Second Skin

Funny how most of these gaming documentaries seem to pick their chosen few from players without even a casual knowledge of the games. This is more for people who want to laugh at gamers and be entertained by the typical drivel that drives viewers these days, for one, they spend so much time on romance in games which is such a small percentage of what goes on in an mmo. These soft-spoken, pseudo-nerds... bring out the in-game rants, the fights with GM's, girlfriends deleting boyfriend's characters, mom's fighting with their crazy kids, the pothead gamers, etc. To put it in World of Warcraft lingo: /lol /snore /rude I'd like to DELETE CHARACTER on some of these actors. Dumb reality-TV garbage.

Although I played World of Warcraft, I never raided or had a high end character. My part was heavily scripted and improvised based on the direction of the producers.

It was just something to do to add to my resume. They were not supposed to use my real name either but the producers were unethical in their approach for me to do the movie.

They actually would buy me alcohol so i would get a buzz on and open up more because I thought the movie doc was stupid. So please don't send me anymore email telling me your hardship stories. I'm not the person you think I am.

They also lied about where i lived, who I lived with, what I did for work. It's not a real look into a gaming addicts life. Unless perhaps the losers from Indiana were for real but that I don't know. From what i can tell they were actually real life friends of the producers who were also playing a role.

This amazing wide-ranging documentary had its world premiere this week at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. The overflow crowd here loved it. This film could have easily been done as a pro- or anti-gaming screed. Instead, it really presented a balanced picture of the gaming subculture. It demonstrated that community doesn't have to be in-person physical community and certainly can exist in virtual form. (Incidentally, this phenomenon isn't new, there are many other sorts of virtual communities that have long existed on the internet outside the gaming world.)

It showed how these massive interactive role playing games involving millions of people - particularly World of Warcraft - can be addictive and, indeed, dangerous. It also showed the bizarre global aspect of Chinese "gold farming" where thousands are working in computerized sweatshops to earn virtual prizes to be sold to American gamers for real money. Thus these gaming communities have many of the negatives that exist in the real world, but they also have many of the positives.

The film also shows couples who have met in the virtual world and fallen in love. It shows disabled people who are able to live better lives in the virtual world than in their own damaged physical bodies. The film shows that participants can learn much and strengthen their own self-esteem from the gaming experience. There is a danger of addiction, but most gamers seem to grow out of that after a while and live normal lives in the real world.

The film combines both personal stories, useful statistics, and analysis from scholars who have studied the virtual world of gaming. The games come off as magnificent forms of entertainment that can used or abused like any form of entertainment - TV, alcohol, etc. The film is well-edited with fabulous graphics taken from the games themselves.

For those of us on the outside of the gaming culture, Second Skin is a wonderful and very fair-minded introduction that shows the different aspects of this fascinating subculture. I hope this film gets a wider distribution so that more people can gain a better understanding of this somewhat hidden aspect of our society.

Unfortunately, SECOND SKIN does not ever reveal the the reasons behind the nature of this addictive behavior. More of the film should have been devoted to watching exactly how the players use the game, and maybe the viewer would have been able to ascertain how these online environments can manifest such abject compulsion. We see that the characters were psychologically dependent on gaming, but are never shown why this computer software elicits such addictive properties. I will admit that computer games do not appeal to me (I think the last game that I played was 'Donkey Kong'), and therefore this subject has always had me mystified, and this is why I wanted to take a look at SECOND SKIN. The film does a good job showing the characters in their obsessed and enthusiastic Internet environment, but left this viewer wondering 'why'?