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



them this way and you have to learn what order to put the stuff in, and it just -
it’s really quite good when you’ve built up your character because for every
battle you get - experience points - and so, um, after a while you’ve built up
your character, and so you know how to use everything more efficiently - and
it’s - the camera angles are cool too -
AB: In the battle scenes?

R: Yeah.

AB: How are the camera angles different?

R: Cos they zoom - it zooms right into your character, and they have different
angles, - one sometimes looking up at the beast, or across, or down - it’s -
really spectacular.

AB: How does it feel then, to be in that?

R: Exciting! Cos it kind of, right - what the game does is, it has a little
sequence where it actually spirals into the battle scenes, and the music changes
and the tempo changes and it really kind of, actually kind of gets you a bit
more excited.

In the relations between player and game, the agency is clear here, reflecting Rachel’s
engagement with the demand of the game. In the first part of her account, the Actor -
literally, the subject of the clauses she speaks - is the player: “You” - and the actions
you are performing are represented as imperatives, as in the triple repetition of “have
to learn”. It seems quite clear that these reflect her engagement with the procedurally-
authored system of the game.

In the second part of her account, the Actor becomes the text: “It”, and its actions are
textual ones: it “zooms”, “has different angles”, “has a little sequence”, “spirals”. The
player becomes the Goal of these actions: “it gets you a bit more excited”. This would
seem to be more to do with offer - the actions of the text here are conventional
cinematic ones, designed to position the spectator and to work for particular kinds of
affective engagement.

However, though Rachel’s account precisely represents the two-way interactive

function of the game text - you do something to it, it does something to you - the



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