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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9151784" data-attributes="member: 71699">I have a notion about this that hopefully I can find words to explain. The things we don't know are non-diegetic, although the possibility of knowledge about those things can be. Some supporting thought-experiments are theseIt's a murder mystery, and suppose Jo-character has a memory of a knife on the sidetable. Were the knife present, we'd say it was diegetic, but in this case the knife is not present and, as it turns out, the memory is false. Memory-of-knife is diegetic. Knife is non-diegetic. Jo-character is exploring and has a theory that there are canary-people. As it turns out, there are no canary-people. Theory-of-canary-people is diegetic. Canary-people are non-diegetic.Taking this back to the tableIt's a murder mystery. Jo-player has a theory that the butler did it. Subsequently, Jo-player decides the butler didn't do it because the valet better fits the development of their fiction. It's a hexploration. Jo-player has a notion there could be canary-people. Subsequently, Jo-player decides there are no canary-people because they don't fit the development of their fiction.There is some distinction between potential-facts and actual-facts. The fiction is full of potential-facts, and each potential-fact is itself a fact. (It is a fact that Jo-character has a theory that there are canary-people. It isn't a fact that there are canary-people.) The situation you have described is that players can act as if their characters know potential-facts. That does not itself make the objects of those facts diegetic. I can act as if my character believes there is a pistol in the bottom drawer, but if I subsequently decide that there isn't then said pistol is non-diegetic. It's non-diegetic until I take the extra step of settling the matter.Leading me to propose that we can act as if there are things-we-act-as-if-characters-could-know (potential-facts) as a class of diegetic object. Without that leading to the objects of those facts being themselve diegetic (without taking an extra step.)This intuition is driven by experience converting traditional linear fictions into rendered videogame worlds. Doing so makes one acutely aware of the incompleteness of traditional linear fiction. It's easy to write "Addy saw the wee sleekit mouse" but when you have to decide it's fur colour, texture, albedo, coverage and length, kinematic skeleton, behaviours and so on, not to mention the lighting and camera-treatment to produce "saw", and the collision-detection and path-finding to keep the mouse in the room and not dashing through the walls, the incompleteness of that sentence becomes extremely clear. It's not much helped if you add that the mouse is "grey".Players can act as if there are all sorts of things in the fiction they don't know, but that they expect their characters possess or know about. Memory-of-knife is diegetic whether or not knife is. But nothing is diegetic until players take the extra step of explicitly adding it into their fiction. Only in speaking of such things do they start to realise them into their fiction. You have spoken of "the colour of a character's hose, the length of their hair, the smell of their breath, and the contents of their memories" and other players can now nod and agree - yes, those seem like reasonable potential-facts. A moment ago - before speaking - they were not even that.</blockquote>

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