previous post where diegetic advancement is characterised by stuff, or relationships, things that need to be acquired in game, and used explicitly within the context of the game.    

In a traditional dungeon-crawling game, the diegetic ways to improve a character are to find better stuff and equip yourself with it. If the game expands beyond dungeon crawling, then a character might improve by making allies through regular jobs done...some games expand on this by allow characters to improve their skills by attempting to use them a certain number of times, acquire bonus abilities to their characters if they explicitly fulfill certain tasks within the setting, find appropriate people within the setting willing to teach them new techniques, or maybe drain the soul essence of people to gain their memories and powers. Each of these improvement methods has a logical consistency within the setting to explain how/why a character has improved. 

There's a problem here for the players who are just looking to play a game and win it... they don't necessarily want to engage the middle step of doing things within the game, they just want quick rewards that get them closer to a victory condition. On the other hand, for players who want to engage with the world, the feeling of experiencing the setting from within can be it's own reward. Diegetic advancement has a variety of player types who just think it detracts from their game session, however it can really be used as a driver for the story. If you need something to get you the edge you require, it makes sense that certain tasks need to be performed to get it. Most pre-written modules are specifically built on this premise. So, at a micro level players understand it, it's only at the macro level that certain players feel it doesn't work. Arguably, finding more interesting magic items, artifacts and weapons is one of the more clever ways that D&D (and other dungeon crawlers) use to diegetically improve characters, but I don't like the way these games often ensure "everyone gets an even share of the loot". I'm kind of thinking here about one character being equivalent to homeless and living on $100 a week, while another might have a noble background and a couple of levels under their belt, living one something more akin to $2000 a week. If treasure was split evenly, equivalent to $1000 each, it would make a massive difference to the homeless character, and a minor impact to the noble. Equal, or equitable...which do you go with, and which makes more sense. It's probaby something for players to work out among themselves as a creative void to explore rather than applying some specific non-diegetic rules to the situation.   

Getting back to the FUBAR idea, everyone is always subjected to a fluctuating mix of traits that are gained and lost through their successful and unsuccessful actions. Everything is diegetic, and everything is linked to various other elements of the game to may a cohesive imagined ecosystem of storytelling. Traits cards signify to those outside the game what effects might impact certain types of actions, and traits may include relationships, items, skills, penalties, or anything else that might have a mechanical influence on play. If it impacts on the characters, it's diegetic...if it doesn't impact on the characters but instead impacts on the way players perceive the characters, it's non-diegetic.

In some versions of that game, I don't even have a non-diegetic method for improving or advancing characters because it's a game all about immersing the characters in a world that initially begins outside of their control but they gradually gain agency over the events impacting their lives and take back their lives. We need to know the decisions they make, we need their decisions to be important to their lives and their place in the world. Character decisions are diegetic, otherwise they're tropes and deus ex machina, which remove a player out of their immersion.

The thing with diegetic advancement is that I've found it usually works well in a self contained story, but over the flow of a wider narrative, not so much. Finding clues to a murder advances a characters ability to solve that case, but once the murderer has been put away, all that work is basically rendered null and void. Building strength through a training montage may be good for the lead up to the final boss fight, but when the next story is a machiavellian social intrigue...was it worthwhile? (There's probably a whole heap of issues that might need to be raised if a campaign did a left-turn like this...) Many of the games I develop have a tendency to allow players to keep any one of the upgrades they earned along the way as a permanent part of the character from that point forward, or maybe allow other players to suggest which upgrades are worth keeping based on their understanding of how the character was played, and what makes most sense for them to keep. This is a bit non-diegetic, but in many cases, the notion of permanent character advancement is non-diegetic anyway so it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. 

I'm sure there's far more I could write here... but that's enough for the moment.