Second Skin's 1st Interview
An Interview with MMORPG Documentary Makers Pure West, Part I
Posted December 20th, 2007 by Ethec
by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and Cody "Micajah" Bye
December 20th, 2007 - Though we've long heard rumblings that the EverQuest and World of Warcraft IP coming to the silver screen, it seems MMORPGs may make their cinematic debut far sooner than any of us expected - except that actual players, not the fantasy storyline, will be the focus. Pure West Documentaries, a award-winning company that previously focused its viewfinder on industrial and not-for-profit fundraising films, wanted a premier topic that they could call their own.
The culmination of their efforts is Second Skin, two years in the making and just released this week to start the festival circuit with March 2008's South by Southwest Film Festival. We begin a two part series today with Producer Peter Schieffelin Brauer, Director Juan Carlos Piñeiro and Producer / Writer Victor Piñeiro, who discuss the story behind the making of Second Skin.
Jeff Woleslagle, Ten Ton Hammer - "For those that might be unfamiliar with Second Skin, please tell us a bit about the project. What led you down the path to Second Skin, and what were your goals as filmmakers?
Juan Carlos, Producer- "The road for us to get to making this film was that a teacher that we knew, named Ben, was actually really into Star Wars Galaxies. By day he was this mild-mannered teacher, by night he had this alter ego that he was essentially the mayor of this town in the game. He was spending so much time in the game that this relationship that he was in was taking a real turn, he was getting married to the woman. You saw this kind of unbelievable story kind of coming out of that. From there we started hearing about gold farming and so on and we realized this is something that can't be denied.
"This whole thing started with the idea of this guy that was kind of addicted to Star Wars Galaxies, as we started researching it, what we started running into immediately were the negative effects of these MMOs. But about a month later, we started uncovering people's stories and just kind of the idea that MMOs are a community builder.
"What we're exploring are the idea of community, identity, and economy inside these virtual worlds, but we're trying to do it from a very human perspective. Primarily, our film follows a group of gamers in Indiana through a year of their lives within and without of World of Warcraft. Alongside that, we have a couple that met inside of EverQuest 2 and we kind of follow them from meeting inside the game to meeting in real life all the way - nearly all the way to their wedding in real life. Our third story explores somebody who was addicted to EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft and kind of his evolving relationship with the game as he kind of transcends the addiction, realizes that the game's not to blame for his addiction. It's a really neat story."
Cody Bye, Ten Ton Hammer - "What was the process for finding the subjects of these stories?"
Victor, Producer / Writer - "It was a really long process at the beginning. What started with just exploring all the message boards on sites like Ten Ton Hammer and the official forums of all these games, but what eventually happened was we built a website and really sent out… basically here is what we're looking for… and sent out a bunch of links pointing to our website. That's how we found the four Indiana guys; they wrote to us. The couple we found on the Terra Nova forums, I think. I responded to a message that someone was saying 'I'm about to meet my girlfriend in real life, this is exciting.' And I thought, 'Let's jump on this.' We quickly grabbed some tickets to Florida and followed her as she met this guy for the first time."
Peter, Producer - "Our third guy was really happenstance. We went to interview Liz Wooley, who founded Online Gamers Anonymous, which is a 12-step self help program for online gaming addicts. Lo and behold, she had this guy who was staying at her place, which she called "Safe Haven," who was trying to stop playing World of Warcraft. We didn't think a whole lot about it even though it was a very interesting, very passionate interview, but about a month and a half later, we got an email from him saying, 'I left there and I'm playing World of Warcraft again.' We went and talked to him again and just followed his story from there. This is a guy who had a lot of trouble holding a job, he lost his business, he lost a woman that was very important to him and lost a lot of stuff because he really couldn't make enough time for his real life. It was very interesting to see him come to grips with what he'd lost and then surge forward and seize life again."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - "Speaking of the more negative aspects of gaming, did you run into any roadblocks from people on the outside, who see perhaps see games in terms of things like the "Hot Coffee" incident?"
