Heavy Hero or Digital Dummy: multimodal player-avatar relations in FINAL FANTASY 7



“star”, I mean a Cloud ... - the person you play principally throughout the
game. Not that some of the lead characters haven’t LOOKED like girls. . I
am tired of the usual RPG plot: a (male) hero with humble roots is chosen by
fate to defend human freedom with his manly strength and courage.
(Squaregrrl, 2000)

At the same time, this is not only a narrative, but a game. Though in the guise of the
game Cloud operates as superhero protagonist, in the system of the game he
embodies, like any RPG avatar, the symbolic and technical mechanisms through
which the player performs actions within transitive sequences of the text, as the next
section will suggest. Altogether, the game operates around some of the immersive,
agonistic, episodic, aggrandised structures of both the traditional oral narrative and
modern popular superhero narrative, fusing them with the rule-based system of the
game.

Cloud - Digital Dummy?

The substance of Cloud as a larger-than-life, highly specific protagonist within the
guise of the game, then, is overlaid on the game engine’s entity module - the skeletal
set of programmed repertoires within the game as system. In this respect, as well as in
all the ambiguities of his design, he is, like all RPG avatars, what Stephen Poole has
called ‘a comparatively blank canvas’ (Poole, 2002), on which the player can project
imaginary structures of his or her own. He is a kind of puppet, and we pull his strings,
as Achilles is manipulated by the Olympian gods. When we press the Playstation
buttons or PC keys, it is this programmed entity we engage with and control.

He is a bundle of semiotic resources, or affordances for the player’s engagement with
the game’s system, equipped to move us through the game’s links and nodes,
landscapes and events. He is a set of economies: health points, hit points, experience



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