Second Skin Film

How MMORPG's Shape Our Culture

Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza is the director of Second Skin, a film that takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Multiplayer Online games (MMOs).

Our movie is split into three different parts. One story is about gamers who live in Fort Wayne Indiana who are coming of age. One of them is having twins, and the other one is getting married. And so it’s their life as they try to balance out the real world and their virtual life.

The second story is about a couple who met in an online game who are meeting up in real life for the first time. They are trying to bring that virtual relationship they’ve had for many months into the real world to see if it works.

The final story is of this guy Dan who lost everything. His house, his job his car, he was almost engaged before he lost it all.

The Idea for Second Skin

One of my friends was playing this game called Star Wars Galaxies. Inside the game, he became the mayor of an online town where he was in charge of 300 people. He gained this unreal responsibility inside the game while in real life he was a teacher who was about to get married. I just found his double life so interesting.

It struck me with such force that I said, 'Drop everything let’s go do this.' It’s the most important thing in terms of our technology, and where we are going in the future in terms of the social networking that has existed in the last few years.

The Second Skin Experience

I think there are all types of gamers. There are all types of humans, and MMO’s are a microcosm of the society that we live in. You’re going to have the entire gamut of humans that we have in a real society. We have gamblers, alcoholics - people that take things to extreme. Someone can play fantasy football too much! Whatever it is, you can go to far, and a certain small portion of society is going to have difficulty balancing.

I became so close with everyone of my subjects, it stopped being a story line. Everybody there became such good friends and had such interesting personal human stories. In the end you love your subjects, but you have to be unbiased, and you have to have a really human approach to the way that you deal with a documentary.

There is the sense that you can’t get too close, but on the other hand if you don’t get close enough, then you’re never going to be inside and understand the world.

It’s an important film in terms of where we are as a society. To say here’s where we are right now. Things are going to get crazy in the future with all the Facebook’s and Myspace’s and MMO’s. They are really going to have a blurring effect on how we deal with our reality. So let’s take a breathe, let’s see where we’re at, and let’s see where we’re going so we can make some good choices.