"Rimmon–Kenan (1983) notes how the distinction between Plato's and Aristotle's mimesis (often translated as showing) and diegesis (telling) had come by the end of the nineteenth century to mean, on the one hand, the direct presentation of events in which the narrator seems to disappear (as in drama), and, on the other, presentation mediated by a narrator who, instead of exhibiting events, talks about them, sums them up, and so forth. Since then, the term diegesis has been widely adopted in film theory with a rather different sense: diegetic space is that which is accessible to the characters in the film (Giejgo 2001). By contrast, one of the most common extra–diegetic components is film music, heard by the audience but not by the characters in the story. Subtitles and inter–titles are also extra–diegetic. In the case of a painting, the artist's signature is usually in the non–diegetic space of the canvas surface ? but occasionally is made diegetic by being incorporated into the scene itself. In a videogame, there is almost invariably a diegetic world occupied by the scenery and characters, and a non–diegetic layer occupied by status indicators for variables such as health, weaponry, and so forth. We argue that this divided relationship between the world and the interface, between the diegesis and the extra–diegetic, is analogous to the configurational mode of graphics. There is a diagrammatic relation between a pictured world and the set of controls and measures which are external to that world. Such a relation is also familiar in standard graphical user interfaces, usually considered as examples of direct manipulation (Shneiderman 1998:186 passim) but often favouring indirect manipulation, so that for example an onscreen video–console has a set of controls to play, stop, rewind and so forth, rather than the user interacting with the displayed video material itself. The controls are extra–diegetic."
(Stephen Boyd Davis)
[1] Rimmon–Kenan, Shlomith. 1983. Narrative Fiction: contemporary poetics. Methuen, London.
[2] Giejgo, Marja. 2001. www, ?Val Geilgud and the BBC?, website of Independent Radio Drama Productions
Ltd, http://www.irdp.co.uk/GIELGUD/valbbc14.htm (1 September 2001)
[3] Shneiderman, Ben. 1993. 3rd edition. Designing the User Interface – strategies for effective human computerinter action. Addison–Wesley, Reading, MA.
http://lansdown.mdx.ac.uk/lceaSite/about/staff/StephenBoydDavis/pdf/BoydDavisMDX.pdf