The Perennial Question of Diegetic Ludonarrative Kayfaybe

Lately, I’ve been introduced to some fascinating words:

• Diegesis: this is the concept that sounds in a narrative are sometimes “in” the story, meaning the characters can hear them, and sometimes they’re on the soundtrack, meaning only the viewers can hear them. (I wrote about this a bit here.)

• Ludonarrative Dissonance: this is the idea that some aspects of a video game are part of a larger narrative, and other parts are part of the gameplay, and there are times when the intended narrative and the player’s actions disagree, leading to dissonance (did you know “ludology” is the study of video games?)

• Kayfaybe: this is the staging of reality inside professional wrestling, both in shows and events, and as well as when interacting with fans (yes, it’s a weird word, and there doesn’t seem to be an accepted etymology for it, other than a rumor it’s pig latin-ish for “be fake”; more at Wikipedia)

Not to get absurdly philosophic on you or anything, but in the entertainment or content industries, there are three “levels of existence”:

1. The production of it (ex: the writers of a TV show)
2. What happens in the narrative or the content (ex: the characters in the TV show)
3. The consumption of it (ex: the person watching the TV show)

When we’re watching a TV show, at some level, we’re aware that the content is happening “away” from us. We are watching entertainment, and we’re not part of it. We go where the action goes, and we have no agency or choice what happens.

What’s the equivalent of digital experiences? When we view a website, do we maintain that distance, mentally?

Sure, we can navigate, but only within prescribed patterns. When we search, we see results that are given to us, we can’t see how they were created or get access to the repository of content. We have more agency than when we watch TV, but we’re still operating within prescribed channels.

Maybe intranets or groupware are different? With those platforms we understand the larger constructs at work. We usually have some concept of IA or content organization – we know that we’re looking at a “site” or a “list” in Sharepoint, for example. We’re oriented to how the information is managed. We understand the constructs; we can visualize the building blocks; we can see The Matrix.

To what extent is this helpful? To what extent do we need or want our users to “break the fourth wall” of our information structures? Is it helpful for users to be able to mentally frame what our content is in a meta-sense?

In more concrete terms: what if we published and linked our content models to the content they underpin? What if every page had a link at the bottom to our data dictionary with the type definition, all the properties, and showed where in the repository the content existed, spatially and all the processes acting on it?

Would that help the user’s experience? Would it help them understand the content?

Clearly, for casual visitors this isn’t helpful. But for more indoctrinated users (I made that label up) that are going to be spending more than a trivial amount of time with a content repository, would help for them to “peel back the curtain” and understand how the content… works?

Consider that you can download the entire Wikipedia database. They have an long page telling you how to do it and how to work with it. You can basically “walk backstage” and see everything, down the the level of a raw database dump.

I talked about this at the Codegarden conference back in 2019. Watch the first five minutes or so of this talk. It’s got Friends and Old Spice and shirtless dudes. Also, I talk about we (those of us working in content) do –

We lie for a living.

That sounds harsh, but but a huge part of our job is hiding the messy reality of how things work. Sure, we know the user has some concept of a “page,” but we want to pretend that our content was birthed to a virgin and borne softly on the wings of angels right to the viewer’s browser.

I’ve written about this line between us and them before: see Breaking the Fourth Wall of Content. I said, in part:

Unlike the traditional theater where the audience sits in the gallery and views the stage through the proscenium, intranets are like theater-in-the-round or “participatory theater,” where the stage is surrounded, there’s little place to hide, and actors come walking in through the aisles among the audience. The audience is “in” the performance. Other people are doing the acting, but the lines between “us” and “them” get blurrier and in some performances, actors come and sit in the audience and maybe even pull us up on stage. When this happens, we’re not voyeurs anymore; rather, we become part of the performance.

We spend a lot of time trying to pretend our IA and content modeling constructs don’t exist. They belong to “us,” not “them.” And if they’re ever detected, that’s like being caught in public in our underwear.

I feel like we need to think about this a little more. Digital experience is usually framed as an “us vs. them” proposition. Should it be? If not always, then when? And why does this matter?