The Independent Film Festival of Boston :: Second Skin

Fantasy and reality clash in Second Skin at The Independent Film Festival of Boston

"A competition is afoot between synthetic and real space," according to academic Edward Castronova, who studies the economies of virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Get a front seat for the competition in Second Skin, a fascinating new documentary that looks at some of the faces behind the avatars in elaborate online gameworlds while exploring the positive and negative effects - from getting addicted to falling in love - that echo from virtual worlds into the real world for the estimated 50 million users of multiplayer online roleplaying games. A labor of love for Belmont-born producer Peter Brauer and his partners Juan Carlos and Victor Pineiro-Escoriaza, the film screens this weekend at The Independent Film Festival of Boston. Brauer, crashing at his parent's house for the Festival, spoke with Bay Windows about Second Skin's war of the worlds.

Q: Congratulations on all the buzz around Second Skin.
A: Yeah, we're pretty excited! It's very timely, and that's been great. The press is interested in the subject already. Several people have tried and failed to do a film on this topic before. So there has been some similar stuff, but nothing on the scale of what we did.

Q: So tell me how you got started.
A: Juan Carlos and I started Pure West Documentaries a year before we started making this film. We were an industrial film company, so we made fundraising videos, and did market research videography, and things like that. And we were paying our bills, but we wanted to make our own movie. Juan had this friend who got very deep into Star Wars Galaxies, and simultaneously I read about gold farming [amassing virtual resources to be sold for actual money] in The New York Times. So we started researching it and seemed like a no-brainer.

Q: Was it hard finding people, and how did you narrow down the potential subjects?
A: First we interviewed a lot of the experts, the people who study these games. Then we built a web presence and posted on a lot of forums and video game blogs, saying we were looking for people whose lives had been touched by these games. We wanted stories that were alive, that were playing out in the present tense.

Q: So you knew that Kevin and Heather were going to meet in real life for the first time, and that Karalee and Andy had a baby on the way...
A: Exactly. We knew that there was a significant change coming for Andy and Karalee and we wanted to see what happened. And we knew Anthony and Becca were getting married, and Heather was getting ready to meet her EverQuest boyfriend. So we knew those stories were going to be dynamic.

Q: It's interesting that people who are drawn to these online experiences, where you can be anonymous, where willing to be the subjects of a documentary.
A: I'm always dumbfounded that people would let their lives be filmed, but then they haven't been on the other side and they don't really realize how big a deal it is. I think also that the camera is a fantastic validator. And for people who are maybe shy, having three people follow you around and pay a huge amount of attention to your life, probably feels pretty good. It makes them feel that their lives are important. And they are important. I think that Kevin and Heather are two wonderful people who are not very good in a social setting, and the fact that they met and fell in love is a beautiful story. It's beautiful that there's this new means for people to open themselves up to relationships.

Q: So it's just coincidental that the film focuses almost entirely on World of Warcraft and EverQuest?
A: We filmed a fourth story about someone in Second Life. But that story didn't have a strong dramatic arc so it was greatly reduced in the film. Also, World of Warcraft is enormous. It has 10 million players worldwide. So we really had to focus on that.

Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned or encountered filming this?
A: I think Dan's story surprised me the most. Just seeing the real battle he went through with addiction. The surprise was that he put all this onus on the game, and I think once he took it off the game and put it on himself, that's when he came to grips with his life. He definitely had a hard life with or without these games.

Q: What especially surprised me about his storyline was just learning that there's an On-Line Gamers Anonymous, and there's even a halfway house.
A: Largely due to her experience with Dan and another gamer, she's scaled back. Dan said some hurtful stuff to her that we didn't want to get into to.

Q: But watching the film, we can tell it didn't end well.
A: It didn't. She felt burned because she is really trying to help people. But she is still active. The funny thing about Ol-Ganon is that it's an online organization, and Liz is very web savvy. She plays an important role in the community, and she's supported by a lot of gamers who want people to game responsibly.

Q: Speaking of the community, I know some people are complaining that Second Skin is overly negative.
A: There's a large minority of gamers who feel burned by the movie. They wanted to see this glorification of their games, and that's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to find real human stories and tell them as honestly as we could. I think the movie is very even handed and lets the viewer have a discussion. So the fact that some people are reacting negatively is in some ways welcome, because it adds to the broader conversation of how we plays these games and how they fit in our lives.

Q: There's one person posting on boards representing himself as Dan -
A: That's really him. Dan has actually not seen the movie. He doesn't want to. That was the result of a huge miscommunication on our part. Our website had a description of him that was really outdated, and he was very upset about that. He was absolutely justified. And he also wants to move on with his life, and I think he has some regrets about participating. Because we caught him at a low point in his life, and who wants to revisit that on a big screen? I can't blame him at all. But at the same time I stand by Second Skin and think it's a very accurate depiction of what happened.

Q: And did this film do anything to your own interest in World of Warcraft?
A: My drive to be a filmmaker had prevented me from playing it. When we started making this film I had my excuse. I did a lot of "research." But now, playing Warcraft brings me back to making the movie, which was the biggest ordeal of my life! So it made it less enjoyable, though I do still play.

Second Skin screens Thursday April 24 at 9:30 p.m., and Friday April 25 at 6:45 p.m., at Somerville Theatre. Buy tickets, and learn more about the Independent Film Festival of Boston, at www.iffboston.org.