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

points, weapons and magic with quantified capacity. He is a kinaesthetic grammar,
with a limited set of actions for us to deploy - talk, walk, run, jump, get, fight.

The word ‘dummy’ raises some pertinent questions. We use it to suggest a puppet,
and one with ventriloquial qualities, though these are limited in Final Fantasy 7 - we
can actually ‘say’ very little, though we can act quite a lot. But dummy also suggests
stupidity. This is absolutely not want we want to imply; but it does usefully alert us to
to the critical view of game narratives and characters in popular perception. Janet
Murray notes this (Murray, 1997); and it is part of her strategy to compare game
characters with Homeric heroes in order to demonstrate that such characters are two-
dimensional for good reasons, demanded by the kinds of narrative of which they are
part. The further implication of this is that we cannot simply set up an opposition of
the narrative protagonist, replete with story-content, and the digital avatar, empty of
all such content. In fact, the two are closely related, as we shall see.

Of course, Cloud, the character/avatar, is both heavy hero and digital dummy.
Furthermore, the two roles, though presented here for the sake of contrast in a
polarised way, are interdependent, and leak into each other, just as the game’s system
and guise affect each other. The “Heavy hero”, for instance, is the kind of protagonist
ideally suited to be constructed by rules and formulae, being already predictable in his
behaviour and formulaic in his nature. However, though it is tempting to regard a
textual construct like Cloud as a fixed object, this would miss the point of the player-
avatar relation. This text is more like a series of processes, beginning with the design
and production of the text (itself a complex multiple articulation of different
communicative modes), which draws on the provenance of images, sounds, and

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