Time for New Terminology? - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 80

2008; Jørgensen, 2007b). I will then discuss how
gameworlds separate themselves from traditional
fictional worlds and that this has consequences
for the way we interact with them (Aarseth, 2005,
2008; Klevjer, 2007), and consequently for the
application of diegetic and non-diegetic. The
last section of the chapter will present an alter-
native model for analyzing game sound in terms
of spatial integration. Throughout the chapter, I
will also use data from research interviews with
empirical players where this is appropriate. The
data concerns player interpretations of so-called
transdiegetic features in computer games, and sup-
port the idea that gameworlds work on premises
other than traditional fictional worlds.
Although this chapter focuses on the auditory
aspect of games in particular, it should be noticed
that the discussion about the relevance of diegetic
and non-diegetic features does not concern audi-
tory features alone. However, sound is particularly
interesting for several reasons. Since sound is
neither tangible nor visible, and has a temporal
quality, it has the ability to remain non-intrusive
even when it breaks the borders of the gameworld.
The ability to seamlessly integrate with the game-
world gives it the opportunity to challenge the
relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic
in a way that visual information cannot.

diegesis was revived in the 1950s to describe the
“recounted story” of a film, and today it has become
the accepted terminology for “the fictional world
of the story” (p. 16). According to this terminology,
diegetic sound is represented as “sound which has
a source in the story world”, while non-diegetic
sound is “represented as coming from a source
outside the story world” (Bordwell & Thompson,
1997, p. 330). Game scholars who use diegetic and
non-diegetic when describing game sound, tend
to take their point of departure from this newer,
film theory understanding of diegesis, and extend
the meaning of the “fictional world of the story”,
to the universe of the game. As mentioned, this
is confusing since it implies that the gameworld
is a storyworld, and is misleading because game
sound works for different purposes compared to
film sound. These points will be in focus in the
following discussion that critically evaluates the
use of diegetic and non-diegetic in relation to
computer game sound.
Of course, the debate about the relationship
between diegetic and non-diegetic features is not
unique to game studies. Also, film theory sees
the limited ability of this theory to precisely de-
scribe sound. While David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson (1997) define non-diegetic sound as
“represented as coming from a source outside the
story world” (p. 330), Edward Branigan separates
non-diegetic features into extra-fictional and
non-diegetic. He argues that when a piece of back-
ground film music is accompanying the credits of
a film, it should be interpreted as extra-fictional,
but when it accompanies a series of shots from a
nightclub, and is thus presented as typical of an
evening at that location, it should be interpreted as
non-diegetic (1992, p. 96). In this view, Branigan
claims that non-diegetic sound is related to the
diegesis, but does not correspond to the fictional
characters' experience of it (1992, p. 96), while
extra-fictional sound exists outside the diegesis
and is required to talk about the diegesis as fic-
tional (1992, p. 88). Although not accounting for
the participatory nature of games, Branigan's view

bAcKGrOUND

Diegetic vs. Non-Diegetic sound

The term diegetic originally stems from The
Republic , where Plato separates between two
narrative modes that he calls diegesis and mime-
sis . Diegesis, or pure narrative, is when the poet
“himself is a speaker and does not even attempt
to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speak-
ing”; while mimesis, or imitation, is when the
poet “delivers a speech as if he were someone
else” (Plato in Genette, 1983, p. 162). According
to film scholar David Bordwell (1986), the term