Second Skin Film Debut/Review

At this year’s SXSW in Austin, Texas – perhaps the most-blogged cultural event in recent memory – the film Second Skin debuted. It is a documentary about computer gamers that explores some prurient questions about why people game by documenting the lives and events of actual gamers.

Now, I didn’t make it to Austin and did not see the film. But judging by the trailer alone, it looked like it might be a more positive taken on what Wagner Au called “Mirrored Flourishing”, showing avatars on-screen aside their real-life counterparts, and perhaps a more positive take than the BBC’s recent Wonderland. The trailer also reminds us of Darkon, another film that explored another perceived-as-geeky subcultures (Darkon was about medeival re-enactments and the politics of this small subculture, but there is an overlap with the themes of Second Skin, to be sure.).

Jessica Maguire at Gamasutra did see the film, and offers a critique. Maguire seemed to have a preconceived notion as to the what the film would be about: an exploration of the many issues in MMOs, or, as she writes, “I was excited to explore how interactive media is changing our experience of ourselves. Instead, I just wound up feeling sorry for the losers playing World of Warcraft.”

Yet, in her review, she proceeds to describe in detail the narratives of the people she sees onscreen. This is a telling strategy, because it seems she is interseted enough in the people in the film to describe their stories in depth in her review.

Though again, this is a review of a review of a film we’ve yet to see, it would seem Maguire was expecting an intellectual treatise on the various discourses and threads of MMOs, and also some mention of SL. Instead, she saw flesh-and-blood documentation of the various people, with all their flaws on display, who play MMOs.

Regardless, we’d still like to see the film. The world may still, as Maguire writes, be waiting for the perfect documentary about MMOs to be made. But Second Skin still tugs at our appetite for stories from RL about MMO users.

Read other reviews here and here.