Peter - "Certainly we hear a lot about the negative aspects. But I think one thing we found was really important was to really give both sides a voice. Of course, I'm a gamer, I care about the gamer's voice a lot more, but if I don't come out and acknowledge the other side, no one's going to listen to me. I think there's definitely a time and place to broach the subject of what violence and whatnot is doing for our lives, but I guess the truth of an MMO is, violence is generally toned down to a large extent. Most of them are so fantasy based that it's not a GTA-style sandbox game where you're in this physical world visually. But people do complain about the sex side. We certainly asked a lot of questions of our gamers about the sex side, and what we found was: it's not very common. But we really don't focus on that in the movie; I really don't think that's how people view these games."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - "Do you think its not common, or is it just that people just don't want to talk about it?"
Juan Carlos - "Probably a little bit of both, actually. We have a neat segment on The Syndicate, this enormous guild that's in WoW and I guess Ultima Online right now. We went to one of their [live] meetings and had a whole bunch of very quick interviews with about 30 of their members. I'm going to say 28 of them said 'No no no' very quickly and the other two blushed and laughed and plead the fifth."
Cody, Ten Ton Hammer - Is it hard to make an interesting film that shows both sides of these issues, being that the common gamer may not be as interesting as some of the subjects you've chosen for the film?
Victor - "We got a lot of pressure from early audiences and especially people in the film industry that made documentaries. They really pushed for, 'Oh, this is shockumentary material! You could make this all about World of Warcraft destroying society.' You know, we didn't see that at all in the two years we've spent making this movie. If anything, we saw these worlds build community. Sure, we have a really fascinating story of a guy that lost everything to these games. I think it's one of my favorite stories in the movie.
"But alongside that, we've definitely found a lot of interesting stories in the idea that, like, this couple courted in the game, and we have a lot of great machinima of them courting in the game before they meet. We've got a lot of great machinima of these guys kind of explaining where MMOs are in their life."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - "Of all the types of games, MMORPGs have to be among the least spectator friendly. It's just not as much fun to watch someone play World of Warcraft than, say, Madden or Halo 3, owing to the dead time in raid planning, etc. How did you capture the social aspects and humanity of these games in the in-game segments?"
Juan Carlos - "Obviously the people are stuck in front of their computers playing these games, so how do you make that interesting? We worried about this in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, the amount of things that happen in anyone's life over a year really just took over the film. Their life exists, and from people's lives, breathe life into the film naturally."
Peter - "I would also say that obviously we're not showing people waiting a half hour for their guild to show up. There's obviously a lot of stuff that ends up on the editing room floor in terms of getting ready for a raid and whatnot. We try to explain exactly what a raid is, we explain the importance of it, but what we really focus on is the community that all that downtime and cooperation takes. The real sense of camaraderie and brother- and sisterhood that happens in these games, I think we really try and focus on that to a large extent."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - "In terms of the game communities you're dealing with, do you mainly focus on World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2?"
Victor - "We talked to some guys with Asheron's Call and EVE Online, but over time the subjects we ended up using; those that had the most interesting stories were all from either WoW or EverQuest 2."
Peter - "But we all have some Second Life players. We certainly tried to do a picture of all MMOs, not just WoW and EQ2, in terms of how we explain the games and the phenomenon. It's definitely bigger than just two games."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - "Moving to the more technical demands of this project, was any one game easier to film than others?"
Peter - "World of Warcraft is definitely the easiest to machinima. In terms of graphics, it's probably one of the more streamlined games. We work a fair amount with EverQuest 2 and EverQuest 2 is a beautiful game, but the graphics are very intense. It's hard to get enough computing power to see them to their full potential. But World of Warcraft truly is amazing, I mean, WoW Model Builder is the most incredible machinima program. It really frees you to do a lot of stuff that I don't think you can really do with any other machinima. I really enjoy working with Model Builder and I'm thankful that it exists; it just makes our lives a lot easier."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - And for the budding documentarians out there, did you use any sort of special software to capture in-game video?
Peter - "We use really what anyone would use, we use Fraps. And then with WoW Model Builder I'll also go and do a lot more detailed-oriented stuff. It's really painstaking but I export lots of high-resolution bitmaps and make very high resolution animations of the characters."
