Start Press: Is Avatar The Ghost of Videogames Future?

Easily the most fun I’ve had watching blue-skinned aliens run around in a tizzy since The Smurfs. Yes, I’m talking about James Cameron’s Avatar—a visual feast that causes your eyes to balloon to the size of DDD breasts (at least I think that’s what they meant by “3D”). I loved the film. I loved the polarized Buddy Holly glasses that caused Pandora’s luminescent wildlife and vegetation to flutter off the screen and into my lap. I loved the Dances With Extraterrestrial Wolf-like Creatures love story. I loved the sense of being invited to a graduation ceremony, popping the champagne cork as Hollywood advanced to a new level of Movie Magic in front of my eyes. I enjoyed spending nearly three hours ruminating on the glories of science fiction and its power to inspire real-world technological progress. I haven’t had a chance to play Ubisoft’s Avatar videogame yet, but despite the abysmal track record of movie tie-in games, I've still got what Jack Handey describes as "a good, lucky feeling."

Movies get adapted into videogames all the time. Can you think of a Summer blockbuster that didn’t have a game version released in conjunction? They’re practically bundled with McDonald’s Happy Meals at this point. Conversely, we’ve seen more than a few videogame properties made into movies—the best of which might be charitably described as “awful though intermittently watchable.” But Avatar is one of the rare films whose entire premise is based on an exploration of the videogame medium itself (to the extent that it should’ve been called Avatari). Forget about the hands-free world of Microsoft’s Project Natal. How much more interactive can you get than having your consciousness reawakened in the skin of an entirely different creature? Now that’s playing in first person.

Avatar’s protagonist is the ruggedly handsome Jake Sully—a former Marine who cashed in his waist-down motor function for a Purple Heart medallion. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, he’s taken his twin brother’s place in a high-risk assignment on the exotic planet Pandora. But even if he still had his legs, the planet would be far too dangerous to simply go charging into the underbrush. American scientists working on Pandora have developed a technology that lets them develop test-tube adult specimens of the local Na’vi alien race. These specimens are created using a combination of both Na’vi and human DNA. By climbing into a sort of high-tech coffin, a human can enter a sleep state and reawake as their Na’vi avatar.

Sitting in the audience, it’s hard not to get a thrill watching paraplegic Sully’s avatar swing his legs off the laboratory table and climb unsteadily to his feet for the first time. Not only can he walk now, he’s nine feet tall. With a tail so forceful that its involuntary whipping motion nearly takes off a poor lab worker’s head. Only when Sully goes to sleep and inhabits his new avatar body can he access this empowered state of being. Sully’s experience offers a potent metaphor for the gaming experience. When we delve into a videogame, we enter a state of waking sleep, trading our identity for the avatar onscreen. Our human weaknesses and limitations are left behind. We see the world through different eyes.

It’s no coincidence James Cameron decided that both the Na’vi and their home world Pandora would prove bioluminescent to such a degree that the film looks like a $237 million Sony Bravia television commercial. Our game worlds are amplified versions of reality, especially in today’s HDTV paradise. Reds are redder. Blues are bluer. There’s a moment in Avatar where a helicopter pilot flies a group of humans by Pandora’s floating mountains. When the aircraft finally pierces the cloud canopy and the mountains come into view for the first time, all passengers onboard crane their necks in unison. The pilot laughs and says something like, “If only you could see your faces right now.”

Games routinely show me things that leave me slack-jawed with amazement. I’d get a kick out of seeing my own stupefied expression at the precise moment when I saw BioShock’s underwater metropolis Rapture for the first time. Or the Locust’s mind-boggling subterranean architecture in Gears of War 2. Or the Basilica Di San Marco’s interior in Assassin’s Creed II, ethereal golden sunlight pouring slantways across elaborate floor mosaics. But what if we could stand barefoot on the warm tiles of that Venetian church and smell the musty air, inhale all those accumulated prayers hanging in the stillness around our head?

Noted futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil spoke at the Game Developers Conference in February of 2008. He condensed his provocative book The Singularity is Near into a tidy hour-long presentation, describing his vision of a future just decades away in which science has reverse-engineered the human brain and people will be able to enter simulations that let us keep all five of our senses and enjoy richly designed interactive environments. Forget the prosaic video-conferencing of 1990 sci-fi movie epic Total Recall. In Kurzweil’s tomorrow, you’ll be able to sit down in front of your older brother who might live thousands of miles away and enjoy a chat over cups of delicious “virtual” coffee. At the end of your conversation, you’ll hug goodbye and feel the knit fibers of each other’s shirts beneath your bare arms before logging off. If something as simple as a hug could be coded, imagine what we could experience in the videogame worlds of 2030, 2040 and beyond.

Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll look back on the technology of Avatar and snort at the fact that people climbed into silly tanning beds to accomplish such leaps of faith. None of us know for certain. But remember: Not one of us—not you, not me—thought the star of Total Recall would ever govern the most populous state in the Union. Many doubted that an African American would ever govern the United States. Our technological future lies in a place that nobody governs—the mad-scientist laboratory of our imaginations. Like the winged creatures in Avatar that the Na’vi ride bareback and without reins, we steer with thought. We imagine our course. And the most unattainable perches seem nothing.

Jason Killingsworth is Paste’s games editor. He is based in Dublin, Ireland, and writes about music, film, tech and games for a variety of outlets. You can reach him online at jason [at] pastemagazine.com.