Second Skin (2009)

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 game shows the life of MMORPG gamers from many angles. Like any addiction being addicted to videogames can be unhealthy, but for most addicts it seems to be a phase. They grow out of it. Unfortunately the movie suffers from a 'cast' containing a few unlikable people. And I'm not talking about the gaming addicts that ignore their real life.The ubergeek who thinks he's a playboy but in reality appears to be unable to hold a normal conversation with a regular person for more than 5 minutes isn't even the worst.Neither is the guy who overcame/suppresses his addiction by continuously yelling to himself about how bad games are for you.I really hated the woman who treats gaming addicts like alcoholics with a disease and who ferociously tried to keep her son from doing what he enjoyed most in life. She seems oblivious to the fact that her son killed himself because of her constant nagging instead of his gaming addiction. The kid killing himself is sad, the fact that his mother can't learn from her mistakes is even more sad.I am a gamer myself but I don't dislike this movie for what it's trying to say about gaming or gaming addiction. I disliked it for the same reason I don't like TV-shows like the Jerry Springer show; people constantly making bad/wrong choices in life depress me.

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'?

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.