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



intensify. The low angles and close-ups bring the player closer to the avatar at exactly
the moment when the demand structures are at their most urgent.

While Rachel shows in this retrospective account of the game how demand structures
are represented as imperatives, there is some evidence that this kind of linguistic
transformation is even more marked during game-play. Gareth Schott’s (2002)
observation of boys engaged in collaborative play of
Soul Reaver 2: the Legacy of
Kain
(Eidos), showed how the language used during play was marked by a dominance
of imperative forms, functioning as what Halliday (1970) terms the
regulatory mode
of language. Schott’s observational data revealed that, during game-play, players
showed no disposition toward describing the game and its objectives in narrative
terms. Instead, players maintained a preference for directive-based instructions such
as, “go there”, “jump on to one of those”, “run away from the other one fast”, “land
on that” and “push that”. Alone, auditory analysis of game-play would not have
imparted any information on the character/avatar or his position on his journey
through the clan territories of the game. Reliance upon ‘regulatory’ modes of
communication also extended to joypad action buttons, where Schott found players
commonly advised each other to press X or Y buttons rather than ‘Push’, ‘Jump’,
‘Shoot’ and so on.

Beyond the battle scenes in FF7, the feeling of offer rather than demand is reinforced
multimodally. The music of these sequences is much less stark rhythmically, either
using unmeasured rhythms or using regular duple times muted beneath flowing
melodies, which either chime with cheerful characters and locations, or evoke the
kind of mysterious sorrow which Izawa notices in
Final Fantasy 3 (Izawa, 2000). In



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