Could "Second Skin" Trigger Second Thoughts About Online Gaming?
Do you spend nutty amounts of time online? Do you experience bouts of anger with other players -- even fits of blazing rage -- while playing online games or visiting message boards to chat about what you've been playing? Does gaming ever make you feel suicidal? Romantic? "Like someone in love"? Do you feel "empowered" playing online MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, and does that sense of power relate inversely to a less-than-satisfying day job?
If you answered yes to any of the above, you may want to put the forthcoming Pure West documentary Second Skin on your view list (it premieres at SXSW, which runs March 7-16 in Austin, Texas). The film follows a handful of gamers deeply devoted to massively multiplayer online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Director Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza calls it "An Inconvenient Truth meets Errol Morris." Here's the YouTube preview clip:
"We are in a world that is becoming increasingly atomized, and we're all becoming isolated," says Exodus to the Virtual World author Edward Castranova (interviewed in the documentary).
Are online games socially liberating? Harmful? Is it as simple as saying they're somewhere in between or that "it all depends on the player"?
More and more, I see people exploring their wildest ideas and fantasies online, and more and more, I see some of those same ostensibly happy folks ready to tear each other to bits over the tritest slight. I know people who sit on message boards for hours a day playing semantic one-upsmanship, taking cheap ironic shots in some bizarro quest to pass as pseudo-intellectual on a given subject. I know others who seem to think passive-aggressive or just plain incendiary behavior in chat channels is the new Feng Shui. Blizzard's World of Warcraft played a role in wrecking the marriage of a relative (of course I blame the player, not the game). It may have been a major factor in delaying someone else I know a full year toward their terminal graduate degree.
Ask any psychologist: Going online removes basic communicative cues developed over evolutionary eons. It's called the disinhibition effect, and it can be as toxic as it is liberating. (See Erin Biba's piece "Jerks of the Web" for some interesting examples.)
The gaming press likes to mockingly reject anything that paints gaming in a negative light most of all because it plays well to gamers who see themselves as disenfranchised next to other media like film and books. They're right (about the disenfranchised part) but that doesn't excuse the occasional spillover into lowbrow reactionary territory. Gaming isn't some pristine, perfectly formed, great big happy sugar pill. Certain aspects of it have some fairly disturbing side effects, particularly when you get into the psychology of cyberspace and more complex theory like "dissociative anonymity" and "solipsistic introjection."
Most of us aren't thinking about that stuff. We see the chance to be someone else (or something else) as liberating. And it is, and I have no doubt there's a healthy cognitive angle here. But online games don't just offer us an alternative identity, they also strip us of some of the most fundamental elements of social interaction, reducing conversations to abstract symbols and basic physicality to cartoony gesticulative tropes like "wave" or "laugh" or "cry." Online games allow -- and by virtue of that allowance, actually encourage -- people to do and say things they never would in so-called "real life." And no, I don't just mean the obvious sex-related time sinks -- this is much broader than mere sex.
You may intuitively believe that "letting it all out" is more "honest," and therefore a benefit of online interaction. Not necessarily true. Most psychologists include the social layer we loosely refer to as our "filter" or "personal space" or "bubble" (etc.) as every bit a part of the cumulative package that comprises a person's "total" personality. Without the social immediacy of physical proximity and all the subtle cues we read through body language and vocal inflection, we're effectively having socially neutered conversations in virtually-anything-goes-land, a perfect alchemical testbed for some of the most amazing -- but as well, some of the most disastrous -- social interactions.
I have no idea where Second Skin comes down on any of this, but the teaser trailer looks professional and pretty darned interesting. Hopefully it'll be smart enough, incisive enough, and take enough of a stand (as opposed to just window-shopping the online paradigm) to get more people thinking about this, rejecting blithe futurism (i.e. most "analysis" of online communities by the gaming media to date) and engaging the bad as well as expanding on the good.
Replay
Agree? Disagree? Have your say below in comments, visit Wake the Happy Words for expanded dialogue, or pelt me with emails here.
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MMos really can make you rot. I have so many friends who just hide at home every night playing games. I have a friend who told me when she used to play WoW, she didn't eat enough, didn't sleep enough, and found herself even skipping showers.
Another friend of mine, when he first purchased WoW, logged about 30 hours in the first weekend, and was so tired that come Monday he fell asleep in his car and missed his english final exam.
It is scary how addictive they can be.
if you get addicted to a game like WoW, you are gay. "oh im an elf, im an elf!" uhmmmm no youre not, you are gay, you need a life, and you need to stop paying 180.00 a year for some underwhelmingly pixelated and poorly rendered game. if it were some free MMO, that you didnt have to pay for and could play in your free time, then thats not being gay, thats being intelligent. but paying 180 bucks a year for a game that sucks up your life is ludicrous. i mean XBL only costs 50.00 a year for unlimited, awesome, friend-filled gameplay, that you can actually put down and go outside and enjoy life with.
They are quite right in the video that most people go to their deadend jobs and come home and play these video games 8-10 hours a night I can certainly relate to that, working nights coming home to a empty house or with people asleep didn't equate much socially so I started playing what I soon found out that you truly can't expect to have a normal life of any sorts playing all the time. I have gave up playing WOW because now I have a girlfriend and live together and there are far more important things for me to worry about then some game that takes me away from her.
To Oldtimegamer,
You will be back ..... lol just wait til she pops out a few kids and you be back hidding from the real world... lol trust me ...