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

In terms of the modality of the “explore” mode, then, it looks as though Ben reads the
game as demand: as puzzles demanding to be solved; while Rachel plays it as a weak
demand: a rhizomic world to be explored, the strong demand act being kept for key
moments of progression or battle. This ambiguity of Final Fantasy 7 contrasts with
the spatial organisation described by Diane Carr (2003) in relation to Planescape
Torment, where the rhizomic organisation of the gameworld is associated with the
structures determined by the classic D&D-derived RPG.

The most direct responses to the demand structures of the game, then - to the battle
scenes, or the nodes of the puzzle maze - are those when the player is most likely to
report their experience in the second person, when the pronoun slippage is most
likely. And these are the aspects of the game driven by the system, where the avatar is
most empty, most like a vehicle for the dynamic action of gameplay, most simple in
their characterisation, reduced to a sword, or to the sliding economies of health and
experience points. But this kind of involvement, most similar to the agonistic patterns
Ong reports of the oral tradition, is overlaid with other kinds of engagement, provided
by the offer structures of the game’s guise, marked by the third person in the player’s
account. Though the times when the text is least open to player action would seem to
offer least in terms of engagement, it is these times when the character is filled out -
when the declarative mood of the cut scene or interpolated dialogue fills out part of
Cloud’s history, his murky past, the uncertainty about his mercenary motives, his
obscure love affairs, his ambivalent relationship with Sephiroth.

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