In part 2, we'll talk with Pure West in detail about their trip to an actual gold farm in China and their portrayal of these secondary market dealings, reactions to the film from game developers like SOE, and much more. Stay tuned!
Pure West "Second Skin" Interview, Part II
Posted December 27th, 2007 by Ethec
by Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and Cody "Micajah" Bye
December 27th, 2007 - Though we've long heard rumblings that the EverQuest and World of Warcraft IP coming to the silver screen, it seems MMORPGs may make their cinematic debut far sooner than any of us expected - except that actual players, not the fantasy storyline, will be the focus. Pure West Documentaries, a award-winning company that previously focused its viewfinder on industrial and not-for-profit fundraising films, wanted a premier topic that they could call their own. The culmination of their efforts is Second Skin, two years in the making and released just this week to start the festival circuit with March 2008's South by Southwest Film Festival.
In part one of this two part series, we discussed the background of "Second Skin" including the difficulties of maintaining a neutral bias throughout the documentary, the technical aspects of making a film that preserved the human-ness of gaming in a digital world, and the approach they used to film the powerful segment dealing with gaming addiction.. Part two of our interview with Pure West Producer Peter Schieffelin Brauer, Director Juan Carlos Piñeiro and Producer / Writer Victor Piñeiro begins with a look at the "ethical" Chinese gold farm segment, developer relations throughout the making of the film, the film's look at the second lives of disabled gamers, how the documentary treated the topic of cybersex, and the path to theatrical and/or general release for "Second Skin."
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - About the gold farming portion of the film, just from a quick read of your website, Frederick, one of the film's subjects, moved to China to set up what was referred to as an "ethical" gold farm, and you tell his story in the course of the film. Apart from the obvious developer concerns about ToS-violations and so forth, a lot of gamers feel that the secondary market works against the spirit of the game - that players can buy their way into aspects of the game that they didn't earn passage to. Do you present this side of the story too?
Victor - Of the seven characters we have as the subjects of our movie, I'm going to say that 6 of them are against gold farming. We actually show gold farming from the perspective of, you know, we are definitely not down with this - don't put us down as saying we're for gold farming, because we're very against it. But then, it was just such a fascinating place to go, and when I found this friend of mine whose brother was a gold farmer, I thought, 'Okay, we've got to visit this.' We definitely include the aspect that none of these guys are into gold farming, but then when we go to China and see this gold farm that's so different from anything we've seen in the paper or the New York Times, we were like 'this is too crazy to pass up, we've got to throw this in even if it's just for a couple minutes in the movie. It's a neat little segment, I really love it.
Juan Carlos - The other thing about the gold farming is, we really tried to take an approach that wasn't slandering the gold shops themselves; calling them sweatshops or whatnot. It was really just trying to define them in terms of an economy, with the idea that an economy exists within the games themselves.
Peter - At the same time, there are a lot of gamers who gripe about gold farmers then buy it themselves. We don't talk about this in the movie, but if you look at some of the research, there's a lot of people that really complain about it and are hypocritical in their actions. We talked to one guy who purchased a character then complained about farmers taking his loot. It's a complicated question for sure. But we don't focus on the American lives, we focus on these guys in China that have the joy of being able to play World of Warcraft 12 hours a day instead of some horribly dangerous construction site. These are young kids that love playing WoW, and they found a way to get paid to do it. You can't dislike them too much, they're pretty likable guys.
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - We see that you talked with Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton from Bioware, who may or may not be working on an unannounced MMORPG. In general, what's been the reaction from developers you've talked to? Are they helpful, a little frightened, what's their take?
Peter - We also talked to Scott Hartsman [former EverQuest II producer] and Matt Firor, one of the producers on Dark Age of Camelot. Blizzard is a juggernaut, we didn't get to talk to them, but Sony Online [Entertainment] was very helpful; we got to talk to a lot of people from there.
Juan Carlos - Sony's really been a dream, to be honest with you. They've just been so helpful and so giving with the machinima and just helping us get really good access at FanFaire. Peter hung out at FanFaire for a couple of days and he got some great footage there.
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - You talk also with disabled gamers, and I've always thought that would be a neat angle. How did you come across these folks? Is there an organization devoted to them, are there guilds?
Peter - There are some places where there's a group of disabled gamers that'll meet in communities such as Second Life. But the way that I came across the disabled gamer that we ended up following is a guy by the name of Andrew Monkelban, just a great, great guy, was randomly through a film friend that I had met, just said 'I know a guy.' I just started talking to him, and just an amazing conversation the began between us.
We ended up going up to Buffalo to meet him - it was just so interesting, going from a purely online relationship to having a real-life relationship with someone who, you know, you couldn't tell at all that they were disabled online. You had this fluid conversation with someone. And then to be able to actually meet him - one of the disabilities he has is an inability to talk, so he would actually type everything out to us while we were there. To have that come so late in the game in terms of getting to know him, it really added such a different angle because you didn't come into it the same way that most disabled people we've talked to, you end up meeting them and you already have reservations based on the fact that they're disabled. To be able to lose that wall from the get-go just by meeting someone online; that's essentially the greatest boon that exists inside these games. You don't base people off of race, color, creed, anything - you base it off of who this person is, and it really allows for people to be free.
Victor - It was also pretty fascinating because inside the game, he's a guildmaster, on the side he edits music videos and submits them in Second Life and shows people. It was just fascinating; this really multi-faceted guy who was just the most down-to-earth, chill person. I really didn't go into any detail asking him about his disabilities, so it was this huge surprise when we got to his house and like, 'Oh, this is nothing like I pictured it. I've been hanging out with this guy on Second Life who kind of looks like you but he walks and talks and jumps and hangs out.' It was definitely one of the most powerful experiences in making this movie.
We actually hung out with a bunch of disabled people throughout the making the movie, and every time they'd mention that it really feels like a second life to them, they really feel like they're such a vital part of the community for the first time. What we took away from it was, you push back a layer and you think that MMOs aren't just a boon for disabled people in this vein. You've got people from small towns all over the world that can't find like-minded people and then, here you go, you jump into a virtual world and you've got a guild full of friends. It's a really powerful experience.
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - Along with the socializing influence of MMORPGs, there's another side to these games as well - more of a competitive or achievement-oriented mindset. How did you handle the more hardcore and PvP perspective in the film while preserving the humanity of these games?
Peter - We do show a PvP battle at one point, but we really don't focus on PvP too much. We definitely explain what it is, but we're trying to appeal to a very general audience. We want this movie to be the movie that gamers tell their parents to go see so they can stop explaining themselves. If you go into too many technical details about how the game works, you're really turning off the other audience, which I think is equally important. Probably, for every gamer out there, there's two concerned family members that are trying to make you quit. This movie's as much for the concerned parents to get a really good understanding of what their children and loved ones are doing and make more informed choices. So, again, we don't really dwell on too many details about gameplay. We focus much more on bigger questions of what these games do for actual people's lives, and how positive or negative theie lives are as a result of these games.
Victor- If you're talking more about competition and less about the technical, we have a lot about the competitive side of these games. Two of our subjects are really competitive inside these games, and one of the big phenomenons that we've come to again and again in filming the movie is the idea of keeping up with the Joneses. Maybe that's not just PvP, but you're both in the same guild and you're raiding and someone got the purple gear before you. You're like, 'Oh geez, now I've gotta catch up to this guy." There's tons of that in this movie, it sort of seeps into every aspect in some of our subjects. We've got a guy that's trying to balance his family life with the gaming, but as soon as he stops signing into the game on a regular basis - he was the most respected guy in his guild, but now he's kind of lagging behind on gear, so he's like, 'dammit, I gotta catch up again.' That aspect is definitely all over the movie.
Cody, Ten Ton Hammer - Do you think that if kids have their parents go and see this movie, do you think that parents will only see the negative side?
Victor - Yea, we've definitely done everything in our power so that parents will come out of that with a positive view of games too. I hope to God they do! Aside from the one addiction story - doubtless there will be people that focus on that - there's much more screentime spent on the positive aspects. If you see the disabled segment, if you see the segment with this guild that are crazy good friends, they've been hanging out for ten years because of the guild, it's really hard to focus on the negative. There's way too much other stuff, I hope.
