The Player’s Multimodal Encounter: Character Image Construction and Narrative Formation in Arknights

Abstract

Digital games increasingly ask players to recognize a character before that character has been fully explained by plot. A mobile role-playing game such as Arknights does not build characterization through verbal lore alone; it coordinates costume, posture, gaze, color, interface position, voice lines and background writing into a dense multimodal field. Existing linguistic research on games has often emphasized localization, player interaction, or literacy learning, while game studies has tended to discuss narrative and mechanics as medium-specific forms. This paper argues that an applied-linguistic account of digital games must attend to a distinct mode of meaning-making: the construction of characters and story worlds through recurrent visual-cultural cues that are immediately legible to players. This paper introduces the concept of “multimodal prototype analysis” - semiotic residues of myth, art history, folklore, professional discourse, and popular genre conventions that are embedded in game character images and activated through visual grammar. Unlike explicit background stories, which tell players what a character has done, multimodal prototypes guide players toward what kind of character they are encountering before the story is fully narrated. Drawing on social semiotics, Kress and van Leeuwen’s visual grammar, systemic functional linguistics, and game narrative theory, the paper proposes “prototype resonance” as a process through which players infer role, morality, affiliation, and narrative tension from the interaction between visual design and textual framing. The empirical portion reconstructs and rewrites a case study of Arknights based on a corpus of five interface images and fifty characters images. Findings suggest that character images in the corpus are dominated by symbolic representation, demand-oriented gaze, socially distant framing, and center-margin composition. These features do not merely decorate characters; they convert cultural prototypes into playable narrative expectations and transform routine interface operations into world-internal actions. The paper concludes by outlining a critical multimodal game literacy for analyzing how digital games organize narrative participation through character design.