As one reporter remarked afterwards, "This is everything we've been writing for the last five years." Which is true. But film is one kind of document; newspapers and magazines are another. Reportage must be fresh, but a movie can take it's time, because movies, we are told, will last forever.
Perhaps "movie" is the wrong word for Second Skin, which seems closer to machinima with occasional interviews of real people intercut for color. If you've never spent time in a virtual world, Second Skin will solve that problem by showing perfectly cinemagraphed scenes of magical forests, avatars bounding across the countryside on gleaming white tigers, and even raids, without all the nasty text overlays and voice chat that normally get in the way.
These are filmmakers who understand context, too. So we're shown charts. Happy charts, featuring the universal man. We see that millions of people play online games. Like 20 million, or maybe it's 50 million - that doesn't matter, the point is, it's a lot.
Then we're told that one in four players is female, and that one in four players begins a relationship online, followed by a montage of adorably matched - and mismatched - couples chatting about how they found each other. The consensus: No one understands a gamer like a gamer.
Then, we're whisked off to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a place the filmmakers tell us is an epicenter of gamers. For a metro area of half a million people, perhaps Fort Wayne must be measured by percentage instead of volume. But no matter: We're confronted with four average gamers who are more than willing to describe their compulsions with lighthearted candor.
We begin to get the idea that gamers are a cross between drug dealers and the protagonists of country western songs who have lost sweethearts, houses, dogs and trucks. Nor does this impression change when we meet the gamer who talks about how he became addicted to World of Warcraft, how his life fell apart, and how he just wanted to die. After playing enough of the game, "the real world looked fake."
Of course, he finds a halfway house for gamers, complete with a twelve-step program - Online Gamers Anonymous. But he falls off the wagon, returns to his MMORPGing ways, and must finally face the addiction on his own.
"I think people who roleplay have more problems than anyone," his cousin tells the camera. Which might be the central theme of the film. Edward Castronova predicts an exodus from reality to virtual worlds. Maybe, he theorizes, this is an indictment of our society. Perhaps it's so broken that we can only find wholeness by retreating into synthetic spaces.
As the film continues to follow the lives of the characters, we meet gold farmers, have our four weddings and a funeral, finish our popcorn and leave happy. Documentary nuts walk away having seen a window into yet another strange world. And gamers walk away feeling like they had seen seen their life story, with slick editing, a peppy soundtrack, and the seductive polish of an Apple commercial.
