14 DAY TRIAL // Avatar, the 3D-powered blockbuster directed by James Cameron, is past the 1 billion dollars revenue mark and seems poised to revolutionize the way we watch movies in theaters. It also had, in the tradition of Hollywood blockbusters, a videogame companion.
As it is also traditional, the gaming experience, which is pitched as a prequel and created by Ubisoft, has failed to make the same impact as the movie mainly because it's nothing more than a medium quality shooter wrapped up in a beautiful world. But maybe we should be looking for hidden messages to gamers buried somewhere deep in the release.
James Cameron, who has directed Avatar: The Movie but had little involvement in Avatar: The Game, has been cited by The New York Times as talking about Sigourney Weaver's character behavior.
He said that “She’s rude, she swears, she drinks, she smokes. Also, from a character perspective, we were showing that Grace doesn’t care about her human body, only her avatar body, which again is a negative comment about people in our real world living too much in their avatars, meaning online and in video games.”
The analogy, if it was Cameron's intention and not just something he thought of afterwards, is pretty thin. After all, the entirety of Avatar can be seen as sending the opposite signal to the viewer. The main character only becomes complete as a being by inhabiting a body that is not his, as gamers do when they inhabit a character in something like Halo or Dragon Age. He even finds love in Avatar form, something which has long been a Holy Grail of virtual worlds. It might be interesting to see Mister Cameron explain this and how the issue of virtual worlds in present day is related to the creation of the movie's Avatar program and to how it is used.