The MMO Documentary: Second Skin (2008)

MMO games are Massively Multiplayer Online games. Games such as World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2. Often times people find comfort in the friendships they make with the other people who are all playing the same game at the same time from all over the world. Sometimes that comfort becomes an obsession, and even an addiction. Second Skin follows the lives of of seven MMO gamers and we see how this kind of addiction can change a person's life. Do you think they're all just a bunch of shut-ins with no social lives? Hit the jump to find out if you're right.


The seven gamers are actually divided into 3 main groups. The first 4 are all friends and roommates and they all game in the same room. It's like an endless party in a way. The second group consists of 2 gamers, a man and a woman, who met online and are about to meet each other in real life for the first time. The last of the seven is a man who has lost complete control on his life because of his addiction and he's lost all his friends and even his job because of the game.

Surprisingly to me, the film takes both sides of the coin quite well. I was certain it was just going to show how utterly horrible your life can get, and it certainly shows that, but it also shows the positive possibilities as well. Things like meeting someone who can accept you for who you are when normally you might be looked down on just because you have a different hobby. Most of the movie seems to lean towards the nice things going on for MMO gamers, but I think that's generally because the few bad things it brings up are orders of magnitude worse. Like suicide and becoming broke and losing everything and everyone you know.

The roommates have a pretty sweet setup going on

Of course for me none of this was terribly new, I actively play games, not of the MMO variety, but nevertheless I've heard it all before. That doesn't mean this is a bad documentary though, just that it's aimed more at an audience who doesn't know the first thing about these new fangled computer games and is really more of an eye-opener. It's simply to show that there can be good things associated with these types of games, and playing them in moderation can be no better or worse than any other pastime such as going to the bar and getting wasted or obsessing over and staying at home watching football.

In the end I liked it, even if I pretty much knew the pros and cons before. The love story of the new couple meeting and starting a relationship was nice, and some of the gamers get married while another has twins during the movie and it shows how all of them have to deal with that. Not just the new father either, but his friends that end up losing their teammate in the game. Lots of different angles on the subject showing both happy and terrible extreme ends of the spectrum. I'd say check it out if you're curious on what all the fuss is about and you don't have anything else going on that day. A good time killer.