In today’s Georgia Straight is my look at the video game adaptation of James Cameron’s Avatar. Ubisoft’s Patrick Naud and Kevin Shortt were revealing about how open Cameron was in involving them, and in keeping his hands off the work that they were doing.

James Cameron is known as an innovator. The Canadian-born filmmaker creates visually arresting movies that rely on visual effects: the killing machine and the creature in The Terminator and Aliens, the underwater environment of The Abyss, the seamless Titanic. With his latest project, the 3-D science-fiction movie Avatar, he has expanded into video games.

The problem is that the film and the game are built on the idea of the noble savage, and that arrogant point of view taints everything.

Not far into the video game based on James Cameron’s upcoming film, I had to choose a side. Avatar: The Game takes place on Pandora, a beautiful but potentially deadly moon far from Earth. Humans mining Pandora’s resources have been surviving in the strange new environment with the aid of the Na’vi—the indigenous population of intelligent, bipedal, blue-skinned creatures. But the RDA, the Earth-based organization running the operation, wants more freedom to remove resources without worrying about the locals, and the Na’vi are showing signs of resistance.