As mentioned above, Walter Ong demonstrates the participatory nature of oral
narrative by the pronoun slippage of the Mwinde narrator, suggesting a slide from
objective oversight of the narrative to empathetic, performative identification with the
protagonist. Similarly, Rachel’s account of Cloud, as we have seen, is characterised
by pronoun-switching. This switching is not random: the avatar is “he” when he
escapes, has flashbacks, is pursued. This is Cloud most located in the guise of the
game, most dominated by the offer aspect of the text. Midway through her account,
the mood changes: “he has to defeat”. This introduces the quest-based imperative of
the game, and the mood changes from declarative to imperative: the demand
structures of the game as system. Immediately afterwards, the pronoun switches, so
that the avatar becomes “you”: you have to go and try to stop Sephiroth, you do this
by collecting materia, and so on.
The player’s dual engagements with offer and demand structures inform each other,
producing a sense of dynamic play and of involvement with a fictional character. As
different moments in the game move more in the direction of offer or demand,
however, it seems likely that the kind of engagement will change. The battle scenes,
perhaps, are the most demand-dominated scenes, where the system of the game would
seem to be all that matters, the economies of health, hits, and magic become critical,
and the temporal elasticity of the game shrinks to realtime conflict.
Rachel’s account of the battles gives some clues about how player agency is
constituted here:
R: Well you kind of get a choice of what to do in battles, and you have to learn
how to defeat some monsters some ways and you have to learn how to defeat