Genre, Representation and Liminality in Japanese: Role-Playing GamesTutorial Characters and Rhetorical Strategies

This paper examines the “tutorial character” in JRPGs from a narratological and rhetorical perspective. Tutorial characters are ambiguous ludo-narrative entities existing at the margins of fiction, representing empirical content (rules, controls) through a fictional prosthesis (the character). Through these entities, games address directly the player in hybrid expressions, mixing references to the fictional world and to the player’s empirical gesture (such as “press B to run”). Tutorial characters adopt different rhetorical strategies which more or less conceal the metaleptic nature of their message, using metaphors to “translate” empirical terms into terms existing in the game’s diegesis, or, conversely, emphasizing the existence of metalepsis and showing awareness of narrative transgression. I demonstrate through games from the MOTHER series (released in 1989, 1994 and 2006) and the Final Fantasy series (released in 1990, 1994 and 2006).
Tutorial characters also function, in JRPGs, as character creation matrices which populate the diegetic universe. Analyzing how tutorial discourses construct the identity of the characters who pronounce them, I distinguish between “interfacial characters” (which merge with the interface and cannot be fully considered as human-like entities) and “tutorial avatars” (full-fledged characters who convey tutorial information from their own point of view and take responsibility for it). Tutorial characters are, indeed, so many avatars, not of the player, but of the system: for this reason, they represent an ideal gateway to study the “narrativization” mechanisms of rules in JRPG and to bring a new light to the ways these games articulate gameplay and narration.