Once a week, we’ll pick out one of Fancast’s many full-length free feature films to spotlight. Sure, you’ll check out the big stuff like The 39 Steps, Blame It On Rio and Pushing Tin, but the smaller movies need shout-outs, too.

The Movie of the Week is Second Skin, part of SnagFilms’ ongoing SummerFest. It’s a documentary about the ever-growing world of online gaming, more specifically the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games that allow you to immerse yourself in a fantasy character in an entire virtual world. There are some big slam-bang movies coming up along these lines (namely Bruce Willis in The Surrogates and Gerard Butler’s Gamer), but Second Skin isn’t a bleak apocalyptic nightmare world at all. Instead, it delves into the truth about the players of these games, from those that claim problem addiction to those that manage to fall in love through their avatar characters without ever actually meeting in real life. The good, the bad, and everything in between is analyzed here. Check out this film, and the Q&A with director Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza after the jump.

Q&A with Director Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza

Q: What would you say to someone sitting down for the first time to watch this film, not knowing anything about it?
Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza: It’s like a college crash course for online gaming as a phenomenon, and what drives people to play and the entire culture around it.

Q: What brought you into this world and inspired you to make a film?
JCPE: The inspiration actually came from one of my brother’s friends who got us into the game Star Wars: Galaxies. He was a really big player in a town, one of the heads of the area. He had a lot of responsibilities in the game, in charge of 100 or so people. He had this online life that was insane. He was a teacher by day, a captain by night, and he was getting married in real life as well. He had this interesting responsibility to both his real life and his virtual life, and he started to have some difficulties balancing both. Watching that happen while I was playing Star Wars: Galaxies, I said “wait a minute, there’s something more to this than just a game. There this really intense relationship and community that needs and wants and he’s responsible for inside this place.” That’s where it started to change and say “This is worthy of a documentary.” I’d gone to school for film and started a documentary company a couple years before, so it was a translation of that.

Q: Are you one of the people who would consider themselves addicted?
JCPE: No, and I’m not sure that ‘addiction’ is the right term. I played Star Wars: Galaxies for a couple months, but I’m more of a console gamer, XBox or Wii or whatever. One of the other producers on the film played a lot of World of Warcraft in making this documentary, and he got really into it. I would say that maybe addiction, in that negative sensationalist way, is probably wrong, but it does occur, for sure.

Q: How much of the negative side of this do you go into as opposed to the positive?
JCPE: I like to think of the film as being brutally honest in telling the lives of seven gamers who are inside these virtual spaces in different ways. A group of four of them in Indiana are essentially coming of age, as one of them is getting married and the other is having twins. It’s their lives as they have this big change and find out what it is to continue their gaming life but also have this going on there. Another story is a couple, two lovers Heather and Kevin, who have never met in reality and find each other in Everquest and say ‘I love you’ without actually seeing each other. It’s their trajectory as they come together in the real world and find out what is possible with the relationship in the real space when they’ve had such a passionate one in the virtual space. The other story is a recovering game addict who we found in a place called OLG-Anon – Online Gamers Anonymous. It’s his trajectory as he comes form there and says “you know what, that wasn’t right either,” and he tries to figure out what this thing is, whether he can call it addiction or if it’s essentially something much more complicated than that.

Q: What are the “online gaming rehab” programs like?
JCPE: It’s run by a woman named Liz Woolley, and I think she tries to make it traditional, but it’s not 100% traditional. Essentially, it follows the idea of the 12 steps towards curing game addiction similar to alcohol, but that’s not really the norm. I’d say the norm is probably more of a ‘food, shopping, gambling’ – more of a behavioral addiction that can be quantified in a smaller population in terms of the larger population of gamers. It’s a much, much smaller subset that has problems like that – like it is in any type of addiction. A lot of people gamble, but there are fewer people who have gambling addiction.

Q: When big movies come out about this kind of thing, they generally deal with it as this awful bleak apocalyptic future leaving the world a tattered hellscape. Which way did you come down feeling about online gaming in general after this?
JCPE: If you consider the real world, and the virtualscape is very much a microcosm of the real space and the same issues lie in both – I do consider the real world to be positive, and it is a good place. Either you’re an optimist or a pessimist. I think there are a lot more good things going on in the virtual space than negative things. It’s our nature to scrutinize anything – our own lives, our real lives, our virtual space – for anything and say “what are the bad things here? What are we looking at?” To be cautious. That’s something that’s absolutely necessary – we do have to be cautious, but there are so many more beautiful things happening in the online space, where communities are formed. Disabled people can go on there and be responsible for things they weren’t able to be responsible for in the real world. There are a lot of incredible things happening, but of course, by that same token, there are things like addiction, or like that gold farming and the idea of those sweatshops where people work for 12 to 14 hours a day in a sweatshop to create virtual gold to then sell it to Americans or other people willing to pay for it.

Q: Have you kept in touch with your subjects to follow up with them?
JCPE: The lovers are still together, they’re doing very well. They live together, and that’s really good. They’re still working through some of the things that they were working through in the film, but that’s like any relationship. They continue to help each other and make it happen. The Ft. Wayne gamers – the couple who got married in the film, they have a couple dogs now, they’re doing well. The gamer who had twins now works at Mythic Entertainment and he does community managing for another MMORPG. Our recovering gamer is doing very well, too. He’s in an out of 9 to 5 jobs that he worked to get throughout the film, and he’s been consistent about it since. He cut out gaming for a bit, and then he decided to just kind of do it normally. He found a way. It’s very much a personal thing.

Q: What should be the overall message people should take away from the film?
JCPE: I think the overall message should be one of education and awareness. If you look at where online gaming is right now, it’s really just a couple of steps forward from where Facebook and MySpace and those kinds of things are. We’re moving in that direction to create more immersive realities all the time. As that population gets larger and our virtual worlds become bigger and more and more of us are inside them for longer – I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely online most of the time, if it’s not my phone or my computer, it’s this or that, I’m constantly in touch – if our world is heading in that direction, we have to think about where we’re going and what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. In the future, what should we do? How should we continue on? We’re becoming more symbiotic with our technology. The lines are going to continue to blur between our virtual lives and our real lives. They’re going to be pretty synchronous 20 years down the line. If that’s going to be the case, we really have to look and think about what that means and what we want to do in the future. That’s what I would really like for people to get out of it.

More on These Topics: Gamer | Juan Carlos Piñeiro Escoriaza | Movie of the Week | Second Skin | The Surrogates