Education Commons^™

Meaning And Emotion In Squaresoft's Final Fantasy X: Re-Theorising Realism And Identification In Video Games, Glen R. Spoors

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis takes the position that traditional theories of "realism" and "identification" misrepresent the relationships between players and videogames, and that a cross·disciplinary approach is needed. It uses Ed Tan's (1997) and Torben Grodal's (1997) analyses of narrative, cognition, and emotion in film as a basis for interrogating existing research on, and providing a working model of, video gameplay. It develops this model through an extended account of Squaresoft's adventure role-playing game Final Fantasy X (FFX) (2001), whose hybrid narrative and game macrostructures foreground many of the problems associated with video games. The chapters respectively address; existing research on video …