Time for New Terminology? - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 88

premises. One characteristic of gameworlds is
that they need to have a comprehensive system for
player interaction. They need to be able to com-
municate necessary information about changes
in game state and allow the player the necessary
degree of control. Many of these interface features,
including sounds, are often added to the game as
abstractions of specific game mechanics partly
integrated into the gameworld and, as that, it is
problematic to see them as either diegetic or non-
diegetic in traditional terms. Instead of looking
at what would be a credible representation of a
naturalistic world, we should look at how the game-
world and the game system work to support each
other. If the game rules state that monsters growl
when attacking, and that individuals respawn with
their amour 10% damaged after being killed, this
is the premise of the specific gameworld. This is
a view that is a familiar one for empirical players.
One of the player respondents in my empirical
research states it thus:

since gameworlds functionally are very different
from literary or cinematic diegeses.
Based on the above, the upholding of the game
system by the gameworld also has consequences
for the integration and design of sound in games.
All game sounds have a function with respect to the
gameworld, be it to provide information relevant
for gameplay or to provide a specific atmosphere.
Specific games and genres use sound in different
ways and the degree to which it is incorporated
into the gameworld plays an important role for
reasons of clarity and consistency and in order to
create an immediately understandable relationship
between the sound and the gameworld. When
designing user interfaces for games, a designer
needs to decide how to present information to the
player. Central to this is deciding which menus
that should allow interaction or not, how and
whether the user interface should be integrated
into the gameworld, and how sounds and visual
elements should work together. Game design-
ers Kevin Saunders and Jeannie Novak (2006)
describe two ways of relating the user interface
to the gameworld and the gamespace. A dynamic
interface supports the idea that all audio-visual
aspects of a game should be seen as interface be-
cause they all provide the player with some kind of
information, and dynamic interfaces are therefore
completely incorporated into the gameworld. An
example is the way an avatar's amour and weapons
provide information in a massively multiplayer
online game (MMO) 2 like World of Warcraft : By
looking at what gear the opponent has, a player
receives vital information about class, level and
power of that avatar. A static interface , on the
other hand, is an overlay interface that consists
of external control elements such as health bar,
map, pop-up menus, inventory, action bars and
so on. Since user interface and gameworld often
tend to merge, making the boundary between
gameworld and interface relative (Jørgensen,
2007b, 2008, 2009), the static/dynamic divide
should not be seen as absolute, but as a continuum
where the interface may be more or less integrated

[…] In this world, you can define whatever you
would like there to be, it doesn't seem that things
are very credible in themselves.

Q: So why do we accept it?

Because it's a game. And that is something
completely different from a film. (Isabel (25).
Individual interview, Dec 01, 2008)

Here Isabel emphasizes the idea that game-
worlds do not need to be a credible alternative to
other fictional worlds, and that game designers
can decide what they want to include as existent
in their world: Because they are integrated with
the game system, gameworlds are necessarily dif-
ferent from fictional worlds, such as films. This
interpretation supports Grimshaw's extended view
of what counts as diegetic in computer games, but
at the same time it amplifies the problematic as-
pects of using diegesis as explanatory terminology,