Diegesis in XR
Diegesis, noun (“die-uh-jee-sis”)
Diegetic, adj. (“die-uh-jet-ic”)
Yay, more industry jargon!
Just kidding. Diegesis is actually not an XR term at all. It is borrowed/stolen from other fields. It’s actually as old as the art of storytelling. In XR, we have plenty of jargon specific to our industry, but every once in a while, it helps to let other fields do the jargon heavy lifting.
Diegesis is alive and well today in books, plays, and movies. From its Greek root, it means “to narrate.”
Another way to view it is a common phrase among novelists and screen writers:
In other words, make the plot obvious via the experience of the characters rather than simply letting the plot be explained through dialogue. Writers across the board advocate a style that is more experiential, a style that shows rather than telling.
Showing is diegesis. Telling is non-diegesis or extra-diegesis. This is actually flipped from the way it was used historically. In the time of Plato and Aristotle, diegesis was “telling” or “narrating” and mimesis or “imitating” was the opposite. But today, diegesis has come to mean all aspects of a story that exist within the context of that story. So since a narrator is outside that context, the narrator is non-diegetic. All things inside the story are diegetic.
In any modern narrative, showing is favored above telling wherever the plot is concerned, but the scope of diegesis has expanded to the point that diegesis and non-diegesis both have valid uses in many other aspects of storytelling. Before we explore these fully, let’s look more closely at where it all began.
As far back as the days of Plato and Aristotle, there was the action of the play, and then there was the description provided by the narrator. Sometimes, the narrator was also a character in the story. Often, the narrator would jump in and out of presence in the story’s action to tell an aside or two.
Diegesis is fictional presence.
In modern storytelling, if the narrator is a character in the story, all words spoken to other characters are diegetic. Any time the narrator speaks to the audience, the words are non-diegetic or extra-diegetic. Literary analysis delves into multiple layers of diegeticism, but for our purposes in XR, we can get plenty of use out of just the two binary states: diegetic vs. non-diegetic.
The idea of diegesis can be applied to not only people, but to any object or idea within a story. For instance, mixing both diegesis and non-diegesis is common in film sound design.
Only the audience can hear underscore. It is non-diegetic (i.e. outside the narrative), whereas when a speaker plays a song inside the scene, it is called diegetic music because the characters can hear and react to it. It is part of the narrative.
Sound designers see every track, every channel, as either diegetic or non-diegetic. They routinely master diegetic audio very differently from non-diegetic audio because our ears have a long history of automatically interpreting certain EQ values one way or the other, mostly due to the way audio morphs as it exits certain kinds of speakers. We pick up on whether a sound is “present” in the room without even noticing why. These subtle differences can have powerful emotional impacts. The intro to Jaws is a classic example where diegetic and non-diegetic sound is intentionally juxtaposed.
We have similar power when building a VR or AR app with more than just audio. Presence is incredibly relevant to spatial UX and UI across all of our senses. VR and AR applications can display content that intends to exist in an imaginary other place, or the elements can exist superimposed yet separate from that place, like a narrator.
Why do we care?
An active awareness of diegesis can help us organize our functional and aesthetic decision-making processes when building an XR experience. Choosing between diegesis and non-diegesis has benefits and consequences. It is a powerful tool in a spatial UX designer’s toolbox. To see why, we should look at an example of XR diegesis and compare it to a non-diegetic equivalent.
CASE STUDY: The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners BACKPACK versus an INVENTORY UI in a Final Fantasy game
The S&S backpack is a diegetic spin on the typical inventory list you get in most role-playing games. Do you want your UI to enhance the experience by becoming part of the action? Make it diegetic.
Rather than presenting a floating window that contains a list of icons, render each inventory object as the thing it represents. No need for icons when the object itself is ever-present.
Often, you can simply scale the object down in true Mary Poppins fashion so that a backpack fits more inventory than it would in real life. If that’s not enough, well then bring in a non-diegetic element to spice things up:
The S&S backpack has paging buttons to cycle through multiple inventory pages. Odd… backpacks don’t have pages. Floating paging buttons would never be found in a real-life bookbag. These buttons are non-diegetic, yet there they are on top of a diegetic backpack. They compliment the functionality of the backpack nicely.
In contrast, the inventory screen from Final Fantasy VII is arguably one of the greatest and most classic RPG UIs ever invented. It is completely non-diegetic.
It was a culmination of all the learnings from previous FF series games, sporting a rare balance of depth and clarity. Everything fits snugly in a list. You can fit more things in a given space. You can configure more things in less time. The materia system was the envy of UI designers for decades. Plus, your arm doesn’t get tired from physically throwing most things into a diegetic trash bin.
Icons tend to take up less space than the things they represent. Reducing an element or idea to a purer symbol of itself has benefits.
But the efficiency of space usage comes at a cost: I don’t feel as though I’m rummaging through a sack to configure and access my weapons, potions, etc. It’s less experiential. It’s telling, not showing, a cardinal sin among storytellers.
While I’m engaging with inventory in Final Fantasy VII, I’m not present in the story. I have zero concerns that perhaps I’ll have my face chewed off unless I hurry. I’ll never panic and accidentally drop the one item that’s crucial for my survival, a mistake that you’ll find is quite common and deadly in Saints and Sinners.
Showing versus telling has big gameplay implications. In Final Fantasy games, large stretches of gameplay consist of traversal through dangerous landscapes out in the open, yet you rarely feel that danger viscerally. You will be constantly attacked unless… you open your inventory screen. No biggy. It’s a time-out mechanism any time you want to take a breather, which is totally appropriate in a game full of mostly sprawling landscapes.
But there’s no calling “time out” in a Walking Dead game. You’re meant to feel the unease of the undead creeping up on you all the time. It makes more sense for the act of sifting through inventory to come in quick bursts interspersed among blood-gushing attacks and sprints away from gnashing zombie teeth. The UI should be more experiential when the gameplay calls for it. In other words, diegesis was generally great for The Walking Dead UI while non-diegesis was generally great for Final Fantasy UI.
We see diegesis everywhere in XR apps. In shooters like Pistol Whip and Space Pirate Trainer, we grow accustomed to the shooting mechanics from the moment we power on the game because menu buttons are activated when we shoot them.
We use the same guns to activate the UI that we’ll use when gameplay begins. The buttons themselves are non-diegetic. There are no buttons floating on imaginary screens in the real world, yet in VR and AR, there they are, like a narrator among characters. But how do we activate those buttons? By pulling the trigger of a firearm that looks and operates very similarly to its real-world counterpart. The gun is diegetic even though it shoots a non-diegetic element. There is no rule requiring separation of the two.
The common refrain you’ll always face as you set out to build an XR UI:
1) Does the experience call for a UI that is more experiential? Then choose diegesis to enhance presence.
2) Does the experience call for high efficiency and clarity? To do more with less, choose non-diegesis. Use symbology and minimalism to represent non-present elements or ideas that take up less space.
3) Do either or both in varying amounts to find a happy medium.
Good luck building your next XR app, and above all, never forget one final thing:
The future…
IS NOW!
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Here’s a few other articles I’ve written on spatial computing:
Unlocking the 3rd D — A spatial design manifesto
WTF is a DOF? —Noob or pro, it’s more complex than you may think
Written By: AJ Campbell, guy who builds stuff https://twitter.com/texasgreentea
