Markers III: Diegetic UI Since Dead Space

For many gamers, the original Dead Space was their introduction to diegetic UI: a form of user interface design where typically abstract elements like meters and menus exist within the narrative of the game. With a single release in 2009, Visceral brought diegetic UI forward by leaps and bounds, but few studios afterwards rushed to create the next Dead Space. Complications ranging from aesthetic conflicts to the manoeuvrability of cameras make diegetic UIs a poor fit for a lot of interactive entertainment. Still, there are some games following in Dead Space's footsteps; they just don't all leave the same bootprint.

As far as I can tell, the closest cousin to Dead Space's interface comes from the 2016 planet-plunderer, Astroneer. Astroneer is about touching down on a far-away space rock, gathering its natural goodies, and fabricating an outpost from them. The communication medium for these activities expands on Visceral's combination of a behind-the-back camera, in-world options lists, and a high-tech suit with UI on the rear.

Our backpack in Astroneer, like our suit in Dead Space, has a meter engraved on the spine. In Dead Space, this bar reports health, but in Astroneer, it tracks available electrical power. The latter title has an equivalent oxygen bar, but while Dead Space distinguishes its meters by shape (line and crescent), Astroneer uses orientation (vertical and horizontal placement). Where Dead Space allows us to project a trail to our objective, Astroneer has us trace out routes from our base to our desired endpoints.

Colonising a planet takes a steady supply of oxygen. In Astroneer, we can keep our reserves topped-up by extending a tether from our headquarters to any new exploration site, and siphoning gas from it. Us laying the oxygen line constitutes a fascinating dynamic between developer and player, where we create our own UI markers instead of following theirs. In an open-world sandbox, we have to. Half the fun is setting the objectives: deciding where we want to be and what we want to do. As a result, the UI can never tell us our destination, but it can mechanically incentivise us to draw a path to it.

The equipment interface in this experience also goes beyond displaying metrics and equipables, as Dead Space's does, into inventory management. Our avatar's rucksack has eight item slots which act as eight portholes into our resource pool. We get a snapshot of what we're carrying before we ever flip open a menu. Lastly, many of the apparatuses we use to manipulate electronics in Astroneer look and feel like real control panels.

But while this construction explorer uses its in-world UI in a manner attuned to Dead Space, it is not as devoutly bound to diegetic principles. Like Dead Space, it features techno-wear with interface doodads draped down the back, but it also incorporates abstract menus, map icons, cursors, and other anti-diegetic entities. So, although the topography and theming of Astroneer's UI pieces are akin to Dead Space's, we'll need to look elsewhere if we want to find a game as devoted to keeping the fourth wall intact as Dead Space is.

Outside of their settings, menus, and title screens, IT simulation games such as Hypnospace Outlaw and Hacknet use an entirely in-world interface. These are works about operating a PC which we play by operating a PC. Because the fictional tasks very closely replicate the real-world jobs they represent, the UI can also authentically mirror the graphical setups for completing such activities. In the last article of this series, we talked about the prospect of developers implanting UI markers on in-game objects. However, the diegetic UI in this genre of software finds a solution which can more thoroughly engulf us in the fiction. The titles skin their means of communication onto an object in our physical world: our computer.

Playdead Studios also deserve far more credit for their advancement of this field. Their puzzle-platformers, Limbo and Inside, use a play format which goes back decades, and yet, these curiosities were the first in the genre to make nearly all their imagery diegetic. As if that weren't enough, these experiences communicate a story and instructions for our behaviour while being virtually text-free. Save for strictly technical menus, the only characters in Inside are the counters on a scale which we use in one of the puzzles. The only characters in Limbo are those which make up a hotel sign, and that's not even incorporated into the play. Via their UIs, Limbo and Inside sow a more durable fictional pretence than even Dead Space. They do it all without the benefit of written language, and in Limbo's case, free of sci-fi casing.

We can see another holistic implementation of an in-universe interface in Starbreeze's Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: a top-down puzzle-solver set to a quant folk fable. Pillow Castle's Escheresque puzzle collection Superliminal also gets within a cat's whisker of a fully diegetic UI. When in-play, the only whispers of it being a video game are a hand-shaped cursor and an outline around any object we're holding. Lastly, Nomada Studio's Gris, a mournful yet hopeful drama, swears off any non-canon UI aside from the odd button prompt at the fore and aft of a chapter. Although, the same point about settings, menus, and title screens which applied for those PC simulators and Playdead's projects, applies to the three titles above.

While Dead Space teaches us how a diegetic UI can immerse us in a grimy horror, we'd do well to pay attention to the offerings of diegetic interface from Playdead, Starbreeze, Pillow Castle, and Nomada. These games exhibit how a studio might use this design technique across a broad spectrum of aesthetics. For Inside and Limbo, removing intrusive decals from the screen helps construct a feeling of disturbing emptiness. Brothers, on the other hand, finds that by de-cluttering our monitors, it can reach the peak of storybook simplicity. Superliminal stands sterile and neutral by leaving no HUD between us and rooms of everyday objects, and Gris's prohibition against the non-diegetic prevents us from becoming distracted from the grandeur of its fallen civilisation.

Furthermore, we can find a whole treasure trove of diegetic interfaces, if only we relax our standards a little. Diegetic UI does not exist in a dichotomy. The medium rarely speaks to us in a voice that is entirely diegetic or entirely non-diegetic. Even Dead Space calls out controller buttons now and then. And while the pickings are slim when it comes to games uncompromising in their adoption of this style, in the last few years, we've seen a bounty of creations which use fewer non-diegetic widgets than their parents.

