What is the difference between mimesis and diegesis

First off, when we talk about mimesis or diegesis, people usually refer to how the puzzles fit in the game universe. How do the puzzles fit in the theme of the world? How do they fit in the narrative? How do they fit within the logic? A puzzle is diegetic if it fits the theme and reality of its game universe. This relates to how the puzzle looks.

The props and parts of the puzzle fit in the universe of the game and do not look out of place. If a player is in a room where they are exploring ancient Egypt, it would make little sense if they suddenly discovered a laser maze built by ancient Egyptians to hinder tomb robbers. Nor do you see televisions on pirate ships.

Nor handcuffs in school. Yes, you can make almost anything fit depending on the story, but who are we kidding? Escape rooms can barely handle narrative let alone world building. In the escape room industry, a lot of enthusiasts prefer the puzzles in an escape room to be diegetic.

They want a puzzle that makes sense in a room. They want the puzzles to match the theme. A puzzle is mimetic if its existence and its solution reflect the reality of its game universe.

This relates to how closely the puzzle matches reality as we know it. Think of the solve the soup cans trope Imagine you had to get through a door in the kitchen by sorting soup cans on a shelf.

The puzzle is diegetic because soup cans are found in kitchens! It fits the theme and reality of the world. If you had a safe, where would you keep the key? Would you hide it in a secret place? Entrust it to a close friend? Or would you put it in plain view inside a key maze that takes five minutes to remove with the help of another player for added team building benefit?

Again, key mazes exist for entertainment, not for warding off theivery. However, imagine you want to get in a vent that can be opened with screws. And elsewhere you see coins at the bottom of a pipe which can be used to unscrew the vent. Now you have to figure out how to get those coins out.

In this scenario, the puzzles are mimetic because they make sense in the real world. As a designer, I would encourage you to make your puzzles as diegetic as possible. Most film and television stories are mimesis. The audience and the actors are engaged in an elaborate game of pretend—a contract that expects the actors to behave as if they really are the character.

The audience, for their part, is invited to suspend their disbelief, to forget the many layers of artifice and experience the story as if was in some way real. The film or program may help this with powerful, believable acting, a spectacle of special effects and convincing costume. These great efforts are expended because, for the audience to have an emotional experience arising from the mimesis, they need a sense of authenticity. They need to trust and believe that what they are seeing is, after a fashion, a reality.

The phenomenon is even more interesting in theatre. The lights drop, the curtains rise, and once again audience and performers are united in an artistic pact. On the other side of the fourth wall, the audience act as if they were not sitting in a crowd of acquaintances. Instead, they almost behave as if they themselves do not exist. They become part of the play of theatre, the game whereby backdrops and props indicate and create an imaginary world. But Mimesis asks more of its audience than simply to believe in an imaginary world.

Indeed, all narrative invites the listener into an imaginary world. The distinctive feature of mimesis is that the audience experiences the story as playing out in front of them. The imaginary world does not exist at a distance—it is neither long ago nor in a galaxy far away, it is on this screen, this stage, immediate and immanent, for as long as the story takes.

Diegesis, in contrast, is pure narration. It is a story told, rather than acted. Novels provide an obvious example. At no point will the pages bite at my fingers.

I should say that I am only up to page , so maybe there are surprises to come. Obviously as a storyteller I work almost entirely with diegesis.

Genette, for instance, explained in a letter to Gaudreault his view that plays and movies do not narrate their stories as follows: [1] [2]. Genette quoted in Gaudreault [], [3]. Taken literally, this assertion implies that the story already exists on the stage or movie set, and simply has to be shown to the audience either by way of a live performance or an audio-visual recording. As I have mentioned earlier, it does not make sense to assume that the story has any physical existence before and outside the perception and imagination of the spectators.

If by showing we mean to present en bloc something existing independently from the spectators, the term can definitely not be applied to stories. On the level of single actions, objects or characters, the term might be used, but only figuratively if we are dealing with fictional stories. Strictly speaking, theatre performances and films only show what really happens on stage and what really happened in front of the camera.

Actors can imitate the gestures, mimicry and speech of other persons. In a metaphorical sense, we might say that they imitate fictional characters. But how can a play or film imitate a story? Interestingly enough, speaking of the filmic mode of presentation, Genette not only claims that the story already exists on the screen, but even before that on the film set.