Emergent affect in Final Fantasy VII and Japanese role-playing games

In this study, I consider the ways in which Final Fantasy VII, a game with a history of over two decades, has been nostalgically and affectively remembered by a generation of global fans. By focusing on audience reception and employing qualitative methods, I show how players of video games can establish affective connections with game worlds and characters. This affective linkage between player and artefact is the result of emergent processes, which are accentuated by the emergent structures that make up video games themselves. The study also considers the affective association with Japan as site of national-cultural production of these games and the genre of Japanese role-playing games, in the context of an increasingly globally interconnected video game industry.