[ADVICE] Diegesis in Games

or the Illusion of Being Immersed

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Hi, hey, hello.

Let’s talk about diegesis:

“… a style of fiction storytelling in which a participating narrator offers an on-site, often interior, view of the scene to the reader, viewer, or listener by subjectively describing the actions and, in some cases, thoughts, of one or more characters.”¹

This is the definition that appears when you look up diegetic. It’s important to realize that this relates specifically to the Greek method of fiction storytelling, not what we’re talking about today.

Instead, we’re going to go with the, thankfully, much simpler film definition of diegesis:

“… anything that can be considered part of the story world. Specifically, it’s the story as it is depicted on screen, rather than the story as it occurs in real time.”²

In other words, from a film perspective, a character's actual actions on screen are diegetic, while the transition from one day to another is non-diegetic. To use Star Wars as an example, Darth Vader’s declaration to Luke about being his father is diegetic, whereas the title crawl at the beginning is not.

In TTRPGs, diegesis works pretty much the same way. Everything the characters directly experience—what they see, hear, and interact with—is diegetic; Dice rolls, mechanics, or the GM thumbing through the book for a rule are non-diegetic.

If you’re reading a blog (especially mine) about ttRPGs, you’re probably aware of the concept of diegesis and how it affects play. But we’ll get into it anyway because I’ve got some thoughts.

Specifically, why it's integral to your game to try and stay as diegetic as possible to retain investment, engagement, and excitement.

First, why should you care about any of this?

The obvious answer is that it makes your games feel better for those playing them. Its easier to see and experience a world if you feel like you’re a part of it.

But the slightly more complicated answer is that it makes it easier for everyone at the table to do the hard things, like role-playing, staying in character, treating the world as a real place, critically thinking about obstacles, and more.

“Roleplaying is a hard thing to do in a roleplaying game?”

Yes, it is. This is why everybody bitches and moans that their games don’t feel like Lord of the Rings or whatever.

People come to your game, presumably, to have fun, not to perform high acting (save for a few of you weirdos out there), so they’re not going to go out of their way to comment in-fiction on all the in-fiction elements of a world the way a written character might.

If a character in my game said something like this apropos to another character, I would literally shit a brick.

As the GM, though, it doesn’t seem that hard to be in the moment. After all, YOU have to be in the moment all the time. YOU have to act as though the whole world is always real. What gives?

1. First of all, sweetie, a hard lesson: nobody cares about your world the way that you do.
   
   YOU may know that the Crown Prince’s galleon is made of Agarin wood from the northern plains due to a long-standing agreement between the realms of Cujar the Wise and Brannic the Northman that allows them both free use of the River Ywalis that borders both their lands…
   
   … but your players don’t (and probably won’t) care about that.

2. Second, as I mentioned, acting diegetically is really hard and a trained skill. Why do you think all those fancy-pants actors have all that money? It’s not just a switch you turn on or off — it’s a muscle you have to train.

That said, just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. And because it’s hard, you have to really hammer home the elements of your world that you care about and never, NEVER, treat them as anything but existing in that world as real things.

Put another way, never break kayfabe.

To me, diegesis in ttRPGs represents the unbreakable, immutable elements of your game world that elevate it from words on a page to an actual living, breathing thing: the Real.

Because the human mind is a fickle thing, once we recognize something isn’t holding up to what was promised, it’s the only thing we can focus on. As soon as the illusion is broken, the mind can only see the stage, the lights, the audience, the cameras — in other words, the non-diegetic.

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But first, a word:

In this week’s [ADDENDUM], I give examples of what I abstract and what I try to keep diegetic in my games. I also make a few suggestions as to what type of game you might end up running depending on what is kept diegetic.

So if you’re looking for concrete examples to use in your games, consider becoming a paid subscriber today. All through October you can subscribe for 40% off and keep that price forever.

You can sign up or upgrade your membership within the article itself. Check it out:

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Now, some will argue that abstraction is important to “save time” or to “prevent the slog of bookkeeping,” but I thoroughly disagree with this view and, frankly, think it looks at the problem from the completely wrong angle.

Why are we trying to “save time” when playing our games?

Shouldn’t we be luxuriating in the most precious part of the roleplaying hobby — which is to say to engage in another world and see what stories can be told from them? Why are we so quick to “cut out the boring bits” when its the boring bits that make the thing feel Real?

I argue that as soon as you abstract something away, you move away from the Real.

There are valid reasons to abstract, even in my argument against doing so flippantly! After all, we don’t need to learn a fantasy language to speak in our character’s tongue nor do we don’t need to necessarily determine exactly why a character with 14 HP is tougher than one with 10 HP. That said, you need to be careful about what you abstract. Cut away too much and you’ll find that you’ve accidentally cut away the Real — and your game will suffer for it at some point.

Keeping as much of the game diegetic as possible almost universally enhances the experience by bringing the Real to the players at the table, including yourself.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diegesis

2. https://www.videomaker.com/featured/a-deep-dive-into-diegesis/