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Hello, my name is Aurora, and I am a recovering addict. It’s been 17 months since I last signed on to my WoW account.

And Second Skin made me want to jack back in

There is a distinct separation between the “real world” and the “digital world”. You can call it a “synthetic reality”, “virtual existence”, “online community” – whatever the name, we have pockets of intentional community that allow us to be different, behave in a way completely removed from how we are in our day-to-day.  Even at Burning Man last week, people were referring to the “Default World” as being the realm outside Black Rock City. From World of Warcraft to The Sims, even on Facebook, we design images that represent ourselves, a digital face that we present to the online world. Second Skin examines the variety of ramifications attendant upon that separation, primarily as seen in World of Warcraft and Everquest II.

We’ve all heard stories about people meeting in an online game and getting married.  But these guys show us what happens to those relationships over time, which is something I’d always been curious about. They spend a lot of time on how people balance their lifestyles, but they also give insights into what it means to be in one of the highest rated guilds, the actual community behind the online façade, and the moral dilemma behind gold farming. It’s an honest look, without any bias or judgment, at the wide range of experiences being involved in an MMO can entail. For example, I’ve known a lot of gamers in my time, including a lot of MMO’ers.  And many of us have referred to ourselves as being addicts. But I had no idea that some people experience such intense addiction that they consider (or carry out) suicide; that there is (seriously!) a halfway house for recovering gamers. It sounds like a joke my friends and I would bandy about, “Do they have a Betty Ford for WoW?” Why yes, they do. 

Of course, when I was hardcore MMO, I didn’t think twice about spending 8-10 hours gaming. Longer on the weekends.  It was almost kind of funny. But one of the best graphics in the movie lays it out: 11 hours gaming, plus 8 hours working, plus four hours sleeping, leaves you 1 hour for “eating, showering, driving, cooking, talking, exercising, peeing, reading, watching TV, hanging out, organizing, cleaning”. Put like that, it becomes clear how easily one’s life really can fall apart after getting sucked into a virtual world. Because, let’s face it – if you feel like your real life is in a virtual world, then what happens to the life that exists in this one?

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