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!