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

in this article (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2002; Lemke, 2002) would call the first
function ideational; and the second interpersonal , adapting these terms from
functional linguistics (Halliday 1985). These are very large categories; and have been
re-thought and re-named by successive theorists in linguistics and semiotics. Kress
and van Leeuwen (1996), for instance, call the first function representational and the
second interactive; while Lemke (2002) calls them presentational and orientational.
Central questions that multimodal semiotics can help to address, in the context of a
game, are: how do such functions interrelate (how is the game-narrative entangled
with the interactive experience it provides?); and how are they realised by
combinations of communicative modes: animation, visual design, music, text, sound?

Another way to think of the ideational, or representational function, at least in
narrative, is to think of what in language is the transitivity system: how Actors
perform Actions upon Goals, or, simply put, who does what to whom. This is the
basic idea on which the French narratologist Gerard Genette builds his theory,
proposing that narrative is an expansion of the grammatical category of verb: it is
about action (1980). The grammatical structure of Rachel’s account suggests that the
element of Actor in the transitivity system of the game is divided. In parts of her
account the Actor is, conventionally, Cloud, rendered in the third person (“he
escapes”). Elsewhere, the pronoun representing the Actor changes to indicate the
player (“you have to go ...”).

As for the interpersonal or interactive function, the question here is how a game
establishes a relation between itself and the player. Genette suggests that, in relation
to the mood of the verb, narratives are by definition indicative - they make

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