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



statements. Rachel’s account of Cloud, in its grammatical rendering of the avatar,
makes it clear that, while in some parts of the narrative the hero is going about his
business wrapped in the familiar indicative mood (“
he escapes from this city because
he’s being pursued”), in other parts, the player has become the protagonist, and the
game is clearly in the imperative (“
you have to go and try to stop him, cos he’s trying
to raise up all the beasts”). In terms of its interactive function, then, the game is not
only offering a narrative statement but telling the player to do something - in effect,
telling the player to insert herself into the transitivity system of the game.

Roleplaying games do offer narrative statements, as in Genette’s classic model. In this
respect, we can and should ask the usual questions about how the protagonist is
constructed: what is his cultural provenance, what kinds of narrative function will he
perform, how might audiences engage with these? On the other hand, RPGs, like all
games, ask you questions and tell you to do things. If narrative requires a willing
suspension of disbelief, games require a willing submission to rule-based systems. In
this latter respect, we can and should go back to the question of transitivity, to ask
how the player is involved in the actions the character performs; and back to the
question of mood, to ask how text-player relations are invited and constructed.

Cloud - Heavy Hero?

Rachel’s word “character” suggests Cloud’s function as part of the guise of the game.
In the ideational system of the game, if the narrative is Genette’s verb-writ-large,
Cloud is the Actor who performs that verb. His narrative function, as a hero-
mercenary who defies the ruthless Shinra corporation and his former hero, now his
nemesis and enemy, Sephiroth, is typical of hero-roles in popular narrative, and, in



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