interactive textual forms, is largely played by the player (along with the game system
in general).
The sense in which the player is, and is not, the avatar, is central to the experience of
the game, and the pronoun-slippage in Rachel’s account of her experience of the game
directly represents this ambiguous relation. This ambiguity extends to the symbolic
and social meanings which might be attributed to the game-play. Agency, in the
Cultural Studies tradition, is generally presented as a positive aspect of active
readership; and it can, in this spirit, be read into avatar play also, where a simple
equation relates the degree of cultural power to the degree of control over the avatar’s
actions. However, as Perry Anderson observes (1980), agency has two opposed
meanings - one in which we are autonomous, powerful social actors; and one in
which we are merely the representative of another (as in FBI agent). Both meanings
can be read into the player-avatar relation: an unprecedented degree of participative
agency for the readers within the text, celebrated as wholly positive in Brenda
Laurel’s image of the audience moving onto the stage to become actors in the digital
play (1991); or a sense in which players merely accept and play out the roles
determined for them by game-texts devised by global corporations, dominated by
patriarchal narratives and what Sutton-Smith calls the male-dominated power
rhetorics of combative play (1997). The question of player agency in Final Fantasy 7
is quite ambiguous, and it is not clear that the dynamic experience of play directly
affects the spectrum of adoration to resistance observable in the fan sites of this, as
any non-interactive, popular text.