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

Conclusion

The player-avatar relation, then, is hybrid. The engagement with the character is in
many ways developed as in conventional narratives, in response to the guise of the
game, which offers a narrative statement through an unrestricted semiotic of visual
design, animation, text and music, to compose the character as visible, audible
presence, his narrative role and affective appeal drawing on the provenance of popular
narrative, both folk and mass media. The immersive experience of roleplay, by
contrast, is engaged through the specific rule-based demands of the game, and the
player’s improvisatory deployment of the restricted set of actions offered; though this
is infused by the imaginative engagement with the character and gameworld, so that a
highly-restricted set of actions becomes elaborated and deepened by a semiotic
merger with other modes. In some cases, this happens through synchronic
syntagmatic relations, as when the system-driven movement of the avatar forms part
of a visual design made up also of background; or when the music of the battle scene
fuses with the system-driven draining of life-points. At other times, it happens
through diachronic syntagms, such as when we see an elaborate FMV of Cloud on a
motorbike, and this image leaves a residue in our minds as we play the tiny, blocky
figure in the ensuing bike chase mini-game. Perhaps, as Lemke points out (2002), this
employs different kinds of reader-perception on the part of the player - a gestalt
perception which takes in the whole of a complex synchronic syntagm; and an
iterative perception which stacks up successive sequential meanings.

Interactivity, then, means a specific combination of semiotic processes here, and an
interplay between the representational and interactive functions of the text. The
playing of the avatar means to physically assume the Actor role in the system-driven

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