Non-diegetic gameplay
It's an old joke: when a meteor is poised to destroy the earth, it's only appropriate and proper to do sidequests. It'll wait. Unless there's an explicit timer counting down the time until the Mako reactor explodes, videogames give you an unlimited amount of time in order to complete their goals. Xenosaga Episode 1 is one of the more egregiously amusing examples: when the party enters the final dungeon, the Big Bad appears and tells you that he's going to Turn On The Big Gun Of Doom, which will take him about ten minutes. If I remember correctly, he wasn't bluffing. Simply going through the dungeon took me over an hour--the dungeons in that game are huge--and before I did that I decided that I was way underlevelled, so I spent another three or four levelling up and doing sidequests. Time limit of ten minutes notwithstanding, you still make it to the final room just in the nick of time.
The folks at TVTropes call this a particular form of Gameplay and Story Segregation, a fairly common one, and it's not hard to see why it exists: you want to give the story a sense of urgency, and having a villain simply hanging out in the back room playing paddleball while he waits for you to show up isn't a good way of heightening dramatic tension. We'll be told that time is of the essence because we're at the climax of the game, but meanwhile, we may not be done with the gameplay: we may be underlevelled, there may be some items we want to buy, and it's fair enough that we get the chance to club some more rats.
The term diegesis--and its related adjective diegetic--are generally used in film and most often used to describe music. Diegetic basically means in-world and has an antonym in the term non-diegetic. Diegetic music is music that the characters can hear--a character turns on his CD player and begins grooving to "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" by Mission of Burma. He can hear it--every character who comes within range can hear it. In another movie, a character is running because he's late for class and "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" comes on the soundtrack as we see him tearing across campus; the audience can hear it, it underscores the tension and speed of the moment, but all that the character can hear is his own heavy breathing, his heart pounding in his ears, and the kids he's almost crashing into yelling at him; this is non-diegetic music. It's a convention we accept: no one imagines that he can hear the song in the second case, and in fact, some movies will set up gags based on that expectation. One of my favorites is in the eating disorder episode of Strangers with Candy. Jerri looks sadly into the camera as the soundtrack swells: "Your problems couldn't be any clearer/ no one pays any attention to you/ you are large and quite obsese"--and, annoyed, Jerri turns the radio off because she's sick of hearing that song everywhere. (The gag repeats two more times, once in Spanish and is one of those examples of a repeated gag that is funny every time, Family Guy I'm looking at you.) We're set up by television convention to believe that this is not an in-world song--and our expectations are thwarted when it turns out to be diegetic.
I've heard the term "non-diegetic gameplay"--at least on Wikipedia--used to refer to, for example, the out-of-world elements of a game--talking about character sheets and rolling dice and all that--but that's a slightly different term, specifically, metagame. (In a console game, metagame refers to what you do with the controller.) I use the term non-diegetic gameplay to refer to parts of the game that don't actually happen.
Consider a hypothetical example based on Dragon Warrior mechanics. Nigel, our hero, is at level 4; he's tasked with defeating the Evil Kobold that has taken place in the woods behind the town. He fights through the wood, faces the Kobold, and promptly gets his ass handed to him. He revives in town with half of his gold taken from him but figures that he's simply misunderstanding the nature of the boss--that he's using the wrong strategy. So he fights through the wood again, faces the Kobold, tries a different, better strategy, one which knocks more damage off, but he still gets killed. So after he revives again, he spends the next hour of gameplay and makes it to Level 5. He faces the Kobold again and once more gets killed. He spends two more hours of gameplay and makes it to Level 7. This time, when he fights the boss, he defeats it, gains 100 gold and 200 experience, plus the respect of the townspeople. (If this is Dragon Warrior VII, he's got an awesome feast awaiting him too.)
Were Nigel to narrate the story of his quest, it would not be, "Well, I explored the woods, fought the Kobold, died, fought the Kobold again, died again, leveled up a bit, fought the Kobold a third time, died, leveled up some more, and defeated the Kobold on the fourth try." It would likely be along the lines of, "I explored the woods, and then I fought and defeated the Kobold." Storywise, the protagonists--even the angsty, edgy ones--are traditionally heroic as far as combat prowess goes. The plotlines of most of them describe the characters as chosen, or gifted soldiers, or specially trained, or even simply normal people who are really goddamn lucky. There is no room for a character who is clumsy or failure-prone. The storyline ignores the hours of training and preparation; while the gameplay--and more importantly, the player--can't do that, the NPCs in the game merely act as if the main character is wandering from town to town solving problems and succeeding, rather than trying and failing multiple times before getting it right.
The narrative of the storyline and the narrative of the gameplay are different; for all intents and purposes, a majority of the narrative of the gameplay simply does not happen in the world of the game. Levelling is non-diegetic; I would venture to say that a majority of the gameplay in an RPG is non-diegetic.
Basically this does explain a lot: If all those hours of clubbing rats to get gold to get better equipment didn't actually happen, then the characters weren't ignoring Meteor: in the world of the game, they went straight to the final dungeon. The whole "Why don't they just use a phoenix down on Aeris" argument becomes a moot point: in-battle deaths are non-diegetic; Aeris is the only character who "really" dies. (Otherwise, the narrative becomes, "Tifa died, and I revived her, and Barret died, and I revived her, and I died, and Tifa revived me, and then Aeris died, but I couldn't revive her for some reason, then Tifa died again..." It's more along the lines of, simply, "Aeris died.")
