[INSERT FIGURE 1 ABOUT HERE]
This is how Rachel, a 17-year-old English player of Final Fantasy 7, describes Cloud
in one of two research interviews we will refer to:
It’s just basically you play this character who’s in this like really cool like
cityscape and you have to, er, and he finds out ... and, er, he escapes because
he finds out that, um, he’s, because he starts having these flashbacks, and he
escapes from this city because he’s being pursued I think, and, um, he has to
defeat this big corporation and try and - oh yeah, Sephiroth, he’s this big
military commander, and you have to go and try to stop him, cos he’s trying to
raise up all the beasts, and you do this by collecting materia, which you can
use for magic and stuff, and you use your own weapons, and -
The apparently innocent clause ‘You play this character’ in Rachel’s account conceals
the central, powerful structures of RPG play. ‘This character’ evokes the conventional
fictional character operating as protagonist in a narrative. However, as well as
protagonist in the conventional sense, Cloud is the player’s embodiment in the game,
the avatar (the word, from the Sanskrit for “descent”, refers to the embodiment of a
god on earth). This article will explore how this dual function is constructed, how it is
experienced by the player, and why the words “You play” indicate very precisely the
grammatical relation of player and avatar. At the same time, it will explore how this
dual function relates to the two fundamental elements of the game: what Linderoth
(2002) refers to as system and guise, the former being the rule-based system of the
game, in computer-games produced by the procedural work of the game engine; the
latter being the visible gameworld, narrative and characters overlaid on the system.
The interaction of player and avatar is played out in two fundamental functions of the
text: how it represents aspects of the world (in this case fantasy narratives); and what
it offers to do to, for or with its audience. The multimodality theory on which we draw