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

Demand and offer in secondary texts

There is a kind of dialectic, then, between the demand structures of the procedural
text, agitating the causal chain, pressing you over the puzzle hurdles, catching you in
affective tensions and anxieties; and the offer structures which lay out the context,
landscape, backstory, motivation, psychology, engaging the reader-spectator in the
empathetic networks and imaginative extensions of the text which also operate in
conventional narratives. Though it is the combination of these which provides the
kinds of pleasures Rachel describes, in secondary texts surrounding the game the two
structures separate out startlingly. Analysis of fan texts is an extensive project in its
own right; but two examples will make the point clearly enough here. The first is a
walkthrough for FF7, by Kao Megura, whose fan status has become exalted by his
detailed expertise in the game to something of an independent online authority.
Because the walkthrough is generically not interested in the offer structures or the
guise of the game, it omits all reference to the backstory, lovelife, appearance, music,
and so on of the game. Its interest is purely in relaying the procedural demands of the
game-system. Accordingly, it is structured almost entirely as a demand act itself,
written in the second person, dominated by the imperative mood:

Once you leave the train, check the body of the closest guard twice to get two
Potions. Then head north. You'll be attacked by some guards.

Take them out with your sword (you may win a Potion for killing them)
and then move left to go outside. Now, talk to your teammates (Biggs,
Wedge, and Jessie), then name yourself and Barret. Make your way to the
northwestern door, and head up in the next room to enter the heart of the
power plant.

For this player, the thrill of the game seems very much bound up in his exhaustive
expertise in the properties of the puzzle maze, and in the game as system. Anything
incidental to this is omitted or reduced to minimal expression. The social motivation

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