But I'm not sure if it's a good thing, and I'd like to see games do something with the concept--I mean, the metagame has gotten parodied and deconstructed and all that, but I can't think of a single instance of a game that takes seriously the concept that the player's experience and the character's experience are two different animals, or at least pays attention to it. Granted, every player levels a different amount, and you'd have to take that into consideration: Seth might beat the Kobold on his first try, and Nate might have to get to level 9 before he wins the fight. I don't think that putting the entire game on a timer is the way to go every time, but I'd like at least an acknowledgement from the game that I am, indeed, playing it.
The folks at TVTropes call this a particular form of Gameplay and Story Segregation, a fairly common one, and it's not hard to see why it exists: you want to give the story a sense of urgency, and having a villain simply hanging out in the back room playing paddleball while he waits for you to show up isn't a good way of heightening dramatic tension. We'll be told that time is of the essence because we're at the climax of the game, but meanwhile, we may not be done with the gameplay: we may be underlevelled, there may be some items we want to buy, and it's fair enough that we get the chance to club some more rats.
The term diegesis--and its related adjective diegetic--are generally used in film and most often used to describe music. Diegetic basically means in-world and has an antonym in the term non-diegetic. Diegetic music is music that the characters can hear--a character turns on his CD player and begins grooving to "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" by Mission of Burma. He can hear it--every character who comes within range can hear it. In another movie, a character is running because he's late for class and "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate" comes on the soundtrack as we see him tearing across campus; the audience can hear it, it underscores the tension and speed of the moment, but all that the character can hear is his own heavy breathing, his heart pounding in his ears, and the kids he's almost crashing into yelling at him; this is non-diegetic music. It's a convention we accept: no one imagines that he can hear the song in the second case, and in fact, some movies will set up gags based on that expectation. One of my favorites is in the eating disorder episode of Strangers with Candy. Jerri looks sadly into the camera as the soundtrack swells: "Your problems couldn't be any clearer/ no one pays any attention to you/ you are large and quite obsese"--and, annoyed, Jerri turns the radio off because she's sick of hearing that song everywhere. (The gag repeats two more times, once in Spanish and is one of those examples of a repeated gag that is funny every time, Family Guy I'm looking at you.) We're set up by television convention to believe that this is not an in-world song--and our expectations are thwarted when it turns out to be diegetic.
I've heard the term "non-diegetic gameplay"--at least on Wikipedia--used to refer to, for example, the out-of-world elements of a game--talking about character sheets and rolling dice and all that--but that's a slightly different term, specifically, metagame. (In a console game, metagame refers to what you do with the controller.) I use the term non-diegetic gameplay to refer to parts of the game that don't actually happen.
Consider a hypothetical example based on Dragon Warrior mechanics. Nigel, our hero, is at level 4; he's tasked with defeating the Evil Kobold that has taken place in the woods behind the town. He fights through the wood, faces the Kobold, and promptly gets his ass handed to him. He revives in town with half of his gold taken from him but figures that he's simply misunderstanding the nature of the boss--that he's using the wrong strategy. So he fights through the wood again, faces the Kobold, tries a different, better strategy, one which knocks more damage off, but he still gets killed. So after he revives again, he spends the next hour of gameplay and makes it to Level 5. He faces the Kobold again and once more gets killed. He spends two more hours of gameplay and makes it to Level 7. This time, when he fights the boss, he defeats it, gains 100 gold and 200 experience, plus the respect of the townspeople. (If this is Dragon Warrior VII, he's got an awesome feast awaiting him too.)
Were Nigel to narrate the story of his quest, it would not be, "Well, I explored the woods, fought the Kobold, died, fought the Kobold again, died again, leveled up a bit, fought the Kobold a third time, died, leveled up some more, and defeated the Kobold on the fourth try." It would likely be along the lines of, "I explored the woods, and then I fought and defeated the Kobold." Storywise, the protagonists--even the angsty, edgy ones--are traditionally heroic as far as combat prowess goes. The plotlines of most of them describe the characters as chosen, or gifted soldiers, or specially trained, or even simply normal people who are really goddamn lucky. There is no room for a character who is clumsy or failure-prone. The storyline ignores the hours of training and preparation; while the gameplay--and more importantly, the player--can't do that, the NPCs in the game merely act as if the main character is wandering from town to town solving problems and succeeding, rather than trying and failing multiple times before getting it right.
The narrative of the storyline and the narrative of the gameplay are different; for all intents and purposes, a majority of the narrative of the gameplay simply does not happen in the world of the game. Levelling is non-diegetic; I would venture to say that a majority of the gameplay in an RPG is non-diegetic.
Basically this does explain a lot: If all those hours of clubbing rats to get gold to get better equipment didn't actually happen, then the characters weren't ignoring Meteor: in the world of the game, they went straight to the final dungeon. The whole "Why don't they just use a phoenix down on Aeris" argument becomes a moot point: in-battle deaths are non-diegetic; Aeris is the only character who "really" dies. (Otherwise, the narrative becomes, "Tifa died, and I revived her, and Barret died, and I revived her, and I died, and Tifa revived me, and then Aeris died, but I couldn't revive her for some reason, then Tifa died again..." It's more along the lines of, simply, "Aeris died.")
But I'm not sure if it's a good thing, and I'd like to see games do something with the concept--I mean, the metagame has gotten parodied and deconstructed and all that, but I can't think of a single instance of a game that takes seriously the concept that the player's experience and the character's experience are two different animals, or at least pays attention to it. Granted, every player levels a different amount, and you'd have to take that into consideration: Seth might beat the Kobold on his first try, and Nate might have to get to level 9 before he wins the fight. I don't think that putting the entire game on a timer is the way to go every time, but I'd like at least an acknowledgement from the game that I am, indeed, playing it.
posted by R. Goodness at 2:46 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home