The good news? Nobody’s spending time clucking their tongues and worrying about how nerdy, obsessed, and emotionally immature Dungeons & Dragons players are. That’s because tabletop D&D is passé.
Instead, it seems, now everyone’s spending time clucking their tongues and worrying about how nerdy, obsessed, and emotionally immature MMO players are. As in the view of the newly released film, Second Skin.
But my take was that the film–which focuses mainly on three distinct stories, a gamer who is so deeply addicted to World of Warcraft that he loses almost everything in his life; a household of gamers who spend almost every waking, non-working hour playing; and a couple in the early stages of a relationship that bloomed in EverQuest II–depicts these people as largely dysfunctional, out of touch with the world around them and not very capable of dealing with that world.
Of course, that’s an extreme view of the film, and I know for a fact that many in the audience saw it very differently. I overheard many saying afterwards that they thought the film was uplifting and a positive, realistic look at these games and the people who play them.
I just don’t agree. For me, part of the problem may have something to do with the fact that I’ve been writing about virtual worlds and online games regularly for more than four years. As a result, much of the underlying context of the film was not even a little bit new to me. And so I think I may have been looking more at the way the film’s subjects were portrayed than many of the audience members who, I surmised, were largely new to this topic.
I could have that totally backwards, of course. Perhaps they were mostly hard-core WoW players who saw themselves in the film’s subjects. I’m not sure.
But I guess I was a little upset because I think many people are looking at this film as a definitive view on what online games and virtual worlds are, and I simply felt it was far too narrow a view.
At least nobody’s ranting about how World of Warcraft is actually a Satanic plot. Well, not yet.
Wait until the first Southern kid commits suicide after playing WoW . . then they’ll get the full 700 Club treatment like D&D did. Of course back then there was no internet and RPG players were a very small band of (lovable) misfits. WoW has a name recognition and general level of acceptance that D&D would literally kill for! I can see the WotC lawyers now, figuring out how a few simple deaths could allow for total world domination, and how to avert any blame from falling on their clients. . ..