Second Skin-Scary MMORPG behaviour

Posted by: Bianca212 on Mar 01, 2010
Last night I watched the documentary Second Skin. If you're into World of Warcraft or any other online role player games, the movie will be an education. These are the hard-core gamers, not the guys who enjoy a little escapism at the end of the day. These were people who were just as happy, if not happier inside of a game than they are in real life.

 It follows the lives of a bunch of players- seven I think, but there are other people that come and go in the doccie. I was actually afraid having watched it, and so thankful that while my boyfriend is a computer nerd, he doesn't make me sign into his WOW account while he is on his way home so that he can start playing immediately when he walks through the door, and I can sit and eat supper on my own. Yes, there was a guy whose wife, pregnant with twins, did that. He then proceeded to play for six hours in the evening-every evening and twelve hours a day on the weekends.

Of course, before the babies arrived, he had to sit down and have a serious think about his life, and came to the conslusion that he would scale back his playing to only three days a week so his wife didn't have to raise his babies alone. Yes, that's how sensitive and helpful he was. Of course, his friends from his little raiding coven or whatever the hell it was called weren't very happy about the fact and then when the second of their four person team got married, it was like their world was crashing down.

Another guy actually lost his house, his job, his family to online gaming. Like a crack addict. And then there was the couple who got married at some or other gaming convention in Vegas- with Star Wars themed costumes and after the (real) ceremony, they sat down at their computers and proceeded to get married in-world. What struck me most was that people were actually living their lives in these games- all their friends were in-game, a lot of people fell in love in-game and almost 80% of the people interviewed seemed to think that they were better off in-game because they have better friends, better relationships. Of course you have better relationships in-game-if you're spending the best part of your day (in some cases 18 hours a day) and life online, the "real" people in your life, the ones you never see, aren't exactly going to be rushing to spend time with you now are they?

It was terrifying to watch because people had deluded themselves into thinking they were happy like this, like it didn't matter that they had gained 50 pounds, peed in colddrink bottles and lost their jobs, because their supposed online "friends" accepted them for who they are.