Sludge Life highlights items we can pick up, sneaks pop-ups into the corners of the screen, and goes heavy on the subtitles. But most of the time we're playing the game, we look out over its crusty, urban sprawl without any displays or menus obstructing the view. In The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, icons may materialise in the top-right or top-left to denote injury or our collectable count, but the markers fade away when no longer needed. These are classic examples of how you can cut down on the time the player spends ogling UI by hiding anything not immediately relevant to them. They are also demonstrative of how simpler mechanics that are mostly based in a physical environment facilitate diegetic UI.

Gang Beasts and Heave Ho use a similar hide-and-seek flow. The first is roughly a wrestling game. The second casts our friends and us as two-limbed creatures who must climb and swing their way to a finishing line. The meat of these games is a compilation of scenes in which almost everything on view is diegetic. However, we need to make choices about what scenes we enter and how to configure those scenes. The game also needs to report on the arcs of those scenes. We enter the stages and set our preferences through the menus, and the game reports on competition through its scoreboards and its announcements of success. Outside of that, the designers mostly use concepts we're familiar with from common knowledge of human bodies, so little abstract UI is necessary. We could say these games use the intuitive biological logic of the Necromorph UI and apply it to the player characters.

There are also plenty of games which overlay button prompts and text on the screen during tutorials, but once we've settled into them, cut off those tags. Again, frontend menus exempted. See Unravel, Celeste, and Splosion Man. That last game is a pertinent example of how an experiment set in a diegetically-controlled environment has a great excuse to post plenty of signage, telling the user where to go and what to do. It never feels like cheating that the artists nail arrows all over this research facility because we would expect the canonical building administrators to do the same.

When studying how games communicate with players, we often take screenshots and then pick them apart one knob or dial at a time. But if the developers are frequently changing what elements appear on the screen, we can't analyse these interfaces through such static materials. We need to remember that as game states change, so do UIs.

The rising virtual reality format has further embraced diegetic UI with open arms. Such programs let you pass your head through solid objects or have you teleport about using abstract arrows and markers. However, VR also has a setting wrap around us and enables us to use our bodies to carry out work as opposed to employing a whole backend of modifiers and meta-systems to simulate a virtual body. The physical grounding means the play of most VR games is relatively simple, and all the above characteristics come together to allow VR applications to be mostly or wholly reliant on diegetic graphics.

Among a litany of examples are Phasmophobia, a ghost-hunting nightmare where UI appears on the spirit-busting tech, and the lowbrow violence simulators, GORN and Drunkn Bar Fight, where gameplay output consists of what weapons you're holding and how intact your enemies are. Then there are games where the safety of a cockpit allows you to move and have the UI occupy the desk in front of you, such as STAR WARS: Squadrons and Vox Machinae. Really, you can pick almost any VR game and watch the diegesis swirl around you; new mechanisms for interfacing with virtual worlds have given rise to new ways to communicate the states of those worlds.

Outside of VR, other rich veins of non-diegetic UI include Ape Out, Hue, AER: Memories of Old, Figment, Close to the Sun, Stories Untold, Spirit of the North, Never Alone: Kisima Inŋitchuŋa, Return of the Obra Dinn, Conarium, and Untitled Goose Game. There are too many to name them all.

By the end of the 00s, there were just a handful of breakthrough diegetic UI games. Dead Space, a shooter that maroons us on an infested spaceship in bulky armour, may have been the most comfortable to play. In the time since then, there's been a surge in the number of games utilising narrative-appropriate methods to express systemic concepts. Many of the resulting creations run a lot smoother than our holiday on the Ishimura. If you were with me for my last essay, you'll probably have an idea of why the games we've chewed over here can make peace with diegetic UI. Our examples of games with in-world interfaces are mostly mechanically parsimonious and refrain from trading in a lot of abstract concepts. A number also use sci-fi themes and carefully-guided cameras.

But we started this experiment talking about Dead Space's potential to influence, and we still haven't proven that Visceral's horror had a knock-on effect on this new wave of pro-diegetic design. We may never because there are so many cooks adding to the broth of modern development that it's hard to separate out the influences. Over the past couple of decades, across all software, we've seen a shift towards cleaner, minimalist screens. That's partly because of the proliferation of mobile devices which users often wield casually, wanting to receive and send information at lightning speed. With a smaller screen, you also have to be more choosey about what you place onto it, and with no mouse and a touch-screen keyboard, designers must streamline inputs. All of which cry out for a design philosophy where less is more.

The expansion of information technology beyond established techheads has also meant that more natural and simplified interfaces evolved to suit a mainstream audience's aptitude. This expansion included the audience for video games, meaning that designers had to entertain a demographic unwilling or unable to read a screen crammed with counters and widgets. There was also a flourishing of smaller studios around the late 00s which overlapped with the explosion of "casual" gaming. With limited resources, many micro-companies ended up stripping their games back mechanically. Because these developers had a greater capacity for experimentation, they were also able to fiddle with more contemporary methods of talking to the player. You'll notice that almost none of the diegetic-leaning UIs I've referenced here launched from AAA studios.

We could argue about how much Visceral wrote the script for modern UIs and how much the currents of mainstream interface trends steered them, but without a lot of prominent designers disclosing their inspirations, it's all hearsay. Still, whatever Dead Space's place in the flow diagram of the medium, it constituted a historical moment for dialogue between games and their players. And whatever the point of origin for today's diegetic video game UIs, they provide a grace and lucidity we can all appreciate. Talented game development doesn't mean finding the master technique you can apply in all contexts; that's a fool's errand. What it means is knowing the right tool for the right job, and with time, video games have found a home for each style of UI, diegetic included. Thanks for reading.