Spirits in the Aether: Digital Ghosts in Final Fantasy XIV

Abstract

The rhetoric of ghosts has long accompanied electronically mediated technologies, such as the telegraph and the telephone. In the digital age, massively-multiplayer role playing game avatars, such as those found in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, can be seen as continuations of this tradition of haunting as a means of negotiating anxieties incurred by navigating a rapidly changing world. The avatarsâ ability to occupy liminal planes of existence; manifesting on a server, within the game environment, and acting upon the body of the player, is reminiscent of prior conceptions of ghosts. Ghosts, like avatars, move between limbo and the embodied world and are consigned to repetition to complete their unfinished tasks in order to move on to the afterlife. Using multimodal semiotic discourse analysis, this research explicates ghostly themes that emerged over hundreds of hours of gameplay by an intrinsic/expert researcher and by reviewing individual scenes and gameplay mechanics by two extrinsic/novice researchers. These themes were conveyed through narrative, visual content, and gameplay mechanics, making them properly multimodal in their execution, setting them apart from literary precursors.