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of non-diegetic is more sympathetic towards how,
for instance, score music works in games, since
there is some kind of bond between the sound and
what happens within the diegesis.
When discussing film music, Michel Chion
also points out that the non-diegetic category is
complicated. A central reason, in his view, is that
so-called diegetic music, like non-diegetic music,
may have a commentary function meant to help
the interpretation of what is going on in the film.
Chion's own example is Siodmak's Abschied , in
which the protagonist's emotional states are being
punctuated by the music of his pianist neighbor,
thereby questioning the non-diegetic state of the
music. Because of such ambiguous cases, Chion ar-
gues that the reference to diegetic and non-diegetic
music is misleading, and uses pit music and screen
music instead. While pit music “accompanies the
image from a non-diegetic position, outside the
time and space of action”, screen music refers to
“music arising from a source located directly or
indirectly in the space of time” (Chion, 1994, p.
80). From this approach, screen music could also
be used to describe the computer game version of
leitmotifs (Gorbman, 1997, pp. 3, 26-29), in which
music with an apparent non-diegetic source warns
the player about dangers.
The relationship between diegetic and non-
diegetic is not a simple one in literary theory
either. One example of this is provided by Gerard
Genette, who points out that the diegetic and non-
diegetic levels often blend together in the act of
narration. He uses the term metalepsis to describe
any transition from one diegetic level to another.
While the classics used the term to refer to “any
intrusion by the non-diegetic narrator or narratee
into the diegetic universe” (Genette, 1983, pp.
234-235), Genette extends the term and calls all
kinds of narrative transitions of elements between
distinct levels of the literary diegesis narrative
metalepsis ”. In literature, these transitions range
from simple rhetorical figures, where the narrator
addresses the reader, to extremes in which a man
is killed by a character in the novel he is reading.
However, being closely connected to the act of
narration—how a story is told—metalepsis only
serves as a comparative illustration for the trans-
boundary movement that happens in computer
games.
These methods of categorization show that the
relationship between diegetic and non-diegetic
sound is not without debate in film theory and
literary theory but, while the concepts work as a
point of departure and as a common ground for
understanding the narrative levels of traditional
fiction, they create confusion in connection with
computer game sound because of the participatory
nature of games and gameworlds (Collins, 2008,
p. 180; Jørgensen, 2006, p. 48, 2007b, p. 106). In
films and computer games equally, sound cues the
media user's understanding of the environment, di-
rection, spatiality, temporality, objects and events.
However, film sound is limited to informing the
audience as to how to interpret what is going
on in an inaccessible world while game sound
provides information relevant for understanding
how to interact with the game system and behave
in the virtual environment that is the gameworld
(Jørgensen, 2008). This means that game sound
has a double status in which it provides usability
information to the player at the same time as it
has been stylized to fit the depicted universe. This
may create confusion with respect to the role of
the sound since it appears to have been placed
in the game from the point of view of creating
a sense of presence and physicality to the game
universe while it actually works as a support for
gameplay. A comparison serves as illustration.
When the players of The Elder Scrolls III: Mor-
rowind (Bethesda, 2002) hear the music change
when navigating through a forest, they know that
an enemy is approaching, and may act accordingly.
However, since this music has no source in the
gameworld, the player character should not be able
to hear it, but since the player does hear it and may
act upon it, the character also seems to act as if it
knows enemies are approaching even though it
does not yet see them coming. In this sense, sound
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