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Gamers With A Second Skin
By Virginia Prescott on Monday, August 11, 2008.
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Your neighbor, your local cop, your checkout clerk, your grandmother, maybe even you. Millions of people around the world spend countless hours interacting in virtual worlds, playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPG’s.
Seated behind a flickering screen, they can log on to games like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Everquest, and become idealized version of themselves - the chiseled knight mounted on a bucking steed, or the svelte female warrior, skilled at fighting monsters - online personaes that battle with other players, able to make friends, tell their secrets, even flirt.
It's also a major economic industry. World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade earned $96 million in one day. Compare that to the highest one-day gross for a film last year – $60 million. And Blizzard Entertainment, the company that makes World of Warcraft, has an annual gross of $1.2 billion.
A new documentary called Second Skin explores the lives of those people. We meet couples who fall in love without meeting, disabled players who have found new purpose, addicts whose lives fall down around them, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, and wealthy online entrepreneurs - all living in a world that doesn't quite exist.
To find out more about this world we’re joined by Second Skin's director, Juan Carlos Pineiro. The film’s New York premiere is set for September 5th. We also hear from Marie Harriman from Antrim, NH. She isn’t able to leave home often due to a disability, and says that playing Second Life allows her to feel less secluded.
Watch the trailer for Second Skin:
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As a 34 year old gamer, husband and father, I paused to listen to this segment because I was primarily interested in how the "gamer culture" was going to be presented, and I was unsurprised to find that the host's presentation was quite in-line with what I had expected.
Non-gamers frequently treat gamers -- especially those who play MMOs -- with a very jaundiced eye, falling back on outdated stereotypes. Gaming today isn't the anti-social past-time of 20 years ago; the bright spot of the segment was the undercurrent that these virtual worlds lead to more, honest and lasting social interaction then "social networking" sites like MySpace or Facebook can ever hope to foster.
Unfortunately, I do not think that gamers were done any favors with this segment. The questions being posed struck me as having a very cynical twinge to them, as they usually do when they are posed by someone who isn't familiar with the culture, or even appeared to have done very little pre-education before participating ("The Syndicate" is a gaming guild, not an MMO).
The fact is that gamers are no less "adjusted" to reality then those who follow football, baseball, or "American Idol". Most people know someone who is a fan of at least one of these cultures, and there's usually no question that these people are well adjusted in their appreciation for their subject. Not everyone knows a gamer, however, and in that absence non-gamers can only rely on the non-gaming media to provide the portrait of the "typical gamer", which is usually far from reality.
Kudos to Mr. Pineiro for lending his voice and documentary to the education of non-gamers. I only hope that enough of them will bother to educate themselves rather to continue with outdated notions.