In a way, Second Skin is the dark flipside of last year’s SXSW hit, The King of Kong. Both documentaries are about people who spend way too many hours playing videogames, but this one is a much more downbeat, dispiriting and at times tedious account. Say what you will about the denizens of the Funspot arcade in Kong, but at least none of them came to believe they were Mario or Pac-Man, and a few of them actually saw daylight on occasion.
Second Skin concerns a much newer, more sophisticated form of computer gaming, awkwardly abbreviated as MMORPG: Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. These are vast virtual environments populated by people from all over the world, in the form of elves, knights and various strange beasties. The most popular such games are World of Warcraft (or “WoW,” as its residents term it), Everquest and Second Life. All players start out with nothing and must gradually build up their skills, arsenal of weapons, magic spells or whatever else it takes to improve their standing in the virtual world. Most players belong to guilds, some of which consist of hundreds of members who communicate with each other through the game, sometimes meet in person and even fall in love.
That’s the happy side of Second Skin: a lot of different kinds of people play these games and aren’t swallowed alive by them. Kevin and Heather meet through the game and strike up a romance, but the strains of a long-distance relationship and incompatible lifestyles that jeopardize their love story have little to do with battling dragons or raiding caverns. The “Fort Wayne boys” hole up in a house together and play for days on end, until real-life relationships and obligations start to take precedent for some (but not all).
Then there’s Dan, a gamer who becomes so addicted he loses his job and everything he owns; his only goal is to keep the electricity on so that the game never ends. He considers suicide and eventually he ends up in a rehab center for gaming addicts, but a bad back and worse attitude make his slow climb back to reality a painful one.
Second Skin grows repetitive and numbing after a while; it could easily lose thirty minutes or so from its running time. There’s a lot of pontificating about what it says about our world that so many people would prefer to live in a virtual one. The real problem with the film probably stems from the fact that these people spend so much time in their game personas; for the most part, their actual personalities aren’t that compelling. Second Skin isn’t without interest, but in the end it’s a movie that makes you want to go outside, see the sun and get some fresh air.
