Rock & Roll is the devil’s music!

Yesterday, somebody Tweeted that Second Skin was playing on Hulu. Having heard about it a couple times on podcasts and such, I decided to check it out.

Second Skin is a documentary about gamers. Specifically, MMO gamers. Sounds like a cool premise, right? From what I’d heard about it, the movie sounded like something that might show us as we are: a little crazy, but altogether likable, and usually completely sane. I thought perhaps it would show the vast array of people who play MMO’s, people from all walks of life. I thought it may be similar, in theory, to the podcast How I WoW, which interviews interesting players of all types. Sometimes, they aren’t players at all. This is not how the Second Skin went down.

Second Skin focused on those people who people think of as hardcore gamers. The stereotype, so to speak. There were a few different people they interviewed, all of them overweight, probably hadn’t showered for the cameras, their basement dens littered with energy drink cans and vacant chip bags. A few of the couples had met online in their respective games (either EQ or WoW). Most were struggling with real life catching up to them: most had lost their jobs, one of the guys was getting married, one was a new father. Most of them were jobless. Most of them didn’t care about being jobless. They just didn’t care. These are the people that society has ignored and given up on, and they want to escape the world they were born into. There’s one interview with the mother of a guy that got addicted to EQ and ended up commiting suicide. Of course, she blames the game.

The whole thing just made me angry. As Patrick of How I WoW tweeted in reference to the mood of the film, “Rock & Roll is the devil’s music, I tell ya!” To me, Second Skin did not show the entire picture. The filmmakers found the lowest of lowlifes, the hardest of the harcore, and made it seem like that’s who every gamer could end up as. They made it seem like every single one of WoW’s 12 million subscribers was either a bum in the basement or a Chinese gold farmer. It shows all the pitfalls of MMO gaming and only some of the benefits.

They show how people get addicted. They show how people waste eight or twelve hours a day in front of the computer. They show a reformed player, one who is angry at people who still play because he thinks they’re wasting their lives away. When really, he’s angry at himself for wasting his own life. I will grant them that they showed the good parts too, even if they were slanted. They showed the camaraderie of a tight knit guild, the ability for malformed people to truly be who they aspire to be in the virtual world. But they still make it sound like these people should be able to do without.

Yes, these people exist. But I exist too. I exist in that precarious place where most gamers live, between the basement bum and the non-player. We exist in the corners of society, not sure if we want our identities as gamers to come out, precisely because of movies like Second Skin. People immediately assume that you are on that downward spiral to joblessness, homelessness, and addiction, when most of us aren’t. They mention suicides and gaming widows, all along blaming the game and the game companies for keeping their gamers hooked. Yes, they’re trying to make money, just like you’re going to advertise and hope some people give you their money. The problem is not the game. The problem is the person. The mother who lost her son blamed the game, saying that he had all these problems because he played EverQuest. It’s really the other way around. Those problems are always there, and they always have been there. This guy was depressed, socially awkward, unable to function as a normal person. So, he goes to this game. This place where he can be who he wants to be. He would rather be a “resident of the virtual world”. The misfits come here because they can be part of a community, something they don’t have in the real lives.

I agree with the point that I think this movie tries to make: that society should be ashamed for driving these people to such measures as finding a different world to live in. This does not constitute demonizing gaming. Most MMO players do not play to completely escape life. Of course, we desire diversion from everyday life, but so does everyone else. Why do people watch movies or read books? To escape their existance for just a little while. We find our entertainment in slaying dragons and other wayward entities, you find your entertainment in a bar. Both can be unhealthy. Neither should be condemned.