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

narrative patterns from both recent and distant previous cultural histories, and on a
constantly-developing game engine common to the Final Fantasy series. The process
in which any text is realised is the meeting of text and reader, or in this case, player.
One reason for comparing the playing of a computer game with a performance of oral
narrative is that it foregrounds text as event, rather than as object. It is easy enough to
find texts which behave like and materially exist as objects (print texts, film,
computer text). But some disconfirming examples, equally comparable in many
respects to computer games, raise questions about text as object: a performance of
Hamlet (as opposed to the printed play); an oral narrative; a girls’ clapping game.
Where is the text-as-object here? What is the value of regarding the performance of an
actor as an object; or the orally-transmitted formularies that oral narrators or girls
playing clapping games draw on? Or the combination of song and physical rule-
governed action that a clapping game consists of? Furthermore, the playing of games
is iterative - it is many text-events, all different, with a dynamic relation between the
computer-game as a textual resource or text in potentia, the player as a dynamic
textual element, whose fingers and skills become no less part of the game-system than
the avatar’s strings of code, and the player as cultural resource, interpreter, and
adapter of the game’s resources in the production of fan art and writing.

Playing the avatar

Cloud as Heavy Hero and Cloud as Digital Dummy offer different sets of semiotic
resources from which the player makes her experience of the avatar. The Heavy Hero,
in many respects derived from conventional narratives, and constructed through non-
interactive modes (visual design, music, animation), is largely read by the player
(along with the game guise in general). The Digital Dummy, mostly made up of

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