Time for New Terminology? - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 84

ing able to free oneself to establish a new model
designed to take the particular characteristics of
game sound into account.
A game scholar that partly succeeds in using
diegetic and non-diegetic in his description of
games is Alexander Galloway (2006). Focusing
on games as activities, he couples the terminol-
ogy with his own terminology of whether it is
the player ( operator ) or game system ( machine )
that performs the act. His model describes all
actions as executed either inside the “world of
gameplay” or outside of it and whether it is the
player or the game system that takes a specific
action. In this way, he describes all actions from
the player firing a gun to configuring the op-
tions menu, from the movements of non-playing
characters to the spawning of power-ups. While
the categories themselves are not crucial to this
chapter, Galloway's perspective is important. He
emphasizes the fact that games are activities and
that they must be described as such. He also states
that when diegetic and non-diegetic are used in
connection with games the meaning of the terms
changes (Galloway, 2006). However, even though
he points this important fact out, Galloway's
use of these terms is somewhat confusing since
he, like I do with the term transdiegetic , tries to
change the concepts from describing the relative
positioning of features in space to describing ac-
tions. The model is worth mentioning, however,
since the action-oriented perspective supports
sound by focusing on temporality: that is, like
sound, action is time-based.
Galloway's approach to diegesis as a “world of
gameplay” is also closely related to Mark Grim-
shaw's radical modification of what should count
as diegetic sound in computer games. He extends
the idea of diegetic sound compared to film theory,
and states that in computer games, diegetic sound
is “defined as the sound that emanates from the
gameplay environment, objects and characters and
that is defined by that environment, those objects
and characters”, and that it must “derive from
some entity of the game during play” (Grimshaw,

2008, p. 224). In this respect, sounds do not have
to be placed within the game environment in a
way that we recognize from the physical world.
In other words, as long as the referent is diegetic,
the signal does not need to be. There is no need to
have a character in the gameworld that produces
the sound for it to count as diegetic. For Grimshaw,
sounds are diegetic as long as they relate to actions
and events in the gameworld. He exemplifies by
pointing out that sounds signaling the entrance or
exit of players in a multiplayer game should be
considered diegetic since they concern entities in
the game environment and affect their behavior.
Based on this understanding, Grimshaw elabo-
rates that diegetic game sounds are not limited
to sounds that exist in the gameworld but that
we also need to take into account all sounds that
provide information relevant for understanding
the gameworld. In effect, this would also include
the traditional background music that signals an
enemy about to attack in The Elder Scrolls III:
Morrowind , and disembodied voiceovers in War-
craft 3 . By introducing additional new concepts
that specify whether a sound is heard by a specific
player ( ideodiegetic sounds), and whether such
a sound results from the player's haptic input
or not ( kinediegetic versus exodiegetic sounds)
(Grimshaw & Schott, 2007; Grimshaw, 2008),
Grimshaw creates a game-specific terminology
that recognizes its theoretical relationship to the
diegetic or non-diegetic divide. A concept that is
particularly interesting is what he calls telediegetic
sounds. Connected to multiplayer situations, these
are sounds produced by one player and of con-
sequence for a second player who does not hear
that sound. While it may be seen as a paradox to
call this information auditory when it is in fact the
action of the first player that affects the second
player, the concept has interesting implications. If
we detach the concept from the idea that it must
be heard by a first player, it may be extended to
all situations in which players appear to react to
a sound that they do not hear, such as is the case
when players apparently react to the traditionally