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



More intriguing information

1. Micro-strategies of Contextualization Cross-national Transfer of Socially Responsible Investment
2. The WTO and the Cartagena Protocol: International Policy Coordination or Conflict?
3. Bridging Micro- and Macro-Analyses of the EU Sugar Program: Methods and Insights
4. The Distribution of Income of Self-employed, Entrepreneurs and Professions as Revealed from Micro Income Tax Statistics in Germany
5. Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence1
6. Why unwinding preferences is not the same as liberalisation: the case of sugar
7. AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE PRODUCTION EFFECTS OF ADOPTING GM SEED TECHNOLOGY: THE CASE OF FARMERS IN ARGENTINA
8. Getting the practical teaching element right: A guide for literacy, numeracy and ESOL teacher educators
9. The magnitude and Cyclical Behavior of Financial Market Frictions
10. The name is absent
11. Political Rents, Promotion Incentives, and Support for a Non-Democratic Regime
12. INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS AND GROUP PROCESSES
13. Economies of Size for Conventional Tillage and No-till Wheat Production
14. Estimating the Impact of Medication on Diabetics' Diet and Lifestyle Choices
15. A MARKOVIAN APPROXIMATED SOLUTION TO A PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
16. Transgression et Contestation Dans Ie conte diderotien. Pierre Hartmann Strasbourg
17. The Trade Effects of MERCOSUR and The Andean Community on U.S. Cotton Exports to CBI countries
18. The name is absent
19. Brauchen wir ein Konjunkturprogramm?: Kommentar
20. The name is absent