BoingBoing did a great video interview of the creative team behind Second Skin, the indie movie that explores the impact, good and bad, of online roleplaying games on their biggest fans.

Both the BoingBoing interview and the trailer for the movie are worth watching. The filmmakers could have gone for an easy laugh with a dysfunction-heavy approach look-at-the-geeks approach, but to their credit they show both sides. They also convey that online rpgs are not an obscure or fringe phenomenon but a bona-fide subculture — and one that is some fifty million strong. (Though I wonder how many of those fifty million just signed up for some game and never logged in again, like people who buy gym memberships in January).

Geeky and crpg-loving as I am, I find the real-world social and cultural implications of massively multiplayer online worlds more interesting than the in-game mechanics of ventilating Orcs with this month's Magic Bow of Please-Don't-Delete-Your-Subscription. When I played a fair amount of World of Warcraft, I actually had much more fun sitting around in the auction house buying and selling things and figuring out the economy of the game. How would people make economic decisions in an entirely fabricated environment? What new factors would guide demand, and what familiar factors would fall away? I made a lot of imaginary gold guessing at what would drive buyers in a fake world that would not in the real world.

Moreover, as Patrick recently pointed out, the huge wads of cash that people drop on playing these games meant it was inevitable that legal issues would pop up. I've been hoping for a long time to get a case from a game company involving some sort of internal investigation of online harassment or civil suit against third-party gold sellers or the like. The challenge of explaining the nature of the case to an octogenarian Johnson appointee makes my fingers tingle.

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