Why 'Avatar' didn't change anything for gamers

4:00 PM on 12.22.2009   |   Anthony Burch

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If you're like me, you probably saw James Cameron's Avatar over the weekend. If you're really, really like me, you didn't find it particularly impressive. You may have found James Cameron's bazillion-dollar opus boring not because of the cliched plot, or the needless narration, or the uninteresting characters, or the pretty-good-but-not-as-great-as-the-idiots-with-Comic-Con-press-badges-said-it-was CGI, but because of one fairly simple fact:

Avatar wanted to do things videogames are already better at.

At E3, one of the film's producers briefly explained the plot to a group of journalists. He used phrases like, "transport the audience into an alien world," and "let the audience explore locations they'd never dreamed of" in "a world that feels more real than anything you've ever seen in movies before."

Fine. Cool. A wonderful goal to aspire to. But also a completely redundant one to anyone who has spent the last decade playing videogames.

Hit the jump to see why Avatar hasn't shown gamers anything they haven't already experienced in a more effective, immersive, and exciting way.

 Games, by their very nature, are about exploration. Even in the most linear of linear experiences, there is still some room for the player to feel their way through things, to figure out what the game is capable of. Call of Duty may only allow one way through every single level, but the player is still allowed (and arguably, encouraged) to spend as much time as they want simply drinking in the details of the world, figuring out ideal fighting strategies, and generally dicking around to their heart's content.

The very nature of the medium allows, and implicitly encourages this sort of behavior; there's seldom any punishment for standing around and ignoring the main plot of Modern Warfare for a few minutes because you want to check out the brickwork on the enemy base you've just shot to shit. All the little appliances in the Black Mesa research facility exist solely for the player to play around with: hey, the soda machine actually dispenses soda! Hey, I just destroyed Dr. Magnusson's casserole! Though one could reasonably argue that allowing the player the freedom to dick around and ignore the main plot of linear games undermines dramatic tension (imagine staring at a soda machine for the entirety of "No Russian"), the fact remains that concepts like exploration and self-mandated pacing and just plain dickin' around are well-suited to games.

Movies, less so.

James Cameron wanted us to feel like we were on Pandora; that, 3D IMAX goggles or not, we were just as immersed in a world of funny-looking plants and blue giants as Jake Sully and the other characters who didn't matter enough for me to remember their names. As someone who plays a lot of games, I found myself incapable of experiencing the degree of immersion Cameron wanted me to feel. Immersion isn't just about seeing a bunch of cool stuff and feeling that the world is believable; it's about feeling that you are a meaningful part of that world, even if you're not able to change the world on a fundamental level.

My experience of viewing Avatar felt like an implicit conversation between James Cameron and myself. I get halfway through the movie and Cameron yells, "Here! Look at these floating mountains! Isn't that shit fucking cash?"

"Yeah," I respond. "Can I spend some time around here? Hang out and get a closer look at them?"

"Nope!"

"But I wanted to explore--"

"SHUT UP AND WATCH JAKE SULLY HAVE PG-13 SEX WITH THIS BLUE CHICK"

And then the conversation ends because in my mind he's playing air guitar and has begun to ignore me.

Of course, this isn't James Cameron's fault – the demands of narrative film in general forbid the audience from ever truly exploring or examining anything at their own pace. In film, audience is subservient to the director; he shows us what he wants us to see, and decides how long we can look at it, before we're tossed along to the next scene. The very nature of immersion and exploration runs counter to these demands.

Even if a hypothetical Avatar game (I haven't played the actual game yet) consisted of nothing but a bunch of pretty, contiugous locations that I could walk through at my own pace, it'd still be more immersive than Cameron's flick.

In games, the player is more important than the creator (even if the creator doesn't want to admit it). Within twenty minutes of booting up The Saboteur, I can look out onto the Paris skyline, see a monument I want to check out, sprint there, and climb on it/shoot at it/blow it up at my leisure. My ability to pace my own experience -- to decide that, actually, I won't check out the Eiffel Tower until much later because I wanna hang out on the Champs-Elysee and stab Nazis for a few hours – is one of those things that make games such a unique, beautiful medium.

Even as flawed as a game like The Saboteur is, James Cameron will never, ever be able to make a film that surpassses its immersive qualities. Ever. All the Na'vi and Marines and lush, CG landscapes in the world simply cannot compete with allowing your audience the simple ability to move around in your world at their own pace, unrestrained by the demands of narrative pacing.

Of course, that argument inexorably leads into an indictment of the current direction games are heading in – that, say, more and more games are seeking to replicate the linear thrills of movies rather than utilizing our medium's unique strengths. If movies shouldn't try to ape techniques games can already do much better, one could reasonably argue, games should probably stop aping movies for a little while if only so we can see what our medium is truly, individually capable of. Great power, great responsbility, etcetera. I'll beat that drum until a game comes along that convinces everyone else of what Spelunky and Far Cry 2 already revealed to me, and roughly six other people.

But seeing as it's Christmas -- otherwise known as the time when you're supposed to be less of an unbearable shit than you usually are -- I won't say another word about that. Instead, I'll end with this: I'm incredibly happy (and terrified, and angry, and demanding, but mostly happy because it's Christmas) that games can do things that even one of the best directors in the world, with a near-unlimited budget, cannot ever hope to emulate.

Avatar can go fuck itself.