Millions of players take on an online persona on a regular basis in MMOs, but how does playing these games affect them, and what does this reveal about the social dynamics of online interaction?
That's just a couple of the questions that the Pure West Films crew sought to answer while they filmed "Second Skin", a documentary trailing the lives of three sets of gamers who've been influenced significantly by the MMORPG genre. Romance, addiction, business models and social opportunities - all of these elements and more are examined with relation to how they take form in MMOs, resulting in an insightful, eye-opening feature for viewers.
Since its premiere in 2008 at the SXSW festival, "Second Skin" has already garnered a number of accolades, from being covered by major media outlets like Newsweek, Wired, NPR and more, as well as being voted the #4 Documentary of 2008 by Aint it Cool News. It has just premiered in theaters in select cities as of August 7th, and the DVD will be released on August 25th on Amazon.com and other outlets. Be sure to check it out - it is definitely not to be missed.
You can check the trailer out below:
Comments
Which game has the biggest infleuence, fan base and probably highest addiction rate. Hmm would that not be WoW!!
Blizzard know that having the good also means you will have the bad. It does not really matter if there was not fair representation, since WoW has biggest subscribers in MMO games, so if you related that to the film, then the amount of time spent on WoW is fair.
The point of the film was to highlight MMO players behave and does not matter what game was used, there all cause the same issues.
Unfortunately WoW is the star of MMOs at moment and so will be used to highlight these issues. I was would not worry about unfair representation, unless it was implied that this behaviour was unique to WoW, which it is not.