"Second Skin"/"Culture Jam"

Wow. I just finished watching Second Skin, and that is definitely my initial reaction to the entire thing. Wow (pardon the pun). I personally know quite a few people that don't necessarily play the games that were featured in the film, but play other online games, such as those on Xbox Live. I think one of the things that most surprised me about the gaming world initially, were some of the people that were featured as gamers. For whatever reason, I never expected to see middle aged women featured as MMORPG players, but of course, there they were. The biggest thing that I took away from watching this, is the entire part that basically compared a gaming addiction to alcoholism. In fact, there was even the group OLGA (OnLine Gamers Anonymous) that had a 12-step program based off of the AA program, just with simple word substitutions. I was surprised to hear people using the words "addict", "user", and "relapse" in relation to a game, as it is something I think we tend to associate with drugs or alcohol addictions. It even got to the point that the one guy mentioned the fact that the real world outdoors started to look fake to him and that he was seeing parts of the game in his everyday life even when he wasn't playing. This reminded me of a quote I had found in Culture Jam while I was reading. Lasn wrote "Eventually, and perhaps sooner rather than later, there lies a world where most human beings are simply incapable of experiencing the emotions that life ought to evoke. Whatever they see or hear or taste, no matter how raw or beautiful, will promptly be pillaged for its usable constituent parts. And of course, once an emotion is corrupted, it can never be uncorrupted," (Lasn 46).

The whole idea of meeting someone online and starting a relationship with them based on a computer game fascinated me as well. I actually started to discuss this with my roommate because I was surprised that this happened, and she started to tell me about her cousin actually doing this exact thing. Apparently her cousin, a female gamer, is extremely addicted to World of Warcraft, and actually moved to another state(halfway across the country, I might add) to be in a relationship, and live with, a guy she had met playing this game. I was just very surprised that this happens in everyday life. I guess it's just something I had never really given much thought to.

There was another part in the reading that discussed the possibilities of advertising in the future. Much of it was a little far-fetched, such as a boy renting his head out and shaving advertisements into his head for random businesses, or schools selling space for advertisements on their roofs. This book was published in 1999. It is now 2011. The passage discusses an advertisement on a banana sticker saying "you pick up a banana in the supermarket and there, on a little sticker, is an ad for the new summer blockbuster at the multiplex. ('It's interactive because you have to peel them off,' says one ad executive of this new delivery system...)" (Lasn 20). The disturbing thing is, later that day, I was in fact, eating a banana and the sticker on the banana had an advertisement for a new video game coming out for the Wii. Kalle Lasn joked that this would happen, and now it has? What is our world coming to?