Page - 166 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

166 | Frank G. Bosman and Archibald L.  H.  M. van Wieringen www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 145–171 tive). Even though the player experiences a considerable degree of freedom, especially in an extended open world game like Far Cry 5, the number of possi- bilities of ways to act is ultimately limited to those allowed technically by the real author, but communicatively by the game’s text-immanent author. The player’s avatar is a character in the story of the game. This means that the game’s text-immanent reader is, like the game’s text-im- manent author, not visible in the game. Only their in-game representation, their avatar, being in fact a character, is. It is through the avatar that the game’s text-immanent reader influences the course of events in the game, within the technical and communicative boundaries. Through the player’s avatar, the text-immanent reader’s position in a game can be much more complex than in a written text: there is the possibility that the player’s avatar, as a character, will interlock with the game’s text-immanent reader, but only when the gamer, i. e. the game’s real reader, is interacting with the game’s world without an avatar. And finally, we can identify the game’s real reader, a real person playing the game on their console or PC. When we concentrate on The Baptism trailer, we see a familiar pattern. The real author of the trailer is an unknown production team, consisting of directors, script writers, technicians, and so forth, employed by Ubisoft to create promo- tional material for the upcoming game release. Just as in the case of the game, we can identify a text-immanent author, a “director”, leading the sequence of scenes as the viewer, i. e. the trailer’s text-immanent reader, watches the story unfolding. The characters in the trailer are more or less the same as in the game, with a focus on Joseph, Jerome, and Jerome’s daughter, but with one very important communicative difference: the trailer does not feature a player’s/viewer’s avatar as the game does. Technically, this variation is caused by the non-interactive quality of the film medium versus the necessary interactive quality of the game medium. From a communicative point of view, this quality makes clear that the freedom of the text-immanent reader is greater in a game than in a text or film. And the trailer also has a real reader, the historical viewer, a real person watching the trailer. The Book of Joseph: The Text-Immanent Reader The communicative analysis of the physical version of The Book of Joseph has two sections, one concentrated on the analysis of the text of the book, and one on analysis of the images in the book, especially the one featuring the four Seeds as monks.