Peter - We definitely try to keep it really balanced, and keep it on the good stuff and keep it coming out - really let the games speak for themselves.
Juan Carlos - We've also been showing the film to plenty of test audiences too, and it sounds like it's been a pretty balanced thing. We've definitely shown some gamers' parents and they've been like, 'Oh, this is how it is. Okay!' We can only hope this is the norm.
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - I wanted to return to the cybersex segment briefly. I see you spoke to San Diego dominatrix Bianca Malise, who runs certain "services" in Second Life. What was it like to put that segment together, and what was your goal for that portion of the film?
Juan Carlos - The cybersex section is probably going to end up as a DVD extra, because it was just too hard to fit inside the narrative arc of any of these stories, and because none of our subject really were into cybersex at all. Filming-wise, it was two of the most fun days we had shooting. We hung out with these porn stars, the Whorecraft people, that guy is just a huge gamer, it was really cool to talk to him. But it didn't make it into the full movie. We're hoping for a DVD extra, a chunky side dish. (laughter)
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - I was gonna say, can we quote you on that, "huge gamer"?
Juan Carlos - Ah, geez. (laughter)
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - Just asking a little bit about the release timetable, we're not too familiar with how the festival circuit works in relation to when folks like us will be able to see the film.
Peter - We just put it in to South by Southwest [film festival on December 21, 2007], so the timetable to watch is should be those first couple weeks in March when SXSW is happening. We're also entering into a bunch of other festivals as well that we're really trying to push for, like Tribeca.
Victor - But you're talking general release. General release, you know, it's impossible to know at this point, but hopefully because it's such a timely subject, we can find a company that really wants to throw it out there as soon as possible. It really depends on the documentary. Some docs jump from festival to theatres to TV or DVD really quickly, and there are some that gestate in festivals for years. So far we've gotten really good reactions from people so far, a bunch of people from HBO and Sundance channel. So it looks like if the movie gets received as well as it has from these key people, hopefully we'll be able to throw it out there pretty quick because, in two years, I don't know where World of Warcraft is going to be at that point.
Cody, Ten Ton Hammer - It'll be bigger. (laughter)
Peter - We'll see what happens in the future, but essentially we do want it to be in the theatres within the year.
Cody, Ten Ton Hammer - What does it take to get a theater release? Is it just a company saying, 'I want to publish your movie,' or do you have to meet certain requirements?
Peter - There's a whole plethora of legal requirements; just about every last little smidgen of footage or music or person or anything in your music has to be signed, sealed, and delivered with all these legal releases. That's a big pain in the butt, but we'll work through that. In terms of what a film distribution company does, yea, they decide to put a film into theatres and they negotiate with theatres and on and on. All the power is in their court, so if they really like our movie and think it's a movie that they can market - I think they can, because look how many people really care about MMOs out there - we just have to convince them that there's certainly millions of us. Hopefully, with all that and a really good movie, a distribution company will say, 'Hey, I think we can make a lot of money, let's get this out there because it needs to be seen.'
Cody, Ten Ton Hammer - Just take the World of Warcraft numbers and say, 'Hey, look!'.
Victor - Exactly. We definitely calculated all those numbers and threw those all over the business plan.
Jeff, Ten Ton Hammer - Have you thought about releasing online? I'm guessing that if you're aiming for theatrical release, you'd have to be careful with that. And obviously you want to make some money too.
Peter - I think releasing online is a little bit ahead of its time. I know some people are doing it, but ultimately we would like to make some money for making this movie. We've gone into just massive amounts of debt making it and we're trying really hard to not be in massive amounts in debt at the end of it. Hopefully in a few years releasing online will be a real option, but we're definitely not going that way. And we will be scouring BitTorrent, don't you worry! (laughter)
Thanks to Juan Carlos, Peter, and Victor for taking some time to introduce us to their MMORPG documentary project. Keep up to date on Second Skin at the Pure West website and right here at Ten Ton Hammer, and share your thoughts in the Ten Ton Hammer forums!