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

In the protagonists of both oral narrative and game, there is a predictability about their
appearance, the tools of their trade, and their actions. The dynamic of the texts is to
see how improvisatory flair on the part of the poet can stitch together and adapt the
formulae; and how the player can stitch together the given repertoires into the
sequence that will gain the desired goal. This kind of improvisatory work can be seen
in Rachel’s account of how she explores the world of Final Fantasy, how she looks
after Cloud when he’s sick, how she fights the battles with him. In both game and oral
narrative, the thing which is the text (a better expression is text-event: the particular
nexus of representation, narrative, affect, causal chain experienced at that moment) is
woven on the spot by the poet/player. The word text, Walter Ong reminds us (Ong,
2002), derives from the Latin word to weave (texere); and he further invokes the idea
of rhapsody as a possible description of oral performance, from the Greek rhapsodein,
to stitch together.

Ong’s ‘psychodynamics of oral narrative’ include a number of features which are
arguably also characteristics of games; some also apply more generally to modern
popular narratives. These include, firstly, ‘Heavy heroes’: oral narratives require
larger-than-life, stereotypical heroes who can be formulaically constructed, easily
recognised and remembered by audiences, and made to represent one or two key
characteristics. Secondly, oral narrative is ‘agonistically toned’: it revolves around
conflict externalised in the form of physical or verbal combat. Thirdly, it is
aggregative rather than analytic - narrative sequences are added and stacked up,
rather than organised hierarchically. This is related to a fourth point; that oral
narrative is high in redundancy, and in what rhetoric calls copia - it repeats the same
thing many times, in different ways, to give the listener the best chance of